You know, I wish the censoring of perviness in Japanese games when they’re brought over here was considered okay for progressives to be concerned about.
I mean, I know there’s the “localization” argument and also some of that perviness is being removed from characters who are minors according to the federal laws of the United States of America, but still…
There comes a point where it starts to bother me when female characters keep getting their boobs shrunk or their cleavage covered or their skirt lengthened all in the name of “modesty” or “decency”.
99% of the time, when I see people complaining about this and having side-by-side comparison screenshots and the like, it’s either people talking about how this is a part of “the grand sjw conspiracy” or wokes mocking said people for being concerned.
“Female Presenting Too Much Sexiness” should set off more alarm bells, is what I’m saying.
The difference between “female presenting nipples” and this is that the former is a case of something being seen as inherently sexual and titillaitng because it’s female, and the latter is a case of something being made hypersexual and titillating because it’s female. Domestic media was like this not that long ago too – everything was full of outrageously hypersexualized women, whether or not it made any sense contextually, for basically the same reason as all the food in the US is full of corn syrup. And, you know, there’s a lot of markets where companies have to put less corn syrup in their food because everyone finds it outrageously sweet there, and that’s a good thing.
Like, the point isn’t that we don’t do cheesecake here, it’s that we don’t want massive amounts of cheesecake in absolutely everything for no reason other than “it sells”, we don’t like cheesecake to be the single most acceptable format for presenting female characters, and we don’t do the “everything has hypersexualized softcore of 14-year-old girls aimed at 35-year-old single men because after our economy collapsed they’re the only ones wlling to spend hundreds of dollars on the deluxe add-on shit that our business model requires.” I’m really okay with this!
There’s I think a broader argument about how an increasingly interconnected field feels about localization in general – to continue with the food example, I remember some heat recently over Eastern Europe getting altered versions of western food products – and when it comes to media, it’d be nice if we broke down all the artificial international barriers so people could get the versions they prefer, law permitting. But I’m pretty OK with “we turned this 12-year-old’s thong bikini into a one-piece” and “we toned down the ass physics a bit for the international market” as a thing that happens; Lord knows it’s preferable to the kind of localization that got done when I was a kid.
Like, I guess the question here is – do you think “going overboard in having ubiquitous sex-object girls” is possible? Because I think you can make an argument that it’s possible but anime and japanese video games aren’t there yet – it’s a bit tough, but you can do it. But it seems like you’re objecting that toning it down is inherently suspect, regardless of what the original content is like, and it feels to me like, at that point, it’s a much more difficult discussion to have.
This seems like it’s basically a process argument in a way that you’re eliding. It’s not about the Ideal Balance of Aesthetics in Pop Culture – which we generally regard as a thing that isn’t worth trying to centrally-engineer even in theory – but rather about the methodology of the people who are reacting to the situation.
I’m no great fan of cheesecake (although it doesn’t especially bother me either, usually it strikes me as Not Worth Noticing, I grew up in the olden days before genre media did its mainstream pivot). Less cheesecake in pop culture doesn’t seem like a bad thing. But I’m in the OP’s camp here nonetheless. If the thing is being modified because the makers are afraid of censors or destructive zealots, that’s very bad, because there shouldn’t be censors or destructive zealots who have any power over art. And if the thing is being modified because the makers think it’ll sell better that way in the new market…well, that’s still kinda bad. This gets into very floofy philosophy-of-art thoughts, but at the least there’s something distasteful about the original composition and execution of a work being mangled for commercial considerations. If you want to consume it, better to take it as it is rather than having it remade to your sensibilities. This is obviously a vague and mutable idea at best – I’m not going to say that language translation is undesirable, for example – but even so, there’s something in the whole dynamic that smacks of immaturity and consumer entitlement.
Or, in briefer terms,
“Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds: the Expurgated Version”