So, Japanese media has this, I guess, tradition?
It tends to sprinkle in something that we don't really have a good word for in English,
other than, I guess, "perviness."
But, of late, I've seen a few Japanese games play with that tradition and try to subvert it.
And some have done this really well. Some, not as much.
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The Japanese language has a handful of words describing a concept that, again, we really don't have proper terminology for in English.
These are words like "hentai," or, its milder derivative, "ecchi."
They essentially mean "lewd" or "perverted," but they don't come with quite the same baggage that those words do in English.
This hentai sensibility can range from relatively innocuous double entendres
to the more disturbing or uncomfortable moments, like the accidental boob grab,
looking up a girl's skirt, or spying on them while they're bathing, accidentally or otherwise.
Now, obviously, Japan doesn't hold a monopoly on panderingly-sexualized content -
we do plenty of that here at home as well -
but this particular tradition has become a well-trodden trope in Japanese media,
and Japanese games have featured their share of these moments.
But, interestingly, I've noticed a few Japanese games lately that are consciously exploring this trope and subverting it:
calling attention to, or steering away from, the leering and non-consensual aspects of this stuff,
and instead using zany humor or context to make it easier for us to discuss and question the things which society has taught us are embarrassing to talk about.
Today, I want to talk about two games: one that does this well, and one that does this poorly.
Let's start with the example of this done well: Yakuza 0, of all things.
I am as surprised as you are to be citing Yakuza for this, but it's their zany tenor and soap opera earnestness that give them such an ideal place to approach this from.
Or maybe it was just that somebody on the dev team was really on the ball about approaching these pervy moments tactically.
Very minor spoilers ahead.
We have to start with Mr. Libido.
In Yakuza 0, there's this collection mechanic where you basically collect trading cards of real-life Japanese porn stars.
Very real women, who have little or nothing to do with the game, are turned into literal objects and then scattered around the town for you to find and collect.
It's the exact sort of stupid, sexually-pandering feature that we've seen in numerous games before.
But then comes the subversion. What do you get as your reward for collecting all these cards?
Well, you get to interact with Mr. Libido, the game's most ridiculous character.
Mr. Libido is a wacky, even more over-the-top than usual rendition of the pathetic horndog trope,
and he is the game holding a mirror in the player's face to basically say: "Congratulations. This is you."
All Mr. Libido wants to do is look at these cards and fantasize about the women on them,
and the game is basically suggesting that if you, too, are all excited to collect these fairly tame images of real-life porn stars, you are Mr. Libido.
It's a clever subversion that's funny, on point, and successful in ribbing you for spending hours hunting scantily-clad lady cards
rather than doing all the other fun stuff the game has to offer.
It's not especially mean about it, but, it's meant to make you realize how silly and juvenile this activity is,
both in this game and in all the other games that feature this sort of thing.
Then there's the scene where a literal child asks you to buy porn for him.
This is played for humor, with the joke basically being,
isn't it funny that a grown man is buying porn for a prepubescent boy alone in the street?
So, okay, that's the pervy bit, but then the game actually goes and makes this a really endearing story that asks us to consider what actually matters here.
Yakuza's main character, Kazuma, was an orphan.
He grew up always being let down by adults, or feeling like they always lied to him, and he has carried that weight all of his life.
When this child asks Kazuma if he'll buy a magazine for him, Kazuma naturally says, "yes,"
on the condition that the child goes home afterward, cause the street's not a safe place for a kid alone.
Then Kazuma realizes that the kid is asking for a porn magazine.
The child doesn't even realize what the magazine is.
He just thinks it must be amazing, cause it's the only magazine he's ever seen that people apparently think is important enough to protect by sealing in plastic.
Then, after Kazuma tries to convince the child that he shouldn't get it, the child starts to cry, and talks about how grown-ups always lie to him.
So now, this semi-pervy scenario has turned into an interesting choice:
do you let this child feel the same hurt that Kazuma grew up with, or do you just get him the stupid magazine?
In the end, Kazuma decides that it'll do far less harm if he just buys the thing for the kid.
Better than teaching him that adults can't be trusted.
Oh, and then actually procuring the magazine is this adorable little stealth mini-game, because your main character's embarrassed to be seen buying porn.
Then there's the dominatrix. This one's really just about bringing in aspects of sexuality that not everyone might feel totally familiar or comfortable with.
Now, usually, these scenarios are played for laughs, as an opportunity to mockingly say,
"Isn't this weird? Everyone laugh at the weirdos."
But that's not what's happening here at all. The humor here plays completely differently.
The comedy here is, instead, that the professional dominatrix is simply too shy and polite to be good at her job.
In fact, that's why she took the job: to be more outspoken and confident.
So, your character has to let her practice her craft on you until she gains the confidence to do it well.
And the best part of this is that it humanizes her. They're not making her a one-dimensional character played off for comedy, because,
boy, isn't the idea of a woman dominating a man funny, ha ha ha?
And they're not mocking her for being a sex worker, either. Instead, you get to see her insecurities.
And the humor is in the fact that being a nice person in this scenario means participating in BDSM roleplay
and giving her tips on what you think a male client might want from a dominatrix.
Instead of framing all of this as disgusting or weird, this sequence makes BDSM and everybody involved seem human and normal.
And there is plenty more of this in Yakuza that I could talk about,
like the host cafe mini-game where they try to humanize some of the hosts,
or the 30 or so ultra-softcore live action videos that they made specifically for the game,
which are just embarrassingly bad, though I'm not sure that the subversion's quite so successful there.
But there's one other game that I wanted to bring up here: Persona 5.
Again, some pretty small spoilers here.
Now, I have spent a lot of time with the Persona games, and Persona 5 is great in a lot of ways, but,
I think they stumbled pretty hard in playing with this trope.
And it's really a bummer, because they start out so strong with an arc that's cognizant of the worst aspects of this trope.
The boss of the first dungeon is the signature hentai character: the leering man who runs around in his underwear.
And the story surrounding this dungeon revolves around sexual harassment,
physical and sexual abuse, and sexual coercion from a position of power,
and it treats all of those evils with the gravity they deserve.
But, then, in the very next dungeon, the game just completely faceplants by having this whole bit
where one of your characters is being pressured into doing nude art modeling.
And the whole situation is presented as, "Isn't this funny? Cause she's gonna have to get naked even though she doesn't want to."
This is the same character that was just the victim of threatening sexual advances from her teacher.
It is cringe worthy.
There's even this moment where her two male friends tell her that she should just go through with it.
They even pressure her into doing so for the sake of the team, rather than finding some other, alternate solution to the problem.
Heck, your main character's even given a dialogue choice where all of the options basically boil down to making her feel bad if she doesn't strip.
Then there's this other moment where you find out that your homeroom teacher moonlights as a hostess,
and your main character functionally threatens to blackmail her for sex.
And, of course, there's an option to romance her without any discussion of the power dynamics in a student-teacher relationship,
or, what, even in many Japanese prefectures would be considered an underage relationship.
It makes everything that happened in the first castle just feel like lip service.
Like, the team wanted their game to deal in serious issues, to impress us with how aware and conscientious it was with these things,
but they didn't have the dedication to properly explore or subvert those old tropes every time they fell back on them.
Persona 5 ends up being a perfect example of the other side of this coin,
of the awful stuff that your game can unwittingly normalize if this hentai sensibility goes unexamined.
Again, there is a lot to like about Persona 5, but it's really important that we don't just shrug off that kind of gross misstep.
If nothing else, Persona 5 shows us just how very aware we have to be of what our content is actually saying.
And, don't misunderstand me, I am absolutely not suggesting that we should be afraid of using sexual humor.
There is a fine and longstanding tradition of bawdy comedy that goes back just about as far as humans have had the ability to write.
Some of the best of it even forces us to examine ourselves and really carefully think about the moral systems we may have grown up with,
leaving us to either question them or knowingly embrace them.
But there's a fine line between racy humor and leering objectification.
Yakuza 0 convinced me that this type of hentai humor can be used for good,
and Persona 5 showed me just how valuable it can be to start a serious discussion about the harmful side of such behavior,
even though it it stumbles into glorifying that same behavior barely hours later.
Overall, games like these have made me cognizant of just how careful with we have to be with this particular aesthetic,
to make sure that we aren't celebrating sexual acts without consent,
violations of privacy, or pressuring people into sexual things that they're not comfortable with.
That's not a thing you want your game to normalize.
See you next week.
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