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BUGHOLDER'S EPIPHANY

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bugholdersepiphany
@bugholdersepiphany
kuraine
@kuraine
Kaden
@Kaden

Haraiva on twitter made a post and then deleted it about orientalism in "cozy/wholesome" games specificially about fetishizing and infantilizing japan.

They went on to say that just because something is cutsey and charming doesnt mean that it isnt a form of racism. Celebratory intent doesnt negate harm and appropriation.

Its a real shame they had to delete it because they got harassed. i think is completely correct and this conversation needs to be more in the public conscious. Ive been seeing some of it in ttrpgs vis a vis 'ghibli aesthetic', but i'd like to see more of it esp within ""wholesome"" games discussions.

This is especialy relevant given there are 2 different games made by different teams that are using japan as a backdrop all while using fake kana. There is genuinly no reason for this other than fetishization.

Edit/Amendment: I want to acknowledge that orientalism is an issue throughout all genres of games, but for the purposes of this post I was focusing soley on those listed as "cozy" or "wholesome"

Kaden
@Kaden

I am not a scholar, not an expert, and i am a white man, but the term "cozy orientalism" a la "techno-orientalism" really seems like an appropriate phrase for this phenomenon

renkotsuban
@renkotsuban
Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.
smuonsneutrino
@smuonsneutrino

What really gets me about "Ghibli aestetic"

is that separate from the orientailism, like. Have these people actually watched all of the Ghibli movies? A huge part of an honest Ghibli aesthetic would involve:

  1. Things which appear to be charming actually being horrific deceits
  2. So! Much! Body! Horror!
  3. Stuff being grimy and gross and greasy and bloody in the same movie as the cute stuff
  4. Actually understanding how myths and folklore operate on a thematic/storytelling level, esp. Shinto and Buddhist but there are tons of western fairytales in there too
  5. Coming to grips with death and loss and trauma
  6. Just the nastiest lady ever cursing you
  7. Unwanted transformations
  8. Cute, friendly little guys that are also a bit gross or creepy or grimy

Why do people even think of Ghibli as cutesy? Does the orientalism run so deep in their brains that they forgot about Mononoke and Spirited Away and Castle In The Sky and Howl's Moving Castle and fucking Grave Of The Fireflies? Like. Sure, some of those movies have cute stuff in them, but I'd describe a movie like Spirited Away as "supernatural horror for children" before describing it as "cute". Fucking Hellboy is more "Ghibli" than most "cozy" games could ever hope to be.

Just say you like Ponyo and Totoro. Stop flattening Ghibli! Stop flattening cultures!

bugholdersepiphany
@bugholdersepiphany

okay but real talk as someone who's not watched Ghibli films before i genuinely had no clue about the movies having those in them and have always only heard about the movies being whimsical and cute or some shit like that

Being told that there's a lot of body horror, trauma, and even cute guys that are also creepy in those movies has genuinely gained my interest in them ngl

that being said, i've not interacted much with media that 'uwuifies' japan that often so this was actually an interesting read learning about the harm with that sort've thing, these chosts.

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in reply to @Kaden's post:

Kaden
@Kaden

Inkonbini and little kitty big city, though i read on a reddit ama for the latter that the game dev chose japan partly because they are interested in city/urban planning but the fake kana is still a bit sus

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Aerginous
@Aerginous

Looking at it I agree their website is misleading about how japanese the team is, particularly how they seem to be avoiding specific credit. But I don't think it's useful to have the 'japaneseness' of its authors be a factor in how problematic the game will be.

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Kaden
@Kaden

even if the game itself is wonderful it doesn't exist in a vacuum and we should still look at in conversation with larger trends of foreigners co-opting cultures that aren't theirs due to false idolization

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ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

I think that RPS review does a rather admirable job of demonstrating in great detail just why this kinda fetishisation is just ... fuckin' weird man.

I was going to call InKonbini "pure calcified nostalgia", but in this case, it's nostalgia for a representation, the image of a konbini preserved in a decades-old videogame. I find this eerie. There are also some familiar broader questions to ask about the ethics or, at least, cringeiness of romanticising roles that tend to be underpaid and precarious. I've never been to Japan or set foot in a konbini, but I've worked in various supermarkets, newsagents and department stores, and while I enjoyed aspects of the job and made good friends in the process, the idea of, say, a Japanese developer releasing a game called Tesco Janitor: Shifts Of The Heart makes me crinkle at the edges.

Or should I also bring up the part later on where the dev admits he got kicked out of a shop after talking his way into a job interview and using it to snap pictures of the inside of the store?

These are people's lives, being romanticized and propped up for the vague nostalgic fetishism of some weeb who got way too into a game about forklift driving as a child. Something tells me we wouldn't even be having this conversation at all if it were about his day job selling magazine subscriptions at a call center in rural Ohio.

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Aerginous
@Aerginous

Yeah, but my point is his behavior is only incidentally tied to him being a foreigner. Like, I'm from a country full of nationalist idiots with godawful behavior about what their 'culture' means. I don't think they have any more right to say what my culture is about than any foreigner who appreciates it. Any other way of looking at it is just identitarian 'culture purity' ethnonationalist horseshit.

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dismallyOriented
@dismallyOriented

Which makes sense - what a Japanese person would identify as the core aesthetic features of kanji/kana would be different than a white person who's less familiar with the language or sees the symbols for characters without having greater context for them. What would be nonsense is instead a comprehensible system that can be remixed.

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aliengeo
@aliengeo

Related: there's a game by an LGBT Japanese dev about transmisogyny in Japan that regularly gets stereotyped as "cozy" when the subject matter REALLY isn't. You can only reach that conclusion if you aren't engaging with the text

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Ligana5
@Ligana5

Ah... yeah it's not a cozy game at all. Not in the slightest. It just has a cutesy art style because... that's the art style of its developer. It's not trying to be cozy at all, or present things in a soft manner. That's just how the game looks, and folks are seriously misrepresenting it.

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haraiva
@haraiva

all good! i didnt realise it was being talked about on here. i didnt really get harassed per se but i could feel the weird defensive responses coming from a mile away and people were already overstepping a little bit in my mentions so i did my habitual thing and went "actually you cant have this" LMAO.

also something i'd stress is that while the original thought was spurred by a game categorised as "wholesome" (inkonbini), this is criticism that applies to all indie games. like, you can see this in horror games a lot. or anything that has to do with "cyberpunk" aesthetics.

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in reply to @Kaden's post:

Kaden
@Kaden

unfortunately I'm not too familiar with this specifically within fandoms and how it relates/differs to people on the internet in general disrespecting artists and plagiarizing their work, so I'll have to take your word for it.

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Samvank
@Samvank

I think theres a very legitimate critiscism to be made about using fake Kana and more broadly about engaging with other cultures in a very shallow way. But it doesn't really strike me as something thats particularly tied to cosy games.
I think that a lot of anime watching people in the west have a period for a few years where they have a very idealized view of Japan, but I don't know if labelling that as orientalism instead of just ignorance is very helpful.

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Kaden
@Kaden

This is definitely something that exists outside of cozy games, but it was a trend that I wanted to bring attention to since it was something I, and others, noticed.

Ignorant people can also create a lot of harm and giving language to how and why it is harmful can help inform others not to repeat the mistakes.

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lori
@lori

I assume the reason it's being brought up in relation to cozy/wholesome games is because of the recent Wholesome Direct stream. An EXTREMELY disproportionate amount of games in that stream either had Japanese names, or were trying to do Japanese settings or Japanese aesthetics (in extremely, extremely superficial ways) all made by people who are not Japanese. It was really noticeable in that particular stream.

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in reply to @renkotsuban's post:

illuminesce
@illuminesce

I appreciate your thoughts on this Renkon!
I didnโ€™t know about mahoutokoro until now, but wowโ€ฆ

I was trying to put my finger on what exactly was bothering me about cozy games (which I love) as a whole, as the whole genre is very โ€œwhite affluenceโ€ coded (sweaters, old house with a bay window, pumpkin lattes), and I think like you said, when it picks pieces or โ€œvibesโ€ from marginalized people and communities it wraps it in a white affluence bubble and assimilates their actual stories.

Edited to add:
Soโ€ฆhereโ€™s a thought Iโ€™ve been chewing on for a bit. The dev in question on InKonbini is part of our game dev scene (as in, the Tokyo/surrounding Tokyo game dev scene). So, is it worth an email? A chat to their team?

Weโ€™re all a part of this space, and no doubt weโ€™ll run in to each other at some point.

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renkotsuban
@renkotsuban

Heya!! Sorry I didn't see this comment til just now. But yeah, Mahoutokoro was a whole Thing that we were yukking up on Twitter, back when Twitter was actually kinda good ๐Ÿ’€ Sometimes I remember it and get even more annoyed at JKR than I already am, hahaha...

And YEAH OMG, the white affluence of wholesome games is like... ๐Ÿ˜ฌ I actually really like cozy/"wholesome" games because I just need a break from the news cycle grind sometimes. idk, I also have a lot of weird feelings about it I guess ahaha.

re: Inkonbini, I will leave it to your best judgment what to do. I don't actually know that much about the game, and the only thing I know about the dev team is what I've read in Rock Paper Shotgun and Famitsu. The RPS article in particular tho gets into some ๐Ÿ˜ฌ๐Ÿ˜ฌ๐Ÿ˜ฌ yikes territory. Definitely alienating to me at the very least, tho obv I can't speak for other Nikkei/Japanese.

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illuminesce
@illuminesce

I enjoy wholesome games, too! I too, like a good escape from the grind of the news cycle.

I donโ€™t want wholesome games to be less about fantasies of affluence, but maybeโ€ฆmore diverse representations. Like a late night tamale making session with close family members or hanging out on the porch telling stories; these kinds of things could easily be wrapped up in wholesome games too. Iโ€™m thinking of Fishbowl, actuallyโ€ฆthe two devs are making a really cozy game about living in the city away from your close knit family.

In particular about InKonbini, I agree with you about the ๐Ÿ˜ฌvibes from the RPS article. It coasts over some choice words from the dev, like especially โ€œthey (convenience stores) typically hire immigrants that are eager for moneyโ€ which both, read in the most generous interpretation, is as a person who 1) considers themselves different from other immigrants to Japan and 2) someone who is ignorant of why people would work a convenience store job (not because theyโ€™re eager for moneyโ€ฆ)

Itโ€™s the lack of accountability in addition to the devโ€™s words. I trust InKonbini will look very nice, but the โ€œstoriesโ€ theyโ€™re sellingโ€ฆtheyโ€™re someone elseโ€™s told from a fanboyโ€™s perspective, IMHO.

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in reply to @smuonsneutrino's post:

DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

It's all filtered through a million layers of indirection and mediation. They say "Ghibli", they don't mean Princess Mononoke or even Ponyo, they mean the Ghibli Hills TV Tropes page as an aesthetic, filtered through layer after layer of other such uses of the aesthetic, with the corners and edges progressively sanded down. Pure signifier with no significance.

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doodlemancy
@doodlemancy

oooooogh i am always quietly mad about the cozy-fication of Studio Ghibli movies in people's heads. i haven't seen Ponyo but even Totoro has some gut wrenching shit in it! Satsuki's meltdown over how long she's been waiting for her mom to come home is so real and so heartbreaking, and like, a major plot point of that movie is "did Mei run off and die looking for Totoro? is that her sandal we found in the water?" even Castle In The Sky, the most played-straight fun rompy adventure film, has a lot to say (and gets real scary here and there). i kinda do want to gatekeep with Ghibli a little sometimes lmfao

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sassafrass238
@sassafrass238

I grew up on the Disney dubs of Miyizaki's movies, and it baffles me how people can get shaped by his work in such a surface level way. Kiki's Delivery Service is one of my favorite movies of all time, and that movie is pretty cute aesthetically, but watching shit like Nausicaa at age 8 ensured I would explore weird, gross sci-fi as a teen and an adult! I just read the Nausicaa manga for the first time, and as beautiful as many pages were in a "normal" way, it was just as likely to try to convince you to see giant insects as beautiful, or just show you a giant slime mold that makes you want to throw up. The "ghibli aesthetic" isn't about cute stuff or landscapes, if I had to define it I would define it by the range in aesthetic that one Ghibli work usually contains.

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smuonsneutrino
@smuonsneutrino

straight-up Spirited Away is the first movie that scared me so bad I had to go home as a kid. The parents turning into pigs fucked me up immediately. I love horror now! But child me actively had to work up courage and revisit that shit multiple times to make it through

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artemis
@artemis

howl's moving castle fucked me up with how they managed to portray the protagonist's age shifting back and forth in real time, in the middle of a single scene. it feels so much like how my own self image is grappling with my disability and traumas and whatnot. it's rare that i feel that seen by a character's visual portrayal. and that's like just one part of that movie. there is so much movie in that movie. they're fucking effective story tellers and they have a lot of stories to tell, and that's why i love them.

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