I'd need to replay the cross-dressing portion to refresh my memory and form a better opinion, but nothing in that sequence stood out to me at the time as being transphobic or particularly disrespectful. Of course, in the intervening years, my understanding of gender identity and its surrounding issues has also grown. But if I were to randomly read a news story on this site saying that cross-dressing was being removed from the remake, I would have cynically assumed that it was being altered to appease the transphobic or homophobic fears of a portion of its audience. Instead of being altered to respect the dignity of a different portion. If anyone is offended by that part of the game, I'm certainly not going to argue that they're wrong to feel that way. I haven't delved into the Tumblr posts yet, but I'm interested in reconciling their thoughts with my current understanding.
The Barret localization was pretty cringeworthy to me at the time, though. Neither Barret's character arc nor FF7's world at large explore any parallels to the history of African Americans. So adopting a stereotypical vernacular that has been used in the real world to exploit and denigrate that particular culture without a really good reason (and "his skin color is darker than the other characters" doesn't count) seems, well, a bit exploitative. Not that anyone involved had bad intentions, but an updated professional localization will surely take that into account. I think I remember hearing that FF7 was largely localized by one American dude in Japan with very little experience. Was he on an episode of the 8-4 Play podcast?
FFVII was localized by 3 people in 2 months, if I remember correctly from an old EGM.
You are spot on about what makes Barrett offensive. You say that the localization of Barrett is due to bad translation, but that's not quite accurate. You have to remember, the Japanese don't have the cultural education or the growing pains that America has when dealing with other races. I think it's hard for some people to understand this, but most of what Japan and much of the rest of the world understands about black people is from media that was put out by europeans and americans. That is to say, Japanese people learned about black people from racist cartoons and movies. Here in America we had civil rights and later laws that went into effect to rehabilitate the image of black people, but in foreign countries, that never happened. For example, in America there may have been a company that sold bananas by having a picture of a black person who looked like a monkey eating it. In America, that label would have been changed in the 60s and 70s. But a lot of those companies never bothered to pay the cost to change the packaging and advertising in other countries. Characters like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima still looked like slaves for decades longer in other countries than they did in the states.
When, as a country, all you know about black people is what is depicted in the media, and all that is depicted in the media about black people is terrible, that's what Japanese people regurgitate without knowing they are making a mistake.
I mean, heck, there are tons of white people in the US who only know about black people from TV. Why would we expect Japan to be any different?
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