Why does the "fun" stuff always happen when I take a night off? Eesh.
Wanted to add into the chorus thanking you for this post. I think personal accounts do a lot of work in helping people to come around on this stuff. :)
It's a really depressing widespread cultural shift in what's permissible to do to female fictional characters, and since Japanese feminists are so busy trying to get themselves to the point of being treated like equal humans with actual full rights in real life, they don't have the luxury of going after it just yet. It'll happen. We'll probably be elderly by then, but it'll happen.
ON THAT NOTE,
Forgive me the essay, but this is something I've been ruminating on for a while in regard to Xenoblade 2. I feel like I benefit from something of a slight window into this without the heated reactions that tend to make it difficult to articulate yourself or the need to silence criticism, so I thought maybe I should take a shot at it. Trying to understand how things like this happen is a passion of mine even when I have a pretty entrenched side in the matter (blame the Psych background), so without further ado...
The Current Situation as it Stands
It's really funny to me, in a way, that this is happening with a Nintendo game of all things, because it was going to happen eventually but I genuinely wouldn't have expected it for another five years without a strange series of coincidences happening all at once.
What we're looking at right now, warranted criticism of the designs notwithstanding, is a perfect storm of monolithic proportions. The nucleus of anime otaku culture has been buried just deeply enough with regard to video games and anime that you can't see it from the surface or even one or two layers down for quite a while. Prominent character artists within the niche, both men and women, have been working their way to this aesthetic in their personal and self-published work for years now, and it's nothing new to anyone who's particularly deep into The Anime. Any eyerolls that happened, mine for example, happened a solid half decade ago when things started down this path. Basically, this is nothing new or exciting for some of us. A subset of that "some of us" also doesn't think it's particularly great that this is the direction that things have gone, but even for us it's nothing new. We've made half-derisive and self-deprecating jokes about Peak Anime for a long time, and I'm sure that a lot of people who thought they got the joke in full were picturing something only halfway to the summit. This still isn't the summit because it can appear in a T-rated game without any editing, but it's certainly closer than the vast majority of video games released in the west has ever gotten.
Takahashi, for reasons we can only speculate about (Is he, as an otaku himself, a fan of designers who work within what I'll hereout refer to as the Peak Anime aesthetic? Is it an advertising campaign to get the fanbases of specific artists to buy the game? Probably both?), has gathered a sizeable cross section of prominent designers within the niche together, something that isn't uncommon at all for mobile gacha games that 99.9% of the population of western society has probably never even seen or heard of. Then he took off all the restraints that normally come with "we need to sell this game to a wider audience, please mitigate your personal shit dude," and put their artwork in a JRPG. This alone wouldn't be that notable, there are extremely niche JRPGs that only sell between 30-100,000 copies in the US and most people will never hear about. But, see, his series has the marketing and mindshare behind it to do seven figures globally--that's an entirely different ballgame.
Peak Anime has never been anywhere near that ballpark before, let alone playing in the game.
Now, because the internet gives us access to twitter advertising campaigns aimed at the extreme niche of Japanese JRPG fans who are also fans of these artists and follow them on Twitter and Pixiv (You'll note the XenobladeJP twitter account has 40,000 followers in total, half the amount that many of these artists do while still passing for an extremely low number in the scope of society itself), and we exist on a site at the absolute apex of video game enthiusiasts, we have access to translated information and pictures that weren't even intended for the general audience of
Japanese players, who will be sold the game based on TV ads just like our general audience, let alone us.
Not only do we have access to more information than we otherwise would, but that information is directly curated for a demographic that is literally on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from where most of us who are regulars in this thread sit. It's a recipe for some of the most extreme culture shock that you could possibly generate on the internet. When that culture shock is backed by reactions to some pretty dicey design work because, again, hardcore anime otaku, well. Yeah. There's gonna be a response. Anime has been gradually moving in this direction for a long time, but we're looking at people at the tip of the arrowhead here when our culture is normally only directly exposed to its broadest point. It was gonna take years before the kinds of audiences that're being exposed to this kind of stuff because of Xenoblade even got a whiff of it.
Speculation as to How this Got So Heated and We All Wound Up Going in Circles
I noted previously that those of us who are deep into anime are already familiar with some or even a lot of these artists by name. We had our reactions to them a long time ago and regardless of any bones we might have to pick with their aesthetics they're old hat by now, long since buried by other stuff to think and worry about. I think a lot of the "Why is everyone complaining so much?" reactions here are coming from people who are, for better or worse, used to this kind of stuff at this point. They've never seen the type of (sociologically normal, because goddamn) explosion of reactions fueled by culture shock mixed with legitimate distaste for dicey design trends before, because most people in the demographic have never been exposed to what Peak Anime actually is before, and greater western society was never, under any circumstances, going to be ready for Peak Anime. There has never been a time in history where the west and Japan have been moving in the same direction in these trends, and Xenoblade's rare blades are a window into what might happen to the general western audiences for Anime Games a couple years from now if things keep moving in the same direction.
What about the Game Itself?
Impressions from USGamer's
Nadia Oxford would lend credence to my hypothesis that a lot of the impression we've been given is skewed heavily by us getting our marketing wires criss-crossed. Blades are pulled using a gacha system, meaning that what you get (and thus see) is heavily randomized and there are an absolute ton of them. Reviewer impressions have implied that there's been a heavy focus on marketing the specific designs that will draw in Otaku, and they don't represent the full breadth of blade designs. Pyra's design will be in your face for most of the game, but it seems likely to me that in context of the full game and its gacha system, the rare blades won't be nearly as punch-in-the-face insane as they appear to be as a result of the XenobladeJP Twitter account.
That doesn't make them any better in a vacuum, or make them
not in the game, but maybe that context will make it less jarring--and it'd help to explain why Nintendo hasn't intervened here given their history. We'll see what reviewers have to say about it in a couple days.
Seriously though, folks. This is what people meant when they said Peak Anime. Welcome to full understanding.
Yikes.