AniFem Round-Up
How Another Code: Recollection rewrote its villain in an empathetic way
The latest game revisits a character coded as sinister for his flat affect and low empathy and writes him with much greater nuance.
Anime Feminist Recommendations of Spring 2024
Vibe with some great fantasy, check out some winning third seasons, and put your middle fingers up to the licensors who buried the season’s brightest new gem.
What’s your favorite dating sim or romance visual novel?
See, told you we’d make a different post.
Beyond AniFem
Small-town Horror: Interview with The Summer Hikaru Died Creator Mokumokuren (Anime News Network, Lynzee Loveridge)
An anime adaptation was announced for the series earlier this year.
Part of what makes The Summer Hikaru Died so intriguing is the characters’ emotional vulnerability. What do you see as the emotional core of Yoshiki and “Hikaru” and their relationship?
MOKUMOKUREN: When we interact with people who are different from us, we tend to have preconceptions. We fit them into our existing values and lose sight of their true nature. Yoshiki is the same. At the beginning of the story, he interacts with the monster “Hikaru” with many preconceptions. However, as the story progresses, he realizes his preconceptions were wrong and needs to see the true nature of things.
“Hikaru,” who’s a non-human, is very different from the human Hikaru. In fact, he doesn’t understand emotions and logic that come naturally to humans. As he interacts with “Hikaru,” Yoshiki becomes aware of the preconceptions he has inside himself. The relationship between Yoshiki and Hikaru is very complicated. However, a major theme of this work is how to deal with complex things without being trapped by preconceptions. I don’t know if this is the answer to “the emotional core,” but I think it’s an important theme in their relationship.
Much of the horror also blends with eroticism between the two boys, like when Yoshiki feels inside of “Hikaru.” Is there a deeper meaning behind these moments?
MOKUMOKUREN: I drew the scene where Yoshiki puts his hand inside Hikaru’s stomach, thinking some people would find it erotic while others would find it “disgusting” and uncomfortable. Both feelings are correct and are exactly what the protagonist, Yoshiki, is feeling. I want people’s feelings toward the “unknown” to be not only “scary” but also sometimes sexual, sometimes unpleasant, and very complex. In reality, the more we find it difficult to accept something, the more sexualized or frightening it is and awakens something primal within us.
SAG-AFTRA Striking Because Companies Won’t Offer Same AI Protections To Voice And Physical Performers, Not Happy About GTA VI Exemption (Aftermath, Nathan Greyson)
The strike, focusing on protections regarding AI, began on July 26th.
“The protections only extend to on-camera performers and to voice performers under their offer if the performer is identifiable in the output of the AI digital replica,” he said. “But the truth is, in video games, it’s not going to be identifiable, as you could be doing the stunts that form the movement for Spider-Man, but what the player is going to see is Spider-Man. So that requirement of identifiability really leaves movement performers out of the scope of coverage.”
Similar – and similarly disqualifying – requirements reared their head elsewhere, as well.
“There is a requirement of a one-to-one relationship between the performer and the resulting character that you see in the game, and that’s not how games are usually made,” Rodriguez said. “There’s usually more than one person whose work will be integrated into the character. So again, when you compare that to the reality of this work, they’re really not covered.”
He added that there was another stipulation concerning AI systems trained on “the whole internet” – in other words, not meant to resemble any specific person – where protections once again only covered voice actors, not physical performers.
“We’re not going to leave half our members behind and make a deal only on behalf of voice performers,” said Rodriguez.
A Complete History of Birdo’s Gender (Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, Drew Mackie)
A thorough history of depictions of the character.
Because Birdo’s return was announced amid all this talk about transphobia, I wanted to consider this as Nintendo saying “trans rights,” but to interpret Birdo’s return as some kind of rejoinder to the wizard RPG discussion gives Nintendo too much credit. Not only has the company inconsistently gendered Birdo in both in English and the original Japanese, but also it’s never taken much of a stand in saying “yes, she is” or “no, she isn’t.” In fact, I would have bet that Nintendo was incapable of taking any such stance in an English-language version of any game, but that changed in May 2024, with the translation of the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Vivian, a character in this game, was overtly written as trans in this new English version, whereas the previous English translation omitted all the references the original Japanese version made to her gender being anything other than cisgender female.
As a gay man who’s played video games his whole life and who’s always been interested in how the medium portrays gender and sexuality, I was shocked that Nintendo had opted to allow Vivian to be trans.
This change also made me think back to Birdo and Nintendo’s position on her gender. Depending on how critical you’re feeling, that position could be described as evolving, ambivalent or just generally inconsistent. On one hand, no, Nintendo has never confirmed that Birdo is canonically trans, despite all the evidence I’m gathering for this post that would suggest this is the case. That may be in part because Western or even specifically American concepts of gender and sexuality don’t necessarily line up with ones used in Japan — now or back in the 1980s, when Birdo debuted, and this is something I will be discussing through this piece. On the other hand, it would also be an oversimplification to say that Nintendo’s English-language materials just decided at some point to refer to Birdo using feminine pronouns and dropped any reference to the “boy who thinks he’s a girl” backstory, because it’s never completely gone away. Occasionally, the English version of Mario games offer vague hints that Birdo is something other than a cisgender female character, and I thought it would be interesting to track that evolution, from her debut outside the franchise in Doki Doki Panic to today.
Nintendo’s Response to Online Bigotry Shows An Industry Unsure How to Keep Players Safe (Inverse, Robin Bea)
Nintendo revoked a Splatoon 3 team’s championship win when they were found to have been using racial slurs while playing the game.
The message from Nintendo comes nearly two months after Valorant creator Riot Games announced a new approach to handling toxicity following a high-profile case of misogynistic harassment against a streamer. In addition to releasing a video with a strongly worded condemnation of toxic behavior, Valorant vice president Anna Donlon outlined changes to its policies that include harsher penalties for hate speech and threats, a larger team to review harassment reports, and a wave of new penalties including hardware bans (which prevent a console or PC from ever accessing a game even with a new account) for particularly heinous behavior. While it’s too early to call the move for stronger penalties an emerging trend, the public nature of both Riot and Nintendo’s announcements show that at least some are willing to take a stand against online abuse.
On the other hand, Nintendo’s response to Team Jackpot may not go far enough. It’s unclear if Nintendo is instituting any sort of ban or more substantial penalty behind the scenes, but if so, it hasn’t announced it. Instead, it was left up to the volunteer organizers of Splatoon 3’s competitive scene to enact a ban themselves.
Brazil apologizes for post-WWII persecution of Japanese immigrants (The Mainichi)
Brazil has the world’s largest community of Japanese people outside of Japan.
A report by the Amnesty Commission acknowledged that 172 immigrants were sent to a concentration camp off the coast of Sao Paulo, where they were mistreated and tortured from 1946 to 1948.
“The documents indisputably demonstrate the political persecution and justify the declaration of political amnesty for the Japanese community and their descendants,” said the commission’s rapporteur, Vanda Davi Fernandes de Oliveira.
The reparation request was filed in 2015 by the Okinawa Kenjin of Brazil Association, which stated that after the outbreak of World War II, members of the Japanese community were mistreated and discriminated against.
Brazil joined the Allies in 1942 and cut diplomatic relations with Japan, after which the Brazilian government confiscated Japanese-owned properties and immigrants were not allowed to gather or speak Japanese publicly.
Mario Jun Okuhara, who documented the persecution and supported the complaint, said his ancestors were imprisoned, tortured and accused of being spies and saboteurs.
“They were not at war; they were struggling to survive, seeking a place in the sun, and educating their Brazilian-born children,” Okuhara said Thursday. “Japanese immigrants shouldn’t be held responsible for the errors of their government during the war. They were civilians working in agriculture and other sectors, fully integrated into Brazilian society.”
Femboys, Futanari, And Finding Myself In The Space Between Their Bodies (Adult Analysis Anthology 2, Lynn “wintermute” Robinson)
Analyzing the presentation of gender and sexual roles in Tales of Androgyny.
The ahistoricity of the futanari and her womanhood reproduce a framework of understanding gender as something that can be played with but not ultimately transformed. Though the futanari, in the totality of illustrated porn, has been paired with any number of partners in any number of configurations, the futanari archetype as deployed in Tales of Androgyny fills a very particular role. She is a sex object meant to appeal to those attracted to women, who has inscribed on her body a tool of dominance which hints at what she wants and denotes what she’s good for. She is very appealing to someone who wishes to explore the sexual space of being dominated, while remaining within their comfort zone of the gender of their partners. For a straight man, inscribed on the body of the dominant futanari is a very simple roadmap: she’s going to fuck you. If the notion of being fucked is destabilizing to your understanding of gender roles, don’t worry, she’s got wide hips and fat tits. If the futanari were allowed to have a history, if we could ask “how did you become a woman,” and if she could answer, then she loses this utility as a sex object and exploration tool.
Why then is the sissy allowed to have a history? Far from being contradictory, the archetype of the sissy actually reinforces this framework from the other side. The masculine signifiers inscribed on the body of the sissy are inescapable. As much as the sissy is able to forsake or abandon manhood, as much as she is able to become feminine-as-in-fuckable, she does not through her feminization become a woman. This is the style of sissy we see in Tales of Androgyny. Both recruitable NPC followers in the game are made of the same archetype as the PC. “Kylira” and “Trudy” are both referred to with “they” pronouns by the narrator for as long as their sex remains ambiguous. Once either of them spring an erection, though, they then ask your character if you knew they were “actually a man,” and the narrator begins to use “he” pronouns instead. Despite the narrator voice recognizing gender ambiguity, gender for these NPCs is never an independent metric, not an internal identity, but a subservient truth to be determined and revealed by genital characteristics.
Supreme Court ruling leads to new clinic for trans population (The Asahi Shimbun, Yuki Nikaido)
Dokkyo Medical University Saitama Medical Center’s clinic will be the first in Japan to offer egg and sperm-freezing services specifically to trans patients.
The outpatient clinic’s opening is a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that recognized a transgender woman as the father of a child conceived using her frozen sperm that was stored before her transition.
The landmark decision has opened doors to more options for trans individuals who want biological children.
In a related case, the top court ruled in October 2023 that the mandatory sterilization of transgender people seeking to legally change their gender was unconstitutional.
Despite these recent victories, the reality is that few medical facilities actually offer reproductive health care for trans patients.
The Reproduction Center hopes its new outpatient clinic specifically for the transgender community will increase accessibility.
Miho Sugie, an assistant professor of reproductive care at the clinic, encouraged trans youth to visit so that they are well-informed about their options.
VIDEO: Review of Love on the Air, a BL romance/stat-raising game.
VIDEO: Praise for Misutonia no Kibou The Lost Delight, which will be out in English next year.
VIDEO: Examining Frieren and Maomao as well-written female protagonists.
AniFem Community
Proper heartmelting stuff, AniFam.
For like pure VN/Dating Sim Monster Prom, Butterfly Soup, Heaven Will Be Mine, Love on the Peacock Express, Monster Camp, Stray Gods. Mice Tea could be there I really enjoyed my time with the demo but haven’t beat it. Same with Love Shore.
[image or embed]— Alexis Sara (@alexissara.bsky.social) Jul 30, 2024 at 8:10 PM
I can’t believe Sex was so good, they made Sex 2.— Chiaki Mitama (@terrible.moe) Jul 30, 2024 at 11:53 AM
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