Sexism in JRPGs

There is nothing wrong with having women characters be overly sexualized in any type of medium. A character within a story is simply that. It doesn't have to conform to any ideology or respect your idea of what's socially acceptable and what isn't. You are free to ignore whatever books/movies/games you find offensive.

The only problem is with people who cannot accept that others might enjoy what they take offense to and who try to push for censorship of certain ideas, designs, themes etc. including overly sexualized women characters in video games.

Unfortunately these people, which includes the majority of gaming "media" have had success in pressuring Western companies to give in to their demands which has led to massive taboos when it comes to the portrayal of women in fiction and significantly less diversity of appearance and personality among different characters.

Japan is one of the last bastions of free expression and I hope it will forever remain so.

I don't think sexist is the right word here.

If your concern is that wrongful depictions of (not existing/types of?) people will result in skewing our idea of what is normal (which I think is an understandable and intuitive concern) then please be evermore concerned about advertisements. Since advertisements are, unlike video games (at least before micro-transactions), paid for and designed to make you desire or believe in things that make them money. I.E. probably not thoughts/patterns that are healthy for you or for society. But really, even if we look at advertisements that have been designed from the ground up to get into your mind using every trick in the book... they're not very effective at brainwashing us or convincing us of anything (yet).

And we all know that if a corporation could do that... they would. It's only rarely that advertisements manage to insert a false belief into society (the darker the bread, the healthier it is; the whiter the teeth the healthier they are) and even then they are easily corrected by being informed by a more trustworthy source (like meeting real woman). So I don't think video games are in the realm of things that are dangerous to our sense of reality (yet). Advertisements will likely always be leagues ahead of video games when it comes to their ability to influence our minds in undesirable ways. We would likely be completely mentally deranged because of exposure to advertisements long before video games would manage to noticeably damage the way we look at real men or women.

I also don't think that the sexually exaggerated depiction of types of people as we categorize them is the most common element in video games. Things like casual violence or violence for fun are much more prominently featured and the player indulges in these things much more frequently. So wouldn't it be more likely that gamers would become loose cannons long before they start looking at women (or men) oddly because of games?

In fact if the skimpily clad women in gaming have any effect they may very well have the inverse effect of what you would expect: when the mind is aware that something is trying to insert wrong ideas, it tends to over-correct. It is not unthinkable, at all, that skimpily clad ladies in video games are making people more aware that (most) real women are not like that.

I'm not a big fan of the Pyra's design in Xenoblade 2 myself. But for me that's a stylistic issue that I have with the game, not a concern or some kind of ethical complaint. It's curious to desire proper depictions of people in a fantasy world. Games are not exemplary in any way. Any other aspect of the general game is not at all exemplary of what we want reality to be seen as, so it's kind of odd that we focus now on a gender as the one thing that should be presented correctly. The beauty of a fantasy world IS that it can do things differently than in reality. I think it's important to note that we're not talking about actual people here, or the depiction of actual people, or a game making a statement to the real world about real women. And interpreting it as if games generally make statements about real women is... well not really substantiated by the creators or the games themselves.

And I wonder whether the concern you have is lesser than the concern you should have if we were to protest developers from depicting things/characters in certain ways. As a lack of depiction can be worse than a wrongful depiction. If a depiction is ridiculous it will likely be seen as such. The taste of today will not be our taste of tomorrow. If we start to denounce certain character designs that we deem too unrealistically depraved... then what if such a person were to exist in reality? Would we think of that person then, to be too depraved to exist? Or do developers need to confirm that a type of body-type exists, or that a mentality exists, before depicting it in a game? It leads to bizarre questions and situations if we consider games to be there for educational purposes first and foremost while they are in reality trying to let us experience a fantasy.

And I think a problem with the complaints on cheap sexualization of characters in fantasy media is that I don't think there is a clear line for any group of people in the world to be drawn. It's ethically not a sound argument, but an understandable concern that should be talked about. It's stylistically very subjective. So I don't think the industry needs to change. But I do believe it's cool if character designs are not the same in all games and that you and people who disagree with you will have plenty of games with character designs that they like. And I do think we ought to keep an eye on how-so-far games (and especially advertisements) warp the mind. Because of course we should know about it if that is the case. (Although the academia of today are perhaps not equipped to direct such a study considering their current inner turmoils around the topic of genders and people's rights.)

@companionpube: No one is actively pushing for censorship here. You think there's LESS diversity of appearance and personality among characters now? That's actually what this whole thing is about--the lack of diversity of appearance and personality in female characters.

Japan is hardly a bastion of free expression, unless you're only referring to video games.

Don't they literally have to censor genitalia in porn in Japan? So much for "free expression".

I had to make sure I wasn't on NeoGaf/Reset Era when I checked the thread title.

Japanese media has been like this forever, different cultures.

This is definitely something I've thought a lot about as I've gotten way more into Japanese games and a select few anime recently. The place I'm at now is that you just have to be willing to criticize media that you love. Honestly I think it's just a way healthier way to enjoy things, to recognize that everything has problems.

I love Persona, so I want it to be as good as possible. And less homophobia and misogyny would make it a lot better. I love My Hero Academia, and I would love it more if it wasn't pervy and actually gave important roles to its female characters more often.

And I will never buy into the "it's just a different culture" argument. We're not allowed to criticize something if a lot of people are okay with it? Like, slavery was a huge part of American culture for a long time (arguably it still is), but everyone around the world absolutely has the right to say that's shitty and shouldn't have been that way. Japanese people have a right to criticize our obsession with putting people in prison. We have a right to criticize their media's obsession with teenagers in short skirts.

tl;dr Just quit stanning.

Just because you don't like it doesn't make it sexist. People throwing it around are deluding the english language. Real people can wear what they want, and fictional people can wear what the creator wants them to wear. Telling people you don't know how women should and shouldn't be portrayed is WAY more sexist then the alternative.

What does Neogaf/Reset Era mean? They're a games forum right?

Correct me if I'm wrong but are anime women in bikinis really a mainstream Japanese culture thing? I thought the whole Otaku thing was that it's a subculture. I don't live in Japan so I can't really say what constitutes "Japanese" "Culture".

There is a cultural gap at play in your statement, but not the one that has been mentioned in this thread so far.

The Japanese and Western view of adulthood are rather different, with the latter still seeing adulthood as a gateway to potential and possibilities while the former seeing it as the time when social obligations strips away their former freedoms enjoyed as an adolescent.

Japanese games that appear to, on the surface, be targeted towards teenagers are as much about nostalgia fuel for the "mature 30+" population as anything truly child focused. All the media that are set in high school are not for those still in that age range, but those that wish they could return to it.

When a creator of a work constantly finds reasons to dress a character in ridiculous clothing and/or frequently tosses them into embarrassing sexual situations and/or makes their defining personality "being madly in love with the bland protagonist" then the creator has harmed their own work as they have chosen not to use them as a believable, multi-faceted character that the audience can empathize and engage with in some way, but as a thing which exists primarily for teenagers to get off to and for certain adults to buy expensive figurines of.

Now, if the primary purpose of a work is to be pornographic in nature, then things are a bit different. In this case, all/most of the characters exist in the first place to arouse the audience; it's what the creator made them for and what the audience came there for. Sure, there might be some characterization or some sort of flimsy plot or even a bit of gameplay, but chances are that it's all window dressing crafted to enhance the fantasy and somehow make it even more erotic in the long run; anything in a porn game that takes away from the eroticism is subtracting from the work because it goes against the work's intended purpose of arousing its audience.

By that exact same token, when one of the primary purposes of a work is to tell a story that it wants its audience to take at least somewhat seriously, the characters in that story need to be within the audience's limits for suspension of disbelief and when a character is almost perpetually treated as an "erotic thing for the audience to salivate over" it goes beyond the majority of the audience's limits for suspending their belief and it subtracts from the work because it goes against the work's intended purpose of telling a somewhat believable story with somewhat believable characters.

"Press F to pay respects" is a reference which still gets mocked and parodied to this day because it's a giant, video game-y message that completely crashes through and shatters the somber tone the game was trying to craft; blatantly out of place pieces of eroticism in a non-pornographic game shatter the tone in much the same way. Games like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, to the best of my knowledge, do not primarily exist for erotic purposes so every time something so bizarre happens that it subtracts from the story and the believability of its characters for the sake of eroticism in the presumed audience it's harming its own narrative in order to cater to...people who are desperate for extremely softcore erotica in every form of media they consume? People who can't empathize with a character unless they're sexually aroused by them? Bizarre traditional expectations of fanservice being present in anime for the sake of it? I'm honestly not sure.

Framing is also incredibly important, just as important as the story and the characters themselves. For example, let's say the protagonist in a game commits an incredibly grotesque act in explicit detail (ex: murdered an entire town of unarmed civilians and then hid in a pile of their corpses to escape detection) while comedic music plays, the protagonist throws out a few one-liners, a little morality bar shifts closer to the "good person" side, and this act is required in order to obtain the "best ending". In this case, the protagonist has acted like a villain, yet the game has framed it (unironically) as "the right thing a true hero should do". As the player, you might be made uncomfortable by the protagonist's actions, but chances are you'll be even more uncomfortable to think that the creators of this product think that such actions are "good" and assume that their target audience will also think as much.

In a similar fashion, things like a character being made to dress in a maid outfit and be "a good servant" who panders to another character, putting all of that character's desires above their own, can be uncomfortable, but not necessarily in a bad way. The work in question could easily use music cues, internal monologue, and other such devices to frame this as a bad and unhealthy thing; the audience has been made uncomfortable, but they are meant to feel uncomfortable and it could all lead to a climatic moment of catharsis when the building tension finally snaps - uncomfortable, awkward, depressing, and horrifying situations in storytelling are not bad in and of themselves. What makes such things bad is when the work's own framing portrays such things as nothing more than lighthearted, harmless fun, as the healthy, normal way in which people should interact and should be expected to interact. Such things deserve to be discussed and evaluated rather than swept under the rug.

@bladeofcreation: If no one is pushing for censorship then why are people that dislike Anime/Japanese culture listing all the "problems" they have with it. I find Soccer to be an absolute bore, but I don't go onto Soccer forums to inform Soccer fans that I find their hobby to be lame and what I think should change to make it more appealing to myself. Instead, I seek out hobbies and activities that appeal to me and leave people who enjoy Soccer for what it is to their hobby without interfering in it.

About the decline of diversity in women's portrayals, yes it is absolutely happening in the West. Almost every recent-ish major American movie or TV show portrays women as strong and independent and more capable than the men she surrounds herself with. Because as soon as you show a woman who relies on men for help, the media accuses you of being a toxic White male mysogynist who is hurting the "feminist" movement by reinforcing "unhealthy" gender stereotypes because they equate the portrayal of one specific woman character with commentary on the entire female gender.

And lastly, yes I admit Japan has some issues with freedom of expression when it comes to porn etc., but they haven't fallen prey to the "feminist" agenda like most of the West has.

@companionpube: It’s called criticizing and having a discussion. Not everything is a call for censorship. Also, “feminist agenda”? Jeez man, just come right out and say it.

@companionpube: There's a difference between not caring at all for something & caring about something, while still be able to see & critique it's flaws. I imagine people that talk in this thread at least care on some level about japanese games.

@farleyslundgren: It's fine to criticize and discuss as long as the criticism is reasonable. Seeking out game series that are known for providing fanservice and then calling out the newest entry for once again featuring fanservice isn't valid criticism. That's like criticizing an R-rated action movie for showing violence.

Also just to clarify, I was referring to Western media and their influence on companies when I mentioned the existence of a "feminist" agenda.

@companionpube: "Long running problematic thing is still problematic, here's why" IS still perfectly valid criticism.

Saying you meant Western media when you said "'feminist' agenda" only makes less sense and makes you sound like you're just another angry gamer bro that's mad anyone is talking about any of this.

This isn't a matter of seeking out series known for fanservice though? Nobody's talking about stuff like Conception here where you know what you're in for the moment you read the back of the box. Xenogears, Xenosaga, and, yes, previous entries in Xenoblade don't come close to being as fanservice-y as Xenoblade Chronicles 2. JRPG's as a subgenre certainly don't inherently have fanservice. Anime/manga as artforms also definitely don't need fanservice to be good (ex: Berserk is a classic and one of my favorites and, while it runs the gamut on mature content, it doesn't have one drop of this type of fanservice).

In fact, let's be completely blunt here: yes, fanservice aimed at teenage boys is common in shonen anime - One Piece has some characters in "sexy clothing", Dragon Ball and My Hero Academia have jokes revolving around "pervert characters", Bleach feels like it constantly has one maiden or another in distress, Kenichi has *all* of these things, but can you seriously say that you've ever seen a shonen anime/manga outside of ecchi or straight up hentai that has as much blatant, constant fanservice as Xenoblade Chronicles 2? I haven't, and there's a decent chance that I've watched more anime than you have (and I've definitely played more JRPG's).

Also, people belonging to the crowd that uses terms like "feminist agenda" quite literally have been known to do things like write angry rants on social media because female superheroes appeared on cans of soup...so let's not go screaming about censorship and trying to push one's moral values onto others, okay?

@companionpube: Because people can talk about things they don't like in a genre without demanding censorship. For proof, see this entire discussion. The OP stated that the things that they like about JRPGs. They also stated the things that they dislike. This is how people discuss art and media.

Yeah, we might be (I say "might" because that's the sense I get from it, but I have not done a quantitative study on this before commenting) seeing more female action heroes these days. With a few exceptions, women in action movies have been portrayed as victims or damsels in distress, and the man who rescues them is often "rewarded" with the love of the woman at the end of the story. It's not a value judgement about all women. But, again and again and again, this is how women are portrayed in media, and that can have an effect on both how women see themselves, and how society in general sees them. It's ridiculous to complain that there is a "decline in diversity" in female characters because media is trending away from showing women as helpless victims who need saving all the time. You don't have to take my word for it. There are any number of articles, blog posts, and social media threads out there where people talk about how the depiction (or lack of depiction) of people like themselves in media has affected them.

Just out of curiosity, are you thinking of The Last Jedi when you mention characters like that? It's a recent, oft-cited example of a movie in which the female characters are super competent and the male characters are generally regarded as dumb, or useless, or comic relief. Consider this: How some men felt watching that movie and seeing how all of the men were written is the same way some women have felt watching sci-fi and action movies for years. I hope you can see that.

@seeric: I totally agree that things like this should be discussed. I have no problems with critisms of things, I just can't stand the labelling of EVERYTHING as sexist. Even if the creators intention is to pander to an audience, that's a choice the creator is well within their rights to make. I feel like just labelling things sexist really shuts down the conversation about how something that is pandering can still have good characterization, it let's the detracters feel superior and the creators or fans write it off without acknowledging the critism that could improve the material.

@rasrimra: That was a very eloquent and well thought out post. Two thumbs way up!

@matmaelstrom11: So this is a good point. I can't speak for person who started this discussion. Maybe they can shine some light on what they mean by "sexist." I think there's a huge difference between saying, "This aspect of this work of art/media has sexist tropes," and saying, "This creator (or work as a whole) is sexist."

I think the first statement is more nuanced and usually closer to the truth than the latter. The latter is shorthand and is closer to how people generally speak, though. To use a more generalized example, if I say, "This movie sucks," I'm probably not indicating that there was absolutely nothing I liked about it. I'm just giving my overall impression in a quick statement. Like I said, I can't speak to the original poster's intent or meaning. But even in that initial post, they listed things about JRPGs that they enjoyed AND things that they didn't enjoy, and talked about how what they didn't enjoy was, in some cases, egregious enough to cause them to not want to engage with certain games.

What I'm saying here is basically, yeah, maybe just saying, "JRPGs are sexist," is simplistic, but I believe the conversation (even as it started) was always more nuanced than that.

@matmaelstrom11: Not all pandering to fans is sexist, but when that pandering takes the form of having the defining character trait of multiple female characters be their desire to serve and fulfill the wishes of the bland male protagonist (the deliberately bland, deliberately generic character the intended audience is expected to project themselves onto), I'm really not sure what you could call it beyond sexist. It's sexist because it hurts the characters themselves and the writing itself, it removes or at least subtracts from any attempt at real depth in favor of creating a pandering, simpering thing that exists solely to give the type of unrealistic attention to the protagonist/player that the player may so desperately desire in real life.

Again, if people want to seek out porn games or just dating games or even simply wish fulfillment games that have nothing to do with sexual/romantic desires, I think that's 100% fine because those products exist for an explicit reason and they're doing what they're designed to do. People get lonely, they get scared and depressed and a whole host of other things and sometimes they to tune out and escape into the unrealistic worlds of such media for a while and that's fine. I think this type of pandering in things like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 though absolutely deserves criticism because it hurts the characters, hurts the worldbuilding, puts extra strain on the audience's limits for suspension of disbelief, and overall makes the game less than what it could be. Criticism like this doesn't really pop up if a game has, say, an unlockable "sexy maid outfit" for a female character (or an unlockable "sexy loincloth" for a male character for that matter) or one or two characters who pop up briefly and then go away forever, but when the game constantly treats its player like they are a horniest teenage boy on Earth who wants to get off to more or less the entire female cast, it can at the very least be rather annoying and detracts from the overall experience.

@bladeofcreation: As the OP, I can say I never meant to reduce all JRPGs, or even all of a single JRPG, to just "this is sexist," and I don't think anyone has tried to do so in this forum. I started this thread to ask if (a) problematic or sexist aspects like in XC2 are common in JRPGs, and (b) if it is wrong or hypocritical to object to the sexist aspects of a game, while still enjoying the game overall. I'm not sure I explicitly stated this, but I played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for about 170 hours, and greatly enjoyed myself for most of that time; I just think some of the objectification and depiction of women in the game, and in other recent JRPGS, is demeaning and problematic.

@acharlie1377: I didn't want to put words in your mouth! Some of the responses (the ones in which people are complaining that you would even bring this up) make it sound like you were putting all JRPGs on blast, so I went back and read it. It's a perfectly reasonable question to have about the genre. Just reading some of the responses, though, one would think you personally started a campaign to ban all JRPGs when that's clearly not the case. Some people really should read your post again before commenting.

Others have answered about how common this is in the genre (I'm not a fan so I can only speak to the fact that I find some anime/JRPG character designs to be quite wrong and gross), but let me chime in on the second question and reiterate what others have said: It's not wrong or hypocritical to be critical of the media and art we enjoy! You can have your limits with it. We all do that, I'd say.

@seeric: I'd only call it sexist if it was making a statement about the gender at large, And you're right that these can fit that criteria but they don't have to and don't always. I think giving the writers/creators the benefit of the doubt that it's just lazy writing/storytelling is preferable to labelling it sexist, saving such for the really egregous examples.

Also I'm not a fan of how you characterize the people who are fans of this stuff. "so desperately desire in real life." You don't know them. Maybe save the judgment?

@bladeofcreation: I actually agree with the op, this stuff is always really cringy and off putting. I was just saying I think the language used seemed hyberbolic, which could stifle the conversation by putting such a negative label on something many people love.

@matmaelstrom11: At this point we're mostly debating semantics, but a dictionary definition of sexism is "prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex." If you agree with @seeric that the game stereotypes or objectifies women, then you're agreeing that the game has sexist tropes or sexist aspects to it, even if that game isn't actively misogynistic. I think an issue is that people tend to mentally equate all forms of sexism to be the same, when that clearly isn't the case. There's a wide difference between saying "this game has some cringe-worthy portrayals of women" (which I think is true) and "everyone who worked on this game hates women" (which I don't think is true), even though both of those statements are implying the game has sexist qualities.

Just like I don't think anyone should write off an entire genre as sexist just because some games in that genre have sexist aspects, I don't think anyone should write off a complaint just because that complaint includes the word "sexism"; all that does is make assumptions about the complaint without actually reading into it.

@acharlie1377: Fair point.

This got oddly civil.

Sometimes this community really does prove itself to be mostly good. <3

@bladeofcreation: When I talk about decline of diversity in movies/TV shows when it comes to the depiction of women I'm referring to movies such as:

Frozen, Brave, Ghostbusters (2016), Mad Max: Fury Road, The Last Jedi and even The Force Awakens just to name a few.

I am not against badass heroines in movies, but I highly dislike writers who try to force female character into pre-existing male roles for reasons that aren't related to the narrative itself. That is simply bad writing. The movie no longer solely exists to tell a story, but rather to preach political beliefs to your audience.

The movies I mentioned all take well-established male roles and replace them with female ones with no regard to how that affects the story or the fanbase. Why not conceptualize a new story that is created from the ground up to suit a female lead rather than take over existing franchises? This way of doing things has produced incredible masterpieces in the past like Alien and the first sequel, Kill Bill 1+2, Firefly/Serenity, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and even Anime such as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Serial Experiments Lain etc., but more and more writers prefer to take the lazy route of simply going for the gender-swap and alienating their existing fanbase. I would be just as upset if Tarantino made a sequel to Kill Bill with an all-male cast.

In regards to how I feel when I see an incompetent male character with a competent female on screen, it doesn't inherently affect me one way or another, it really depends on the justification for and execution of each specific scene. At worst it feels forced and cringey, but it can also make me react positively to it like with some of the examples I mentioned.

@seeric: The OP mentioned Valkyria Chronicles 4 as one example, a series that has featured fanservice throughout all of its entries including the newest one.

Fanservice isn't exclusive to Shounen manga/anime. There are tons of Seinen works that feature fanservice like

Elfen Lied, Gantz, Black Lagoon, Welcome to the NHK, Ghost in the Shell, Chobits and many more. In fact, I don't think a work being Shounen or Seinen has any bearing on the likelihood of it containing fanservice

though I don't watch enough Shounen to really know.

Also, how about sticking to my arguments instead of grouping me together with other people I've never met who happen to have used the same term I did and trying to

diminish my character by association?

@companionpube Just for my own understanding, are you using Frozen as an example of female characters forced into male roles in media? Given the original Hans Christian Andersen story it's based on (The Snow Queen) has a female protagonist, there are probably better examples for your discussion point. Although I have to say, I think Fury Road and the newer Star Wars films are less about forced gender role placement and more about balanced storytelling - but then, that's just my opinion.

@acharlie1377 As this thread has massively, if entertainingly, spun off your original point - do you like the turn based structure of JRPGs, the tropes of the storytelling or the big budgetness of things like FF or Xenoblade? If its the first two, there are a few indie titles out there (Breath of Death VII, Cthulhu Saves the World for example) that might fill a niche for you. In fact, when I looked these up on Steam and started scrolling through the "titles like this" bit there were a few games that might fit your tastes.

The only movie you listed that you could have a reasonable argument for "forcing" women in and diminishing men is the Ghostbusters reboot (as it was basically a gender swap). The rest are just movies with female leads (or co-leads) which make perfect sense in context and fit well along with the other movies in their lineage.

@stantongrouse: Frozen replaces most of The Snow Queen's male supporting cast with less interesting female ones. I suppose it's a less egregious example than the other movies I listed so I probably shouldn't have led with that.

The only reason these roles are "well-established male roles" are because those roles were established during a time when women weren't seen as independent enough to be protagonists. There is absolutely nothing about the roles in any of those movies that require the role to be played by a man; it's not like the Ghostbusters busted ghosts with erect penises or anything. Speaking of Ghostbusters, that's the only movie you list that can be justified as "gender-swapped version of another movie," and the only other movie with a character even close to that description is Rey, since her story is very similar to Luke's in the original trilogy. That said, there's still no reason the "anonymous character from a backwoods planet who grows to be a hero" role needs to be filled by a man for any reason, and as previously mentioned, there is no need for the Ghostbusters to be male to be good at their jobs. The other movies you list don't even make sense regarding "well-established male roles"; Frozen and Brave are just movies that asked "what if princesses could also be independent, fully-fledged characters, instead of just sitting around waiting to be saved by a prince," and Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road has completely different motivations from Max himself.

Why should a filmmaker care that much about their "existing fanbase," if that fanbase is actively toxic? In the movies you listed, the only fanbases angry enough to garner public attention were for Ghostbusters and the new Star Wars movies, and their complaints all essentially boiled down to "women are allowed to act and think for themselves, so obviously men are under attack." For the latest Star Wars movie, these same fans were so angry that Kelly Marie Tran was in the movie as a strong character that they harassed her off social media. How much fan opinion should factor into the creation process is up for debate, but any fanbase that rejects a character on the sole basis of their gender shouldn't be catered to in any respect.

As the OP, I can say that I wasn't "seeking out game series that are known for providing fanservice"; I was getting into a new genre of game, was worried by the problematic aspects of one of the games in that genre, and was asking how prevalent this is. That said, justifying something that is problematic just because it's how things used to be isn't a valid defense of something, unless you're also willing to justify blackface, using leeches as medicine, or a world without the internet. Change, whether it be scientific, social, political, or otherwise, occurs because people challenge the status quo, and see something in the world they believe could be improved; you're allowed disagree with these people, but your disagreement shouldn't be founded on the idea that "the way things used to be are the way things should be now."

Finally, I'll say that using the phrase "feminist agenda" is problematic--not because other people use it for terrible reasons, but because it implies an "us vs. them" mentality. At its core, feminism is the belief that men and women should be treated as equals; it isn't an attempt to destroy men, or strip men of their rights. Just because women are being portrayed more in movies and other media, doesn't mean anyone is "falling prey" to anything; it just means that creators are making efforts to not actively demean half of its audience. The phrase "feminist agenda" immediately marks these people as the enemy, which does nothing but vilify women who want to be treated equally, and obfuscate any meaningful debate on issues like this.

@stantongrouse: That's the thing, really the only thing I can say about my tastes in JRPGs is "I liked Xenoblade Chronicles 2," and "I remember liking the Pokemon games." That said, thanks for the recommendations! I do feel like I might really like a lot of things about the genre, even with my limited experience, but finding a good place to start can be overwhelming. I'll definitely look into those titles and see if they're up my alley.

@acharlie1377: The idea that women weren't considered independent enough be movie protagonists when the original Star Wars Trilogy, Mad Max, Ghostbusters were made is simply wrong. There have been many movies with strong female leads from many decades ago like the Alien franchise, Network, Carrie, Sisters, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

I won't argue with you about whether alienating the existing fanbase of an established franchise is a bad thing or not since you already seem convinced that the only people who would take issue with this must all be mysoginists.

I'm certainly not a staunch tradionalist who believes that all change is inherently bad. I simply believe that for change to be beneficial, it needs to improve on what came before it. The issue probably boils down to the fact that you see the concept of fanservice as something innately problematic whereas I simply view it as one tool in a writer's toolbox.

Removing specifics from the equation and simply equating all change as inherently good and all traditions as inherently bad or vice versa doesn't make sense. You have to look at each specific example and judge it on its own. Also, I don't understand why you are against using leeches as medicine since they are still being used today to treat wounds and blood clots. They are even approved by the FDA if that sort of thing matters to you.

Lastly, my issue is not with women having the same rights as men, I think that First and to some extent Second Wave Feminism were necessary steps in the evolution of modern society and we would be considerably worse off without it. What I find troubling is people ascribing the same importance of and need for forced representation in fictional works of art and their portrayal within that they do to suffrage and preventing domestic violence and abuse.

@companionpube: I don't mean to say no movies whatsoever had strong female protagonists, rather that those movies are few and far between compared to movies with male protagonists. This continues even to the present day; looking at movies in the MCU, 13 have had a male role as the sole protagonist, whereas zero have had a female role as the sole protagonist (though Captain Marvel will bring the ratio to 13-1). Considering the ratio of men to women is roughly 1-1, it seems unlikely that this ratio in those movies is by accident.

I never said that all people arguing against this change are misogynists, I just believe that the argument of "this change is bad because the fans don't like it" is a poor argument. Your argument against something like an all-female Ghostbusters was that it "affects the story or the fanbase"; however, I've previously mentioned that the story has no need to be affected by the gender of the protagonists, and my argument against the fanbase is that sometimes the most vocal fans are angry for bad reasons.

I also don't want to say that all change is good; that's why I said you're perfectly allowed to disagree with change you think is bad. My main point was that your argument shouldn't be "because that's the way it used to be," which was the only defense you had given for the presence of fanservice in games. If you have other arguments, you are obviously welcome to present them, but hating change because it's different from the past is a poor defense. My leech comment was a bit flippant (I was referring to the idea of leeches restoring the balance of humours), but the core tenet of what I'm saying remains, and you haven't (at least not yet) presented a defense of objectifying women in these games other than "because they've always done it."

Lastly, I don't see how "increased" representation of women in media is inherently "forced." Like I've mentioned before, none of the roles you've mentioned need to be filled by men; if anything, the massive asymmetry between movies with male leads and movies with comparably-presented female leads is the unnatural thing (see the 13-1 ratio of MCU movies above). Very few people would agree with the statement that this issue is as important as suffrage or domestic abuse, but that doesn't mean it isn't an issue. People are allowed to think domestic abuse is bad (it is), while also thinking women are underrepresented in media (they are); these are not incongruous ideas.

Yet being exposed to several crotches belonging to men in dream daddy, with little to no relevance for the story or player agency is okelidokey? Frequently in those circles, I can disclose that the game did us all a disservice and to receive the praise it got when other games out there tackled it so much more eloquently and classy, baffles me. Point being: sexism is genderless, till we decide otherwise by weighing one over the other.

@acharlie1377: You are right to point out that female leads are less common than male leads. However, I don't think that's an inherently bad thing. The vast majority of movie directors are male so it makes sense that they tend to choose scripts that feature male protagonists. If more women became successful directors then this would quickly change. Furthermore, even though there is less female representation in movie leads, there are still enough movies overall to the point where the average person has seen far less movies in total than there exist movies with female protagonists.

Also in regards to your example of Marvel movies (I'll admit I'm a bit out of my depth here since I find these new movies to be a complete bore), but any movie really, you have to consider the aspect of supply and demand. Are people really that excited to see a feature length film focused on female superheroes? For a long time comicbooks were considered to be the domain of overwhelmingly male nerds who would most likely prefer to read/watch a story about a character that they could see themselves in and voted with their money accordingly. Many women were too afraid of the social repercussions of being identified as a nerd so their spending on comicbooks/movies of this type was dwarfed by that of men/boys. Only in recent years did this attitude start to change, but it is still a long way off from being eradicated. In this way, the imbalance you see with the number of male vs. female Marvel movie protagonists is the result of organic demand from the people that consume these movies and nothing that needs to be rectified except for the way in which it will naturally change over time to accurately reflect changes in demand.

To reiterate, my justification for the existence of fanservice is not that it has already existed in the past therefore it must be good. Rather, I don't see any reason to justify its existence any more than I feel it's necessary to justify the existence of an opening and ending song during the intro and outro of nearly all anime. It's fine to like it, it's fine to dislike it, but there's nothing wrong with it and we don't need to push for Anime to abandon these tropes.

I'd recommend Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky and Phantasy Star IV if you're looking for JRPGs with lady protags done right. They both have some of the best characters the genre has to offer.

@companionpube: Gender roles are social constructs and, like any constructions, they can be deconstructed and reconstructed anew as demographics and social norms shift. Writing beautiful poetry and carrying around dapper umbrellas used to be considered the absolute peak of masculinity while tech jobs like working with computers were associated more with women until around the 80's. Roles flip-flop, become forgotten, and/or become gender-neutral across time and culture, they're far from set in stone.

If you feel like some "feminist agenda" is forcing female protagonists down your throat, that's only because you grew up in a time when stronger female characters were the exception and not the rule and where just about the only times a female character could be in an action role were if 1) they were constantly framed as "a tomboy" 2) they were forced into it because the only other choice was to die or 3) the focus was still more on a male protagonist and they were secondary. Somewhere along the line companies finally started to realize that girls and women actually do make up a fairly big chunk of the fantasy/action/sci-fi media fanbase so they finally decided to put female characters in leading roles in such media once in a while without feeling a need to justify it in some weird way within the story's framework. If you're somehow feeling attacked(!) by this though, don't worry, it's an incredibly minuscule uptick in female protagonists in such genres as I can assure you the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of leading roles are still dominated by male characters.

As for the anime comparison, I used shonen specifically because that's the demographic all of these games we're talking about would fall into. They're definitely not mature stories aimed at adult men, they are action-y sci-fi and fantasy affairs aimed primarily at teenage boys. I never claimed that Japanese media aimed at other demographics didn't have its own share of problematic fanservice (though even then stuff like Ghost in the Shell certainly doesn't come close to the sheer degree of something like Xenoblade Chronicles 2), I merely compared these games to the types of anime and manga they are the most similar to, shonen.

And let's be clear here, revealing clothing and outright nudity are not inherently fanservice nor are they inherently problematic. They only become problematic when they are framed in such a way they they diminish a character into little more than a sex object, distract from the story or kill the tone/atmosphere of a scene in favor of attempts at eliciting "cheap thrills" from the target demographic (in this case teenage boys), and/or make for a moral lesson that a good chunk of the audience feels uncomfortable about or disagrees with (ex: making a situation where a female character serving a male character and putting all of the male character's own wants and needs above their own is framed as an ideal, healthy thing to do while caring about her own desires is framed as wrong and bad). If you truly enjoy a product, the best thing you can do concerning it is criticize what you believe to be its faults as enough criticism can lead to an even better product down the line or, on a more personal level, you may end up being told about an existing product with all the features you love and few or none of the elements you dislike.

Lastly, I'm sorry that you're upset at being grouped in with people who get angry about soup cans on social media, but, well, everything you said and continue to say matches up so well that I guess you just fit therole.

@seeric:

I'm not really sure what you are responding to in the first paragraph since I don't disagree with what you've stated.

Secondly, as I've stated many times before now, I have no problem with female protagonists at all. My complaint is with the media exerting undue influence over the process of film/game/Anime making and pressuring creators and publishers to shoehorn a certain stereotype of female into everything whether it makes sense for that particular story or not. Of course I believe the existence of characters, both male and female, should be justified by the narrative, otherwise you are diminishing its role to be subservient to the characters when it should be the other way around.

Honestly those first two paragraphs seem like straw man arguments to me because they clearly misrepresent my statements.

About your fourth paragraph, I agree with what you said about fan service being problematic when it is shoved in at the expense of the story or the atmosphere. I don't think anyone would disagree with that though people's evaluations of specific examples will undoubtedly differ. I do think there are others that flat out reject any sexualization of any female character as sexist/toxic or whatever term they choose and that is what I take issue with. Context is vital.

Finally, I have no reason to be upset with you since you are only diminishing what otherwise would have been a mostly reasonably laid out position with petty ad hominem attacks that accomplish nothing aside from making you seem insecure about your own arguments. The thing is, arguments do not become more or less true based on the character of the person who utters them. Therefore attacking the character of your opponent in a discussion gives the impression that you don't feel your arguments alone are enough to convince the audience or your opponent of your position, but that you require external help to achieve that goal.

@companionpube: The percentages of men and women who've seen comic book movies isn't as drastic as you think. This survey, from earlier this year, shows about a 10% difference in the numbers of men and women who've seen a number of MCU films.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/807365/marvel-movie-viewership-gender/

Oh, and Wonder Woman was the highest-grossing origin movie for a superhero.

Do you know why lots of women didn't openly identify as "nerds" in the past? It's because they weren't welcomed by large swaths of the men in these spaces. You can read countless examples of women talking about this in various articles, blogs, and sites on the internet. Women are nerds. Women have always been nerds. They sure as hell haven't always been welcomed in nerd spaces.

Of those movies you mentioned earlier, the only one that could be said to have "forced" female characters is the 2016 Ghostbusters. That argument would only work for the new Star Wars movies if they were remakes or reboots. They weren't.

The idea of "forced diversity" is dog whistle used by people upset that women and nonwhite characters are getting their due.

@companionpube: If your main point with this is to say that not all sexualization in games is bad, then you've just repeated a point that numerous other people (including myself) have made over the course of this almost 5-page-long thread. I don't want to dismiss you out of hand, but I would ask that you read over previous arguments before making your own, and inadvertently opposing a belief that no-one actually holds (at least in this forum).

Regarding the lack of female directors in films, I'd ask you why that divide is so large (recent reports put the ratio at about 24-1 male-to-female director ratio, at least in blockbuster films). No matter how deep you drill, this divide is only explained by either:

(a) There is some amount of bias against women in that space, or

(b) Women are inherently less qualified than men to work in that space.

Since you've claimed not to be sexist/misogynist, that would mean you don't believe in the second option; that just leaves the first option. If the reason women are so underrepresented in movies is because women are so underrepresented in real life, that doesn't really solve the issue, it just broadens it.

You mentioned that you dislike "shoehorning" women into the movie, regardless of how it affects the narrative; to counter this, I would challenge you to find a movie (or game, or show) in which the existence of a strong female character detracts from the narrative, in a way that replacing her with a man would improve the narrative. None of the movies you've named seem to suffer from this issue that you claim is widespread.

@bladeofcreation:

That statistic has a relatively small number of respondents so it's not hugely reliable, but even 10% would not be insignificant and you can be sure that the number was much larger just one decade ago.

Sure there were always women nerds, but not nearly as many as there were male nerds. Being rejected by other nerds probably had less to do with it than being ostracized by the vast majority of people who weren't nerds and viewed it as an embarrasing or shameful hobby to have.

The Force Awakens was a reboot of the Star Wars franchise and The Last Jedi was its direct sequel.

Not that I've actually used the term "forced diversity", but what is it supposed to be a dogwhistle for?

@acharlie1377:

I haven't read the entire 5 pages of posts in this thread. Originally I simply responded to the OP's post and afterwards I responded to the people that decided to reply to me.

I've made multiple points throughout my various replies, I won't relist them all, but you are free to dig through what I've previously written.

What you haven't considered about the about the male to female director ratio in films is that the statistics apply to indie and experimental films as well, where you don't require anyone's approval to create your work, though the ratio isn't as skewed. The fact is that being a director requires a lot of resources, a lot of time, and and absolute faith in your project when the odds of it being successful are very close to 0. It is one of the most risky professions to pursue and you could very well spend 10 years trying to become successful director and end up with nothing to show for your effort except a mountain of debt. The reason why males are more likely to pursue this career path is because males have been selected through millions of years of evolution to be risk-takers whereas females have been selected to be conservers since that is a crucial skill required in order to raise children. That doesn't mean that all men are risk-takers or that no women are, it just means that is more likely for any one random woman to be risk-averse when compared to any one random man.

This is not the same as your option (b) since that claims that women are incapable of being directors while I'm saying that on average, women are far less likely to seek out extremely risky professions.

To your last point I name Ghostbusters 2016 as an example. Replacing the new all-female cast with the original cast, or those who still remain, and sticking to the formula of the original works would have made for a much more entertaining movie.

@companionpube: The male-to-female director ratio I noted is actually JUST for high-grossing films; specifically, the 100 top-grossing films per year since 2007 (original report here). So, your claim that women just aren't risk-takers, and therefore would make up a low proportion of indie films, doesn't even apply here (at least not to a significant extent).

I'm not about to defend the Ghostbusters remake, because that film is deeply terrible. That said, I don't think that terribleness can be attributed to the gender of the cast; rather, I think the film suffers most from bad writing and bad direction, neither of which are related to the cast. Even if the original cast had reprised their role, and you left the rest of the film unchanged, it would still be a bad movie, just with male leads instead of female leads.

@companionpube: My bad. You used the term "forced representation." I apologize for the error.

The Force Awakens is not a reboot. They didn't reboot the whole Star Wars universe. It's a continuation of the same stories from the prequels and originals.

It's clear that one could present you with article after article on this sort of thing, trying to show you that fans of "nerdy" things are far more diverse and varied than you seem to think, but that that won't change anything. It's not even my main argument, anyways. I honestly don't care about the percentage of female fans of comics, games, etc.--I'm far more concerned with the way those fans are treated. And the truth is they are quite often treated like shit, or have their ideas dismissed, or treated as if they don't exist. They do. Many of them have their own stories of how they've been treated or ignored in nerdy spaces. I've seen it myself. The reason that some female fans are hesitant to openly discuss their fandoms is evident in this very thread.

@companionpube: I have read through your arguments in this thread and I want to just clarify a few things so we're all on the same page and not getting too lost in the woods. You don't deny that these are male dominated spaces but that has more to do with biological inevitabilities more so than societal and structural sexism. Forced representation as a response to structural/societal sexism is bad because they don't make for good stories and don't fix the underlying problems. Nothing needs to change about how women are represented and depicted because things are the way they are and if you don't like it you don't have to consume it. Anyone who challenges the current status quo of women's role in media is part of a feminist plot to undermine and water down media because they are misinformed or have a particular axe to grind.

Am I close? I'm being genuine here and not trying to be facetious or condescending I just want to make sure I'm getting your arguments right so we aren't getting hung up or steered towards off topic territory.

With that said can I ask you if you think sexism either structural (baked into the system) or social (generally shared and unknowingly spread) exists at all? Or are we all the way past that and simply dealing with biological realities? If you do think it exists do you have any solutions for it or is it something we have to decide to live with because there's nothing really to be done about it? Does/should media play any role in this in your opinion?

Sorry, I know I'm asking a lot but I think it's important.