Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - The Sudden Rise of Fanservice Games
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Posts: 3018 |
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The manga is still going, but I don't think my point (which is that you don't need to be gay to want to play games/watch shows/read comics with gay people in them) really hinged on my specific example. I don't need to be Japanese to want to watch a show with Japanese people in it, or a doctor to want to watch shows about doctors, etc., etc. |
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Estelle the White Mage
Posts: 51 |
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I don't think there were enough fan service games released this year
My bank account still has money in it. |
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Chester McCool
Posts: 322 |
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Well duh, obviously yaoibait and yuribait stuff do well with straight people who wanna see cute guys and gals be gay, but those always get dismissed when cited as gay representation. People usually mean non-objectifying stories that arent made for the pleasure of straight people. That goes over about as well as citing Senran Kagura as an example of strong female characters. |
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Afezeria
Posts: 817 Location: Malaysia, Kuantan. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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The thing is that with these Harlequin romances (and similar stuff), the man is shirtless not solely to be shirtless. In these stories, the man's actions are the central traits of him as a character, and the illustration is done as such not only to provide a frame of reference to what he looks like, but promises to potential readers about what they can hope to read about between the covers. In other words, while they are highly sexualized, they are not objects. They are almost always written highly unrealistically, but the authors are still at least trying to pass them off as believable people.
They DO complain about other people's fantasies, which is why there is so much anger and resentment with this topic to begin with. Or at least, I see a kind of resentment some guys have when girls fawn over some famous/fictional attractive man. Notice how media popular with teenage girls that feature attractive men are typically the ones most often mocked and ridiculed by guys? If it isn't N*Sync or Twilight, it's Titanic or Justin Bieber. (Some of these have since been vindicated, but personally, that just shows that guys of their own time were too blinded in seeing people like Justin Timberlake or Leonardo diCaprio as rivals to see their actual talents as entertainers.)
Well, if other media can go mainstream, video games can too. I'd say they already have, with stuff like the NES, the Wii, and mobile gaming, but it's that the industry itself either has trouble understand how to stay in the mainstream or are not too interested in being in the mainstream to begin with. Seeing all the people around mepull out their phones and start playing some random freemium game waiting for their food or for the nurse to tell them to see the doctor or some other thing, I'd say that's pretty mainstream as it is.
Nah, I'd say the games aimed at the hardest of the hardcore are already pushing for a fraction of the market that small or even smaller. Who plays a Guilty Gear game, for instance, except for longtime fighting game fans with a competitive streak and demand microscopically precise character balance? How well does a Guilty Gear game sell compared to, say, a Pokémon game?
What causes a movie to bomb is the same now as it was before: Clumsy marketing, bad timing, and bad writing. Ghostbusters 2016 bombed because of bad writing. The Force Awakens and Rogue One succeeded because of good writing. If you don't like the practice of changing a character's race and/or gender, that's fine with me, but I don't care, and I think most others don't either. I watched Doctor Strange and knew they made The Ancient One a woman and Mordo black. I liked it anyway, as I thought the story was entertaining, as were all of the characters, including The Ancient One and Mordo. I treated the movie as if it were doing its own thing (which it was). Hollywood has rarely been faithful to the source materials, and the few times it has (Psycho, Watchmen, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), audiences wind up hating it. The way I see it is that they can be as unfaithful as they need to be, as long as the end result is fun to watch. |
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Megiddo
Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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But are they demanding the complete cessation of such titles? No. Mocking isn't the best reaction, but it's nowhere near as bad as the people who are forcibly attempting to censor creative talent solely to serve their own sense of morality or justice. |
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Levitz9
Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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They used the word "niche" a lot in this article; I think that's important.
The fandoms behind games like Senran Kagura are loyal and vocal, but they're also small. In its lifetime, a game like GalGun dream of selling 250,000 units in their lifetime. For all of the griping that the removal of the petting feature in Fire Emblem Fates was gonna drive away hardcore fans, the games sold just over that amount in the first three days of their release--and more in the months since. The problem with fanservice games isn't moral or economic, it's their fans. They think they're the victim of some cultural change when really, they're a small niche that's got a bit of an entitlement problem and probably needs a bigger view of the world before they think artists are being assaulted (especially since they tend to turn on saidsame artists on a dime--see the Skullgirls crew). I like boobs. Heck, I'm this close to buying Senran Kagura: Bon Appetite. But at the same time, I've spent enough time playing games to know that DOA Extreme 2 was a joke: there wasn't an outrage over it, and there didn't have to be because the moment people saw the jiggle physics they just shrugged and muttered, "Japan...". So when people who like GalGul complain that they're being targetted or that their rights are at stake, I roll my eyes. There's no other way to respond to such childishness. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Maybe you didn't see them, but I did. Plenty of death threats too, which, in a sense, is a call to their complete cessation too. |
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Megiddo
Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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I think you should read about a very real occurrence where an artist's work was censored due to an outrage over a female character's design on the box cover art. Thinking that there wouldn't be any outrage over a North American release of DOAX3 isn't a particularly well-grounded opinion. @leafyseadragon You may have, but without any sort of source to back up what you claim to have seen it doesn't really help much. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Posts: 3018 |
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Wow, a company asked one of their artists to modify artwork on a poster because they thought it would make them more money during a Kickstarter campaign? What an injustice! I have no sympathy for people who whine on DeviantArt when their bosses tell them that a project they worked on needed to be modified to better suit potential clients. That's part of business. |
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Megiddo
Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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Actually, no. It had nothing to do about making more money. It had everything to do with the threatening letters and hate mails that were received.
There's an interview where it states that it was only a tiny minority that complained and that the artwork had been extensively used to promote the game a year before the Kickstarter even launched. My favorite from that interview is this quote regarding how he thinks this should be worked out:
This is exactly right. We see it now in the current anime market where for a long, long time late-night anime was almost 100% targeting men. And how about now? Yuri on Ice, Uta no Prince-sama, and Touken Ranbu, all series that primarily targeted women will be some of the top selling series from all of 2016. Women went out and supported material that was made for them. They didn't go out and shout how sexist To Love Ru Darkness is and demand that the women all be properly dressed. The same can be done with video games. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Posts: 3018 |
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I'm going to take any article that starts with the line
with an enormous grain of salt, but fine, it's clear we have very different views about this issue. I doubt anyone with strong opinions one way or another on this topic are going to convert each other, though, so maybe we should all just agree that fanservice is awesome and shouldn't go away, and leave it at that? |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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I'm glad you brought up the Wii. The Wii was the beneficiary of a wide-spread fad. But when the fad was over, did those who picked up the Wii keep playing it? Feel free to check out Nintendo's finances since the Wii and you'll have your answer. |
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Stuart Smith
Posts: 1298 |
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I suppose that's why the genres shoujo and josei exist, unlike in American media. In addition to things like otome games for women. Women have been involved with anime/manga since the 1960s. I suppose the fact American is a culture is used to open criticism means people would rather sit and complain until other people do things for them, while Japanese women created the content they wanted to see and didn't wait. It's also probably why I've seen a few comments on these forums on why shounen manga doesn't make "better" female characters to attract more women. The idea of target demographics are foreign to a lot of people. When a Japanese game developer said a game was made for men and not women it caused controversy in the west. Fire Emblem If also got a lot of controversy which resulted in censorship in America. I'm not sure if Levitz9/BodaciousSpacePirate's argument is people never complain about these issues, but it definitely happens. There's plenty of examples to draw from, which many Japanese devs have spoken about in dealing with the west. -Stuart Smith |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Fad or not, that's besides the point. My point was that video games can go mainstream, and the Wii did that, even if temporarily. Much of the expanded audience went to mobile gaming, which is undoubtedly mainstream.
All right, fair enough. |
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