Something something oniichan
As people are getting more atomized they interact with fewer people. This is why I think step-whatever and teacher stuff is so popular right now, the idea of meeting new people is getting increasingly alien to a subset of the population.
That subset is also very invested in any way to distract themselves and escape that existence, hence why there is so much media catered to them.
Its been an anime trope for a LONG time though. Like over twenty years
And in many ways Japan was the bleeding edge of late capitalist alienation. They went from building a techno utopia (in their minds, wasn't gonna happen) to decades of economic recession, hopelessness and meaningless corpo grind.
I can tell that I'm starting to get old when I think of 20 year old anime as fairly recent. But alienation and atomization didn't begin in the last 5 years, it has been a long process.
You can also tell the way that things are starting to turn less grand on possibilities. The recent glut of isekai anime is a perfect example as you would have isekai before, but now they tend to all be based on online games. That is where viewers can imagine themselves in the shoes of the protagonist.
Isekai anime are stories where a person is transported from the normal world into a fantasy one, where they are often incredibly powerful and have many girlfriends
That goes pretty far back. Chronicles of Narnia is that without the girlfriends. Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Monster Rancher, The Cheetahmen game on the action 52 cartridge etc.
Yeah, but you're talking about decades between new stories. Today it's like 3 out of every 4 anime released in a season are Isekais and the fourth one is a medieval European fantasy setting with rpg mechanics.
Pretending the west is any different is mighty sus.
"What are you doing step-brother?"
Obviously it crops up in a porn context in both Japanese and Western smut, but you also see it in stuff that is not intended as jacking off material. In Western stuff as well, yes, but it's not quite as common
Just because anime and games make it into the western market doesn't mean it was meant for mass consumption in Japan. If you looked at western releases you'd be made to believe that Japanese grindhouse movies were the entirety of their live-action film market.
This post wasn't intended as "WOW THE JAPANESE SURE ARE WEIRD AND FUCKED UP AREN'T THEY LOLOLOL"
I just find it weird how often you see this trope in pop culture stuff :shrug-outta-hecks: (I'm also well aware that niche nerd shit is niche nerd shit even in Japan)
It's like how early 00s internet humor reduced Japanese culture to tentacle porn and vending machines that sold used panties. Yeah, those things technically existed, but they were only found in red light districts and areas that sold novelties to tourists. It would be like someone visiting Christopher Street during the 90s and assuming most American stores displayed cockrings and leatherdaddy gear on their storefront windows.
Game of thrones: :side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:
Though you could reasonably argue that GoT is jack off material lol
In Western stuff it tends to be portrayed as weird and fucked up shit done by sick and or evil people (like being queer or non-genderconforming used to be until faily recently), in Japanese stuff it's often treated in a more neutral (and sometimes romantic) way
It used to be a pretty common trope in Daytime Soap Operas. Right up there with comas.
It used to be a pretty common trope in Daytime Soap Operas.
Oops, accidentally incest!
There's been a bunch of bizarre stuff in his previous work, but I don't recall incest in any of them. I'm not saying that this somehow crosses the line or that he absolutely shouldn't have done it
There was incest in Deadly Premonition 2, it was actually like one of the main plot points.
Haven't played that yet! There was that leak of a Steam release scheduled for this year, I hope it happens eventually even if the game isn't as good as the first one :sadness:
Didn't Deadly Premonition 2 end up having some real, no-fooling offensive stuff in it though? I remember hearing discussions of both racism and transphobia
I can't speak for racism because I don't remember there being any beyond maybe some stereotypical depictions of Black people in Louisiana? Maybe? Then about the transphobia part, many characters are transphobic, but it's explicitly coded as a negative trait, and the main character is supportive. I believe in the original release of the game the main character misgendered a trans character tho, but SWERY went on record saying they made a mistake in translation, and I believe they corrected it. But overall I think it's not really a negative portrayal of trans people, just somewhat misguided here and there. However I'm cis so take that with a grain of salt.
Also to speak of the quality, I haven't played or watched the first one, but the second one had some really great moments, and did have a really nice post credit scene that I found pretty memorable and charming. For the most part the game's pretty clunky but AFAIK works much better than the first one.
From what I've seen of DP2 the game is a complete shambles technically in a way that the original Xbox 360 release of Deadly Premonition wasn't. It had clearly outdated PS2 graphics and was done on a threadbare budget, certainly, but it ran at a solid 30 fps, wasn't bugged out the ass and didn't crash constantly.
Now, the later ports of DP1 are a different story entirely, all breaking the game in various ways with the PC version being the absolute rock bottom. It's a shame those are the main way people can experience the original now, and an even greater shame the same fucking company behind them developed the sequel :agony-consuming:
It was surprising to hear that was even an issue given his previous game was The Missing
Incest is taboo for a reason. Rare, recessive genes that were previously unexpressed became dominant, resulting in a wide range of diseases and disorders. Look up Charles II Habsburg.
The only time I've seen it not make whatever story it's in 100x worse was Utena, and even that got close at times.
Not sure it's too much better in western media. As an example, I've seen two separate popular western shows (airing recently) that seem wed to the idea that twins are soulmates in a romantic sense.
You see in a romantic partnership tbe ideal is a source of unconditonal affection. Who else in our lives embodies tbat ideal other than family?
In a way I think of it as an over correction. Where as the old ideal of porn was the interchangeable anonamous alien woman. The requisite plastic surgury for the 70-80s look being to allow social distance so we could comfortably project our desires onto them. The overcorrection is now that we idealize love an intimacy with our new ideal. So much so that we project the fantasy inwards onto ourself and environment though the medium of family.
Also, historical, incest was tbe most common and we are just regressing to the mean here.
you're gonna need a citation for that last one. It definitely was among nobility, but most peasants found it weird. Sibling incest is also very rare, even among royalty.
I was thinking more adult child inscest. British style. But a practice being popular in the upper classes useually trickles down
People trying really hard to act like Japanese attitudes towards incest are exactly the same as the West's. Japan isn't into incest because it's exciting to violate a taboo, they're into it because it's not that taboo - which is why it appears in mainstream stuff and not just porn.
Japan never had a Charles II, and it didn't have any of the stuff that led up to him. It didn't really have an expectation that nobles were supposed to be morally pure. It didn't have a religion that saw sex and morality as deeply intertwined. If someone had Charles II as an heir, they'd just adopt a retainer and have him continue the line instead, because the blood wasn't what was important.
All of the above are part of why we Westerners see incest as taboo and depraved. It reminds us of a legacy of awful nobles who everyone hates, who claimed to be morally and genetically superior but were neither. There are reasons why incest is bad, especially under current conditions where it's often the result of grooming, and doing it generation after generation is how you get Charleses II. But occasional cousin-fucking isn't something that's so inherently abhorrent that every culture in the world considers it taboo and would only do it for the sake of violating said taboo. Sometimes people are just into their cousins, it happens, especially when society is ambivalent about it.
Is it better for the norm to be condemning it and having sickos be into it because it's condemned, or to be more relaxed about it, despite the (at least potentially) fucked-up aspects of it? Idk. I feel like I'm gonna get dunked on for this take but like, idk, I once had a Japanese woman casually tell me about her "brother complex" and when I reacted with :kombucha-disgust: she just seemed confused. So I'm just saying, these equivalences everyone's drawing don't seem to actually track.
I've found it to be a perfectly acceptable scaled down DP-style game, done on a more modestly sized budget and dev team, with overt Twin Peaks influences swapped for twee Englishness and storybook whimsy. (And with superfluous clunky TPS elements entirely eliminated) The main plot has only now just kicked off, but so far it's been a more laid back and low-key Swery experience, something that's probably at least partly attributable to the lower budget which means less bombastic cutscenes. We'll see what happens as the plot develops, but I'm expecting some weird fucking curveballs.
The gameplay might be a bit of a deal breaker for some, consisting largely of taking photos, fetch quests, reading dialogue boxes and farming (both the literal and the grindy video game kind). Movement and animation is clunky across the board. There's a ton of little inconveniences and annoyances too, like for example how the dog/cat transformations stop you in your tracks and how you can't go straight from cat to dog or vice versa without going back to human first. You get a fairly decent chuck of English countryside to explore, but outside of the main town of Rainy Woods, there's not much in the way of lore or characters to bump into as you'll mostly be finding crafting materials (And random animals to kill for said materials. Who knew there were so many turkeys living in middle England?)
It's still a Swery game, with tons of detail poured into the usual areas, like food (which you can snap pictures of and upload on
InstagramFlamingo). Most realistic Scotch Egg model I've ever seen, 10/10It's also on GamePass on both Xbox One/Series whatever the new one is and PC
It'd certainly be easier to recommend to a person that had a baseline Swery experience to calibrate their expectations. For a first Swery game, Deadly Premonition would the the natural choice (disregarding the problems with versions available on current platforms), but The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories would probably be a good choice too given its short length and concise platformer gameplay. (I'd LOVE to recommend you try out D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, the game was a fantastic bonkers adventure game with Swery firing on all cylinders and working with a decent budget, but sadly it got cancelled after 3 episodes :sadness-abysmal: )
spoiler
Everyone should still play D4, the soundtrack was great
