I should clarify that I don't think it's because it's because Japan is amazingly progressive about gender. (After all, this is the game where he gets groped by :biden-troll: who exclaims "You're... a man?!)
It's just that Japanese character designers can go "I think the dudes can and should be pretty too"
wasn't this part of the bait and switch of MGS2? Players expected to play as macho Solid Snake but ended up playing as a pretty boy in a really tight suit.
I think Kojima also got feedback from Japanese players saying that Snake was an ugly old man being like, 30
As much as I don't like MGS4, I did like that it's one of the only instances where they try to make an aged character feel old and decrepit. Usually they just slap a BADASS BEARD and gray hair on a guy and have like a few token jokes about them getting too old for this or that shit but otherwise they play exactly the same.
Instead of the BADASS BEARD, Snake has a positively hideous old man stache in MGS4. That took balls
I think Kojima and Kompany do a great job of subverting and elevating expectations of their playerbase on a regular basis. From the Snake Eater, to the P.T. demo, to the Death Stranding, all of them have Kojima and Krew doing shit that make players feel something. Good or bad, I think it's a designers job to make players feel something.
Also from a design perspective Raiden appears androgynous to play up the fact that he's the avatar for the player, regardless of their gender.
I guess the reason Raiden has always stood out in particular is that while MGS is a very Japanese franchise, since it has many of the trappings Westerners like (scifi military fiction, guns, shooting dudes), it's always had a broader audience than something like a JRPG. In other words, dudes who like regular shootybang stuff also played MGS and weren't prepared for the bishounen protagonist
and then they lampooned it in MGS3 by having snake wear a bishounen face mask
They further dumped on Raiden in the form of Raikov. I never minded Raiden so both making fun of him in 3 and "fixing" him in 4 seemed unnecessary to me
If you're past high school age you might as well be a skeleton
"Kurt Russel in his 30s isn't attractive" -- thoughts of a mad nation
Hey, at least that means it's not just Japanese women who are hit with the "Christmas Cake" stigma this time around.
(IDK if that's just an overblown myth to begin with though)
I assume it exists, much in the same way any Western misogynist memes about women exist, that is in the minds of shitheads.
Japanese culture seems very conscious about age in general though. Not conforming to certain social expectations will net you tons of derision
Yeah, makes sense.
I get conscious about that since I see Westerners throwing stones from glass houses when they try to single out le barbaric Asiatics for being uniquely "backwards" (not just Chyna). Not to say Japanese culture doesn't have its own particular hang-ups.
Raiden is Griffith from Berserk in a wet suit with ninja slippers, CMV
I will have you know that Raiden's never sexually assaulted anyone :disgost:
Altered the wording in a way that should achieve the same result
[sexism/homophobia]
I remember when Japanese stuff was first getting popular in the west in the 90s. So many people (mostly boomers) laughing at the designs of some characters "HE LOOKS LIKE A GIRL!"
I knew someone who wouldn't play Final Fantasy 7 because "Cloud looked gay"
Every RPG protagonist must be Geraldo
To be fair, I don't really care for the modern Square Enix house style. Everyone just looks like this weird uncanny valley doll person, though that's mostly due to the odd sort of unreal photorealism they go for
What if Cloud and Zack kissed under the super-heated steam of a Mako reactor?
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/YuO45ajyaK.png?format=webp
only in a Japanese game would you get a male protag like Raiden, dressed in a catsuit
This is "Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir" erasure.
