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This Week in Games - Not So Epic

I know it's mostly irrelevant, but this part of the sentence in the Hatoful Boyfriend section confuses me.

"...given Japanese pronunciation rules, the "H" is pronounced the same as "F.""

Where is this F pronunciation coming into play? Is It supposed to be "Fatoful?" I thought the pun was in pronunciation of the "a" sound: Hato for pigeon, Hāto for heart?

I've only ever dealt with the game through translation, so is there something in the Kanji/Katakana that explains that?

Sorry for the weird question, I'm just very confused and eager to fix that by learning.

Many have countered that Final Fantasy VII being set in a fantasy world that doesn't have an Ireland or Scotland means that Square Enix can handle it however they want. Interestingly, though, the Japanese script pronounces "Cait Sith" closer to the original Gaelic pronunciation.

I reject this notion; this is just a warmed-over Thermian Argument. For the uninitiated, the Thermian Argument is the illegitimate claim that any criticism of a text can be nullified by lore or in-universe explanations

Considering that Square-Enix went through the trouble of re-spelling "Aeris" into "Aerith" long ago, but never bothered to fix "Cait Sith" into "Cat Sìth" (or "Cat Sith", "Cait Shith", etc.), then the company kind of brought all of this upon themselves.

Regarding the Aeris vs. Aerith thing, for some reason she's still called Aeris in the official Spanish translation of the FFVII series, and Sephiroth is called Sefirot, I remember watching Sakurai's showcase for Sephiroth in Smash Ultimate and the official Nintendo of Spain YouTube channel called him Sefirot, even in the video's thumbnail it was spelled like that.

I think I'm confused. I thought the Thermian Argument was the thing people used when they argued why Squeenix was wrong to not include Black people in FF16 because they cited real-world history and the argument was you can do anything you want in a fictional world you created. If it's actually about favoring real-world history and logic then Isn't this contradicting that past argument? Or if it's about arguing a creator shouldn't chained to the real world and do what they want in fiction with no reason to do so then this time it wouldn't make sense. I'm confused if people want real world history and logic to apply to fictional worlds or not.

thecowardlyantoine wrote:

I think I'm confused. I thought the Thermian Argument was the thing people used when they argued why Squeenix was wrong to not include Black people in FF16 because they cited real-world history and the argument was you can do anything you want in a fictional world you created. If it's actually about favoring real-world history and logic then Isn't this contradicting that past argument? Or if it's about arguing a creator shouldn't chained to the real world and do what they want in fiction with no reason to do so then this time it wouldn't make sense. I'm confused if people want real world history and logic to apply to fictional worlds or not.

Like many arguments, the Thermian argument can be misused or incorrectly cited by people trying to express something else. But in this particular case, it's justified.

What the Thermian argument expresses is that in-universe justifications aren't a sufficient explanation for why things are the way they are in a particular fiction. It's not a "You have to be factually accurate" or "everything must follow strict logic," nor is it "you can do whatever you want, it's fiction." It's "Don't tell me about the worldbuilding, tell me why you, the author, chose to do this."

Thermian Arguments are often used against criticism. "I think the violence in the 40k Universe is often egregious, and the fact that the vast majority of the super-powered characters are male is frustrating." "Well, if you understood the lore, you'd know why the weapons need to be so powerful to defeat Chaos, and you'd know that Space Marines are all cloned from their gene-father, who themselves are cloned from the Emperor, who is male. That's why there aren't any female Space Marines." That doesn't actually respond to the actual critique.

Another way to describe it is using a Watsonian Response to a Doyelist Question. The FFXVI situation wasn't an example of the Thermian Argument, even though it seems close.

What happened: People said "There sure aren't many PoC in this game." SE responded "We're basing it on this aspect of history." People responded "You did bad research."

If the response from SE had been "Humanity came into being from the shed scales of a crystalline white dragon, which is why they look the way they do." That would be a Thermian Argument. It doesn't actually address the real criticism.

Speaking about a personal Top list of games, Edge magazine released a list of the best games from the last 30 years and man, it was such a boring list, it felt like it was A.I generated. To be fair, perhaps it was a list of the "most influential games" plnety of important and influential titles weren't featured

This is a "me" thing, but I have a major problem with a lot of those lists because I have no real emotional connections to a ton of the games that the gaming community puts on a pedestal. Like, Deus Ex? Fallout? Sure, they were probably technical marvels for their time (and I stand by The Master's writing in F1), but the games just... don't mean anything to me. You can sit there and tell me all day about how Crysis and Far Cry were HUGE DEALS for the industry, it'll just be in one ear and out the other. A result of gaming being so heavily technofetishistic.

It's also why I used the example of the Maori people suing the LEGO group; Lego could have tried to dodge criticism and claim that the Maori words being used as terminology in Bionicle "were being used in a fantasy setting and as such had no in-universe connection to real-world Maori language or culture", but in addition to being a lazy excuse it still doesn't really answer for actual Maori being used as terminology in the first place. It was very refreshing that the LEGO group actually recognized that it had done wrong in appropriating Maori vocabulary, worked with the Maori people to establish guidelines as per the use of their language, and made sure to avoid "borrowing" Maori words for future toylines. And at no point did Bionicle suffer as a result, either.

What happened: People said "There sure aren't many PoC in this game." SE responded "We're basing it on this aspect of history." People responded "You did bad research."

FinalVentCard wrote:

It's also why I used the example of the Maori people suing the LEGO group; Lego could have tried to dodge criticism and claim that the Maori words being used as terminology in Bionicle "were being used in a fantasy setting and as such had no in-universe connection to real-world Maori language or culture", but in addition to being a lazy excuse it still doesn't really answer for actual Maori being used as terminology in the first place. It was very refreshing that the LEGO group actually recognized that it had done wrong in appropriating Maori vocabulary, worked with the Maori people to establish guidelines as per the use of their language, and made sure to avoid "borrowing" Maori words for future toylines. And at no point did Bionicle suffer as a result, either.

I remember The Saami Council did something similar with Square-Enix when they were selling a certain outfit on the cash shop in Final Fantasy 14. I never heard about a follow up to that complaint so I don't think anything came out of it and you can still buy the outfit in game. Although I think most of the community felt it was more about money than anything about culture since they kept citing their financial deal with Disney in the complaint and described their heritage as intellectual property being infringed upon