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INTEREST: IGN: Catherine: Full Body Game's English Release Changes Deadname Credits


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Junko666



Joined: 05 Oct 2015
Posts: 35
PostPosted: Sat May 25, 2019 11:12 am Reply with quote
Psycho 101 wrote:
Woozah wrote:
I just registered to ask, because this has been bugging the crap out of me ever since this all started...

Are we no longer allowed to portray bigoted people anymore in media?


There is a difference between portraying someone who is bigoted, misogynistic, etc. when there is a point to it, and where there is not. There's a difference when such a character is used as an actual plot device and they change in some manor. Or they're the rude uncle or aunt to a character who's moving past that sort of life. There's plenty of rude, bigoted, etc people in media used in such manners. There are unfortunately just as many that are used with no real point other than to simply be there in the story, used for poor jokes, or due to poor mindsets/beliefs of creators. The former is not the problem, the latter is.


Now I am backing what Mad_Scientist already said. Stop the blatant dog whistle and strawman posts, and also the rude insults towards others here. Had to remove more posts that fell under one or both of those categories.


And who are you to judge on whether there's a point on a character being bigoted or not? Just because you personally believe a certain character has no point in being a bigot doesn't mean everybody who plays the game feels the same way as you do. What you said is an opinion not a fact and that's the problem here because YOU feel there's no point to that character being bigoted you feel its righteous for their lines to be censored when there would be other players who would disagree and feel there is a point to that character being a bigot. Its entirely subjective.
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Vanadise



Joined: 06 Apr 2015
Posts: 488
PostPosted: Sat May 25, 2019 11:17 am Reply with quote
I'm pretty disappointed in this.

I don't like transphobia in my games, and Atlus' portrayal of LGBT issues is persistently bad and has soured my opinion of a few of their games in the past.

On the other hand, censoring like this isn't actually fixing the problem. The game designers and writers still intended what they wrote, and putting a band-aid over it for English audiences is treating us like children who have to be protected from material we find offensive. I can handle material I don't like in games; let me form my own opinion of it.

If you buy the game, you're sending Atlus USA the message that you're ok with them censoring content you find offensive. Maybe that's true, and that's fine, but you're also still giving money to and supporting the creators at Atlus JP who made it in the first place. It's a no-win situation now.
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar


Joined: 14 Aug 2006
Posts: 16935
PostPosted: Sat May 25, 2019 12:32 pm Reply with quote
Junko666 wrote:
Post


Mind showing me where I even commented on the game itself? I made a generalized comment in regards to Woozah's question. I never even referenced Catherine itself specifically. So how about you not put words in people's mouths and save your little tirade for somewhere else.
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Sandstar



Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 196
PostPosted: Sat May 25, 2019 7:13 pm Reply with quote
TasteyCookie wrote:
More pointless censorship to the minority whining on Twitter. And yes it is censorship. No one cares about the name change in the credits, it's the rewriting of the characters and dialog and ending so that it "doesn't offend people" who are still going to find ways to be offended anyways. Oh well, not going to buy the game then. Too bad you don't want our money Atlus, cancelling my pre-order. Keep your outside politics out of games, it's not going to help anyone.


You care that they changed it...
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whiskeyii



Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 2242
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 3:32 am Reply with quote
I remember the original “joke” about Erica being pretty tasteless in the original too. Like, sure, it might be personally awkward for you to envision yourself personally dating a trans person you knew in their pre transition days, but the whole point of the joke is “hee hee, this poor loser virgin has no clue he punched his v-card with a trans woman, isn’t that *hilarious*????”

And it seems awfully backfooted for a game that explicitly deals with gender in sexuality as a prominent plot point for one of its own main routes. I’m surprised Atlus themselves didn’t approach the “joke” differently given the new content, and I’m pretty much okay with the US team pulling a FE:Fates translation on this. It seems like content that should’ve been readdressed to begin with.
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Scherzo



Joined: 27 Feb 2013
Posts: 149
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 4:25 am Reply with quote
whiskeyii wrote:
I remember the original “joke” about Erica being pretty tasteless in the original too. Like, sure, it might be personally awkward for you to envision yourself personally dating a trans person you knew in their pre transition days, but the whole point of the joke is “hee hee, this poor loser virgin has no clue he punched his v-card with a trans woman, isn’t that *hilarious*????”

And it seems awfully backfooted for a game that explicitly deals with gender in sexuality as a prominent plot point for one of its own main routes. I’m surprised Atlus themselves didn’t approach the “joke” differently given the new content, and I’m pretty much okay with the US team pulling a FE:Fates translation on this. It seems like content that should’ve been readdressed to begin with.


Atlus has had... issues with LGBT content in their games. The stuff with the PCs in P4 is talked about pretty often (with Kenji and Naoto), but there's an extremely tasteless joke in P3 where in a competition to collect girls phone numbers, the male leads are nearly roped into dating a transwoman who is positioned on preying on young men. It's extraordinarily ugly.
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yurigasaki



Joined: 06 Apr 2015
Posts: 192
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 6:12 am Reply with quote
Rampant transphobia aside because WHOOF I don't even want to touch that, this thread is really highlighting how many people who are the loudest voices against 'censorship' in these circles don't seem to actually know what censorship IS. It's just a big scary boogeyman they know is bad.

Hint: A company deciding on their own backs to modify THEIR OWN WORK to better reach a new audience is not censorship, unless they have an outside governing body actively attempting to suppress parts of the work or outright prevent it from being distributed because of $OBJECTIONABLECONTENT.
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King Pickle the Wise



Joined: 21 Apr 2019
Posts: 37
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 6:49 am Reply with quote
Vanadise wrote:
If you buy the game, you're sending Atlus USA the message that you're ok with them censoring content you find offensive. Maybe that's true, and that's fine, but you're also still giving money to and supporting the creators at Atlus JP who made it in the first place. It's a no-win situation now.


This is really the important post in this thread IMO. Giving Atlus your 60 dollars to stick it to Atlus is a silly way of protesting. That's why censorship like this never makes sense. Both sides lose in the end.

yurigasaki wrote:
Hint: A company deciding on their own backs to modify THEIR OWN WORK to better reach a new audience is not censorship, unless they have an outside governing body actively attempting to suppress parts of the work or outright prevent it from being distributed because of $OBJECTIONABLECONTENT.


Well said. Just like when Hollywood willingly goes back and removes LGBT content so they can air their movies in markets like China and Russia and reach a wider audience. Or when Cartoon Network decided to change Steven Universe for the same reason in other markets. Or when Toei decided that Zoicite and Fish-Eye being women instead of men made more sense for the American market and would help the show reach more people. It's localization, not censorship.
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Ashabel



Joined: 16 Feb 2010
Posts: 350
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 6:58 am Reply with quote
DRWii wrote:
Not only do I not remember Atlus going bankrupt multiple times, I just put "atlus bankruptcy" into Google and searched the first 3 pages; all relevant hits were about Index going bankrupt in 2013. So either you're mistaken or you have better information than most people. If it's the latter, please share it. (And that's not snark, I genuinely want to know)


It was extremely common knowledge among anyone who was following Atlus that they were tanking financially at the time they were purchased by Index and wouldn't last on their own another month. Atlus USA got starry-eyed over their initial successes on the western market an decided to cater to the audience of people who want to see Japanese games on the western market. However, they approached it consistently in the dumbest way possible. They grabbed up a ton of profitable publishing licenses such as STING and Vanillaware, but their publishing priorities were completely out of the window. They would frequently simply sit on the publishing licenses of games that were widely critically regarded simply because they required heavy time and effort to translate (Blaze Union, Luminous Arc 3) and would instead prioritize random garbage such as Draglade, My World My Way and Operation Darkness.

The end result is that by 2010 their publishing business began to tank heavily and they got pushed out of the localization market by more reliable and consistent companies such as NISA and XSEED (though the former have also burned most of their bridges at this point, but due to really bad localization quality instead). When Index bought them out, it was widely seen as a tanking company that made numerous bad investments being rescued from an imminent bankruptcy.

The Index bankruptcy is the second bankruptcy of theirs I was talking about. From that point onward, any of their announcements about recovering their feet as a company are pretty much them blowing hot air. Atlus are still very much a Sega-owned brand, as is evident from them being one of the many "companies" shifted around when Sega reorganized their internal development teams back in 2016 (the action that cost Sonic Team its name after decades of failures to produce a good Sonic game).

DRWii wrote:
Okay. So are you just responding to the thread in general, or was this also directed at me (seeing as I'm the only one quoted in your post)? Because it feels like you're arguing a point I didn't make.


That was directed at the thread in general, yes.
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yurigasaki



Joined: 06 Apr 2015
Posts: 192
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 7:02 am Reply with quote
King Pickle the Wise wrote:
Well said. Just like when Hollywood willingly goes back and removes LGBT content so they can air their movies in markets like China and Russia and reach a wider audience. Or when Cartoon Network decided to change Steven Universe for the same reason in other markets. Or when Toei decided that Zoicite and Fish-Eye being women instead of men made more sense for the American market and would help the show reach more people. It's localization, not censorship.


yurigasaki wrote:
Hint: A company deciding on their own backs to modify THEIR OWN WORK to better reach a new audience is not censorship, unless they have an outside governing body actively attempting to suppress parts of the work or outright prevent it from being distributed because of $OBJECTIONABLECONTENT.


I genuinely can't tell if you're playing dumb or not, so here, I properly emphasized the part of my post that you evidently didn't actually read.

Again: A creator (or creators) choosing to make changes to THEIR OWN WORK is not censorship. There's a HUGE difference between, say, Rebecca Sugar choosing to remove X Thing from her own show and Cartoon Network cutting out content that makes the queer subtext of the work text because the gays are icky and don't sell.
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DRWii



Joined: 16 May 2007
Posts: 636
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 12:26 pm Reply with quote
Ashabel wrote:
It was extremely common knowledge among anyone who was following Atlus that they were tanking financially at the time they were purchased by Index and wouldn't last on their own another month. Atlus USA got starry-eyed over their initial successes on the western market an decided to cater to the audience of people who want to see Japanese games on the western market. However, they approached it consistently in the dumbest way possible. They grabbed up a ton of profitable publishing licenses such as STING and Vanillaware, but their publishing priorities were completely out of the window. They would frequently simply sit on the publishing licenses of games that were widely critically regarded simply because they required heavy time and effort to translate (Blaze Union, Luminous Arc 3) and would instead prioritize random garbage such as Draglade, My World My Way and Operation Darkness.

The end result is that by 2010 their publishing business began to tank heavily and they got pushed out of the localization market by more reliable and consistent companies such as NISA and XSEED (though the former have also burned most of their bridges at this point, but due to really bad localization quality instead). When Index bought them out, it was widely seen as a tanking company that made numerous bad investments being rescued from an imminent bankruptcy.

Index acquired Atlus in 2006, so I'm not sure any of those are good examples (I thought they owned them longer than that, but Atlus was apparently bought by Takara in '03, so that's probably what I was thinking of). That also largely sounds like a US branch problem, though you could certainly criticize the JP branch for not reigning them in. Not that the JP branch hasn't made questionable decisions, arguably almost driving Vanillaware out of business over the original Odin Sphere.

Honestly, I've spent too much time on these posts (my last one took almost 2 hours to write while this one has taken up most of my morning), and this is all off-topic to the actual article anyway, so I'm just going to drop it and move on.
Ashabel wrote:
That was directed at the thread in general, yes.

Thank you for clarifying. I'm sorry if I came across as heated.
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Kicksville



Joined: 20 Nov 2010
Posts: 1168
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 1:04 pm Reply with quote
Ashabel wrote:
It was extremely common knowledge among anyone who was following Atlus that they were tanking financially at the time they were purchased by Index and wouldn't last on their own another month. Atlus USA got starry-eyed over their initial successes on the western market an decided to cater to the audience of people who want to see Japanese games on the western market. However, they approached it consistently in the dumbest way possible. They grabbed up a ton of profitable publishing licenses such as STING and Vanillaware, but their publishing priorities were completely out of the window. They would frequently simply sit on the publishing licenses of games that were widely critically regarded simply because they required heavy time and effort to translate (Blaze Union, Luminous Arc 3) and would instead prioritize random garbage such as Draglade, My World My Way and Operation Darkness.

What is all that based on in particular? Just out of curiosity, I don't have a strong opinion one way or another (...putting aside my affection for Operation Darkness... ;_;). If it's common knowledge, I don't know where it comes from.
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GNPixie



Joined: 25 Jul 2018
Posts: 293
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 5:30 pm Reply with quote
yurigasaki wrote:

Again: A creator (or creators) choosing to make changes to THEIR OWN WORK is not censorship. There's a HUGE difference between, say, Rebecca Sugar choosing to remove X Thing from her own show and Cartoon Network cutting out content that makes the queer subtext of the work text because the gays are icky and don't sell.


Just a thing worth pointing out:
Self-censorship is in fact a thing. It doesn't need to be a government body or outside force for it to be censorship. Journalists and reporters do it all the time if they're tackling a hard (emotionally) or controversial topic.

In this case, it's more of a localisation change rather then censorship proper. It doesn't stop the original product from existing. Now if they reverse import the changes into the original release, that's where it might be a little more iffy.
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King Pickle the Wise



Joined: 21 Apr 2019
Posts: 37
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 5:59 pm Reply with quote
yurigasaki wrote:
I genuinely can't tell if you're playing dumb or not, so here, I properly emphasized the part of my post that you evidently didn't actually read.

Again: A creator (or creators) choosing to make changes to THEIR OWN WORK is not censorship. There's a HUGE difference between, say, Rebecca Sugar choosing to remove X Thing from her own show and Cartoon Network cutting out content that makes the queer subtext of the work text because the gays are icky and don't sell.


But Katsura Hashino was not the one who made the changes to this game just like Rebecca Sugar was not the one who made changes to Steven Universe. In Hashino's case it was the American company in charge of translating and publishing the game in America. In Sugar's case it was Cartoon Network in charge of translating and distributing it to foreign countries. So I'm a bit confused on whether you're saying it's censorship or localization because you're saying two different answers for the exact same scenario.
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Juno016



Joined: 09 Jan 2012
Posts: 2377
PostPosted: Sun May 26, 2019 9:25 pm Reply with quote
Soooooo... I'm trans. I'm on the fence on this, as I am with a lot of other "censorship" for localization. Personally, it's not a big deal to me. I've lived in Japan several years of my life and talked with friends about trans issues. They're mostly informed on "gender issues" (or whatever this amounts to) by comedians and media. Okama in Japan capitalized on the concept of subverting gender tropes for laughs, which misinforms a lot of people who now think trans people actually LIKE to make their gender subversion into a joke. Meanwhile, your average joe on the street simply doesn't encounter enough real trans people to have an informed opinion on what is or isn't okay to do around them in a social environment (or in this case, how to write them into a story). It's something we've gotten past in the West and Japan is only now trying to navigate past it. Same goes with some feminist issues that pop up in anime culture.

With all of this in mind, I don't view what Atlus did in its games to be "transphobic" in the raw hatred sense. I see them having a genuine interest in portraying characters realistically, and using the vehicle of gender issues as the creators saw them was effective for what they were (when they were plot-related). The jokes they sprinkled in were in bad taste, so there are no excuses for those, but they don't ruin the games for me. I treat them more like case studies of a company/writers trying to navigate complex issues and making a good effort, but tripping along the way. Though I haven't yet, I do plan to buy the Japanese version around the time the English version ships in the U.S.

That said, I don't think it's my place to tell OTHER trans people how to feel about the games. Misinformed or not, these problematic scenes are still problematic. Whether trans people or trans allies end up picking up the game at all, despite these changes, that's just going to be their choice. I commend Atlus USA for caring about this. Even if capitalizing on a controversy is a [weasely] driving force for some companies, a decision based on ethical treatment of your audience is still better than doing nothing.

--------

By the way, I'm not sure if this is the exact argument I remember reading from a few posters in this thread, but be careful when you talk about whether or not we should cater to "a few" outliers. That can be true in some contexts, but in this context, we're talking about real people that exist. We're literal minorities. Of course we are only "a few". When something affects us, it takes a lot more time and effort to combat it. We have to be loud and proud or risk not being heard at all. If the people all around us are making transphobic comments all the time (out of genuine hatred, discomfort, or misinformation), you can't expect us to sit down and take it without a fight. YOU may not see it as a big deal, but it affects EVERY aspect of our lives. If we do not say anything, our lives won't get any better or enjoyable. That is why people complain about video games from Japan on twitter. That is why tumblr is a cesspool of people who care about social justice and anti-people who care about social justice and everything in between. People are upset. Some even go too far for my standards. But essentially, we're all fighting for recognition so we can improve our lives. If that comes at the expense of a few dialog lines in a game, then... well, that's important to us, even if it doesn't fix the underlying issues in society.

And if you, like me, don't like changes made outside artistic intent of the creators, then at least have a nuaced view that takes what I just said in mind. There are real arguments to be had about balancing integrity of art with the changing socio-economic landscape, but please, be considerate to the other side. Saying there aren't enough trans people to make the effort worth it sounds to us like you're saying "Your existence doesn't count." If you truly don't mean that, then think about the implications before you say it next time.

And to my trans friends and allies reading this, you don't have to stay quiet about what's important to you, but try not to see everyone with a misinformed opinion as "hateful". They're usually not. Humans are designed to feel strongly about the things they normally take for granted and don't take well to losing them. "Censorship" of any kind, even for good, is a complex issue.
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