#and i don't even know why this is controversial

[roxannepolice]

The thing about Ricky September rising to the top of the chart as the most controversial aspect of Dot and Bubble is interesting, because... welp, as many people have pointed out, he's the surface level white twinky manic pixie nuwho Doctor at their most op on steroids. I've seen people comparing him to s6 Eleven specifically, but the offhand remarks about how much he knows, the interest in history, and most importantly, the proper introduction as the handsome guy who leads our protagonist away from cheap looking monsters and then runs hand in hand with her... that's Rose, the episode. The reason people took a liking to him is because he literally echoes the main character of the show we're watching. He's the Doctor doll in this sci fi dollhouse. That's why it's so shocking when Lindy uses him as cannon fodder.

So the fact that he's no less racist than everyone else in Finetime fits into the general concept of this episode as unpacking the naturalised racism of Shakespeare's Tempest/Forbidden Planet sf conventions, that Doctor Who, and the Doctor themself has been guilty of (welp this is what you get for thinking it's a good idea to turn a brown guy over to WWII villains or not filtering for racism when you random generate a time and space you will hide in with a black companion - you watch aryan bubble folks go to their deaths you bent ass over tits to prevent; not for many people this would have been karma doing its job, but for the Doctor it is).

But I don't think... the show wants us to hate itself, or its main character. Like, there are reviewers clutching their pearls over another cult text getting written by people who hate it, but. criticism isn't hatred, it's often an expression of love, and perhaps one of the highest forms of self-love. Which is why it caught my attention Ncuti Gatwa looks extra-doctorish in the last scene. Yes, clothes are surface, but in a visual medium they're a message too. Fifteen has been the most clothes changing Doctor we've seen so far, and he spends most of the episode in a more everyday casual shirt, but he dons the extravagant yet stylish tartan knee length suit for the end. And he does a Speech(tm), too, and helpless shouting, and finally a stern face (which ironically enough reminded me of fury of a Time Lord Ten). And like, he's not ignorant of why Finetimers look at him this way. They always knew, just never were on the practical not abstract side of the deal.

So Ricky the Doctor Doll works not only as a meta textual self reflexive parody, but also a contrast. Not so much as a "but see, this show, or even this era is not like other girls" masturbation, but more as a reflection on what makes this protagonist who they are. Yes, maybe s6 Eleven was op-ed too much, but that's not what made any Doctor, including this one, who they are. From this perspective the concept that Ricky would not have helped anyone from outside the in-group is... ironic considering how much of a separate chaff from grain sentiment there comes about in response to the Doctor's radical - and often pragmatically wrong! - kindness. Yes, the rationales for when they "should" be less merciful are more solid than skin colour, but I think this element of "this guy is what you WANT the Doctor to be, and not just visually" is there. Can't help thinking of how the destruction of Gallifrey - both in s1 and s12 - gets hailed as "yes, that's what the show is telling us is the RIGHT thing to do, just in general, not to prevent a specific outcome!". Meanwhile Fifteen keeps calling it genocide and remains wistful.

[simplepotatofarmer]

God yeah! People were so weird about it too, truly a point where I think we were all like “they really have no idea what dreblr actually thinks about anything huh” because we were beyond ecstatic 😂

Even funnier when you remember inniters convinced themselves that cc!Tommy was going to “make a whole stream dunking on c!Dream apologists” because those pre-stream messages mentioned talking about it after the finale in more context, you know, as if the finale itself didn’t make his stance on c!Dream really clear. And then it turns out his rant was your average “can people have nuance” take and being mad specifically at c!Tommy haters for being weird about c!Tommy’s trauma responses and the single most controversial thing be said was that he was biased in c!Tommy’s favor like 😭😭😭 truly a finale tailor-made specifically for dreblr

honestly!

it was funny because, especially on my end, i've been so vocal about thinking c!dream should get a chance to grow and change and be better. it's practically my brand. so when people were like 'i don't understand why dreblr is celebrating', i wanted to go, 'really. you don't understand why the people who have been advocating for growth and wanting the other characters to truly see him as just a guy would be stoked about exactly that happening?' at least to some degree.

literally everything about the finale was what we had been talking about and the conclusions that we had come to. it was just so strange because i never thought we were saying anything controversial, it was literally just 'there is nuance here'. maybe my belief that c!dream deserved to have a chance to change was but whatever. i think that about everything.

wild times.

[angelfirstclass]

Rogue above all else.

This is fan post declaring my love for Rogue and that I love her more than I am attached to a particular ship. For all I know, Rogue can be with whoever she wants to be with and I'm sticking by her. I am an equal opportunity Rogue shipper and have liked and enjoyed Rogueneto and Romy fanfics and art and etc. I don't believe in ship wars and just want to promote my girl.

I love Rogue. I think she is the most beautiful animated character and she is such a complex, interesting character from the comics to cartoons to the movies. Her powers are super interesting with or without Carole Danvers' superpowers and make her an empathetic person.

Firstly, I love that Rogue is the daughter of Mystique and Destiny. What a crazy upbringing that must have been and so unique. I love that she was born and raised in Mississippi and still keeps her roots, but then became the adopted daughter of two smart, ambitious, and strong lesbian women. The backstory of them raising her is super interesting because there is such a conflict of interests for Destiny and Mystique from knowing Rogue was going to be a powerful mutant, using and training her to be part of the Brotherhood, introducing her to people like Magneto, and also loving her like a daughter.

Mystique is such a unique character and such a powerful woman that it makes sense why Rogue is as powerful and strong willed as she is. In my headcanon X-men First Class stuff still applies so Raven is still Charles' adopted little sister and so Rogue is like Charles Xavier's distant niece which makes things interesting. Raven and Destiny hid Anna Marie away while she was growing up, but came to Xavier to help her after her run in with Carole Danvers. They had to reluctantly give Rogue up to the X-men in order to save her, but it was a bittersweet moment that Irene and Raven both regret.

Secondly, I love Rogue's vulnerability and empathy. Her absorbing powers are so unique and bring up a lot of questions about what makes a person. She can absorb powers, memories, and feelings and can even hold on too long and absorb entire psyches and life forces. In the beginning of her story way back in Avengers Annual 10, she is bad and unafraid to use her powers. She not only uses her powers indiscriminately, but she also isn't afraid to kiss people to absorb them.

The Rogue we see in X-men 97 is far more tempered and though has a past, has learned to use her powers sparingly and not want to hurt people. She uses her super strength and flying powers, but rarely uses her absorption power because it is a double edged sword. She may gain powers and drain energy from people, but gets their memories, traumas, fears, etc. which may not be a pleasant experience.

Thirdly, I like pretty much all forms of Rogue. I love X-men Evo Rogue for her gothic personality. I think a teen Rogue would be introverted and different to most girls her age. I like Wolverine and the X-men Rogue for being independent and Wolverine's best friend. I like their dynamic and I like when she is Wolverine's partner and team mate and platonically just gets him because she has absorbed him and they're so much alike. The most vulnerable of all Rogues is Movie Rogue which is a controversial portrayal of Rogue. I personally think Anna Paquin is gorgeous and good actor who portrayed the sweet, vulnerable Rogue to a tee.

This Rogue wasn't raised by Mystique and she didn't absorb Carole Danvers' powers yet. She was a scared teen girl who couldn't touch people and whose storyline revolved around her feelings about her powers and wanting to have physical intimacy. It's not my favorite version of her, but it did beautifully show Rogue's inner angst.

My favorite version of her is X-men TAS or 97 Rogue who I think is Rogue Prime. She is the daughter of Destiny and Mystique, has absorbed Carole Danvers' powers, is the ex of Erik Lensherr, in an on off relationship with Remy Le Beau, sister of Kurt Wagner, great friend and dedicated X-man, and all around bad ass chick.

She has the Brotherhood/Magneto's ex/Mystique's daughter thing as her background which makes her a complicated character with a dark past which makes for juicy storylines, but she is mature enough to be fully reformed and a good person. Her duality and grey toned sense of the world makes her so well suited to complex men like Erik Lensherr and Remy LeBeau who are not traditional good guys with squeaky clean pasts and morals.

I love X-men 97 Rogue. I love Lenore Zann. I love the sass, the Southern charm and cute accent, I love her no bs attitude, her compassionate heart, and her empathy. Rogue is my Queen and I stan.

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

consent is an important moral/legal consideration. but it is not the only one.

[ashtrayfloors]

EPISODE TWO KURT’S BRAIN - INTERIOR

Kurt’s obsession with fashion went back a long way. It was part of a more general appreciation of beautiful and material things, which he’d had since he was a child.

Kurt suspected that this early aesthetic education was responsible for the direction of his own tastes. Things were beautiful to him in inverse proportion to their accessibility: a logic which struck him as childish for its fetishisation of impotence. But the 90s were about not growing up. The pages of the music and celebrity magazines that didn’t have Kurt’s face on them were filled with images of manufactured adolescence: teeny bopper twinks dressed in virginal white, A-listers doused with slime in studios resembling kindergartens, and an ageing parade of actors fresh out of high school drag.

He might seem like a kid to an industry obsessed with youth and its prophecies, but he was a grown up with a kid of his own. Even in earlier relationships he’d wanted the house with the picket fence. Tobi Vail used to say it was because of his parents’ divorce; they’d get into screaming arguments about his attachment to what she called the ‘bourgeois and patriarchal trap of success’. Kurt was hurt, but he did agree that he wanted these things as signs that he had made it. Not to the American dream that Vail despised him for, but to some indefinable sense of a future, and this was the only one he could imagine.

Such feelings were deeply unfashionable, and got in the way of the punk recklessness that had first attracted Vail, and which she held at arms’ length, an accessory to complete her image. Not that he minded them not interrogating these desires together. Kurt couldn’t put it more eloquently than this, but it felt both good and bad to dangle from her arm. To be used the way a man might use a beautiful woman. No one had read any Judith Butler yet, so Kurt could only say: Tobi’s riot grrl feminism made him feel like a woman, but it also made him know he wasn’t one. He was part of a group of people who obstructed people like Tobi, who’s desires stood in the way of her liberation. These wants stood for his involvement in patriarchy; women only wanted these things because men wanted them for them.

But Kurt didn’t care, he dreamed of being turned into an image, into an adornment for the grrls, the gyrls, the gworls of the future. He dreamt that his name would become a secret call passed between women in chokers at parties in lofts and warehouses in metropolitan areas of the United States. He dreamt of a teenage starlet gaining fame in a tv show where she wore his dirty bob for an audience too young to remember his music. He dreamt of the expansion of the internet and forums on which users would share photos of him and argue about what he wore and what he said.

He didn’t tell anyone these dreams. Unlike the house and family, these were just for him.

—Francis Whorrall-Campbell, from "[Digital Poetics 4.7] A Fragment on Kurt Cobain’s Transgender Ideas from ‘In Utero’" (The Hythe)

[punkshitposts]

something I think is actually hilarious is that if you go left enough you start having more stances in common with (individual) conservatives, and if you go right enough you start agreeing with (individual) leftists. like i have a pretty close friend who's self described as "just far enough right that I hate politicians" , whom I hard disagree with his overarching political stances. but the finer details of it... yeah we agree with each other. gun control/gun rights opinions taxation opinions pro-small government opinions slight separatist opinions anti two party opinions anti-corporation opinion ect ect ect.

we stand on opposite sides of a standard political compass but I genuinely think if I were to count stats, I'd agree with as many of his stances as I would a liberals/democrats stances. my hs gov teacher described the difference in right vs left to us as "everyone's goal here is the betterment of mankind, they just think the best ways to do it are different" and that's literally the best way, to me, to describe what the difference in right vs left is regarding anarchism specifically. we got ESSENTIALLY the same opinion but the ways we think are the best ways to go about enacting said opinion are what makes us different. and something abt that is really painfully funny to me. envisioning a world where an-something is the major world thing, not capitalism.... and there's STILL right vs left... but The Anarchist Versions. christ.

sorry for the book i wrote in the tags. ignore typos I am NOT retyping any of that to fix them xoxo

[throwawayaccount3482348873289]

Response

Thank you to Jade/Lolthia @/edens-gemstone for replying to the previous post. I will make an exception in replying as yes, there was a part I forgot to add, which is additional evidence to prove that all your accusations in the comments below are completely false. Allow me to address them one by one.

At the end, I will include some follow-up questions to add additional context for other users.

THE ACCUSATIONS

“Also you literally stalked my tumblr after this, rb posts about Adam that I wasn’t comfy being rb and possibly sent me harassing anons (idk for sure)”

I do not have a Tumblr. This account is made by someone else, posting on my behalf. But if you really are confident that it’s me reblogging these posts and sending harassing anons, post the blog and the anons. If you don’t know for sure, why did you post this? 

“You literally just… didn’t want me included because I wouldn't let you ship your OC with Ibara.”

As seen here, this claim is completely false. I explicitly mentioned that I had no problems with the pairing, but asked them to let me know prior next time to ensure the RP is consistent. I may have vaguely talked about an original story I was writing with my OC and Ibara outside of RP, but within the context of the RP, I have clearly stated that I was fine with the direction Lolthia wanted. 

None of what they had mentioned was communicated to me at all before the start of the RP. They didn’t even acknowledge what I said, just responding with ‘well I figured it would be obvious’.

Lolthia’s behaviour here is consistent with their stated intention in the previous post: to RP not because they want to collaborate, but because they want other writers to expend time and effort to fulfil their self-ship fantasies, without giving as much in return. Therefore, they didn’t bother giving context, let alone asking if their RP partners were okay with it.

“You even stopped our RP after getting mad about me dating Ibara.”

Lolthia stopped the RP themselves after I confronted them for ranting on their public blog about a communication issue they were unhappy with in this server.

Someone alerted me that they were talking about their RP server on their blog. I was concerned about those in the server who were on Tumblr. As their RP partner, I requested that they delete it and talk to us first in the future. We then had the following conversation.

The conversation ended with this rude remark and Lolthia proceeded to be inactive for a long time before starting the argument in the previous post.

“I got tired of constant pings asking me for stuff”/ “I… asked to stop being pinged because I was going through enough”

I need you to understand that you are the admin of the server. We needed your help to create threads to hold our RPs in. Instead of not saying anything when we pinged you only to throw a tantrum about it, why didn’t you pass the permissions or moderator roles to someone else, or at least notify us that you’d be inactive for a certain amount of time?

In the post where we were planning an RP and pinged you - If your interpretation of ‘maybe they can come in later to keep the narrative consistent’ is us excluding you, that’s honestly a you problem, mate.

TO LOLTHIA/JADE

Only one of the claims you have made against me is correct. Yes - presently, I do not like you. But it’s not because you are whatever you identify as, or that you ship with a specific character.

I do not like you because you vagued your own server members, including myself, on your public blog. When I found out and asked you to edit out the mention of our server at minimum, you still had the gall to try to convince me it didn’t affect anyone but yourself.

I do not like you for insulting my friends and I as writers by saying we were ‘just an alternative to character.AI’ all along. And as people, by comparing us to the hate anons who had sent you death threats when we did nothing of the sort. Then, twisting the above into these accusations, without a shred of proof to go with them. 

I am a ROLEPLAYER. Ibara to me is no more than a character and piece of intellectual property.

You: 

Explicitly conveyed that your position was to use us to help you get validation for your alleged ‘relationships’ in a similar way to Character.AI.

Took out your jealousy towards other fandom members onto us, even getting emotional when we merely talked about and shared screenshots of characters you liked. 

When we didn’t give you attention to your liking, accused us of ostracising you and wanting you dead.

Threw a tantrum at us for pinging you for basic admin duties as the server owner, because it wasn’t attention or praise.

The only irrational one here is not myself, but you, and the hard evidence in these two posts is overwhelming.

I won’t be entertaining any further responses. Please be reminded that any attempt to post my personal information publicly will be met with action by me.

TO OTHER USERS

Q: Did you make both these posts and the document? 

No, these posts are follow-ups to the document containing evidence, made by a different person. 

Q: Why did you feel the need to engage them rather than leave the server?

We had already talked only amongst ourselves, ignored any vents they had and began our own server long before these events.

Engaging them was at first a personal choice to defend my friends, who had done nothing wrong. At the time, I was not aware that this was common behaviour for them.

The comparison between us and the death threat anons, which could affect my friends’ reputations, was the most compelling reason for me to attempt straightening this out.

Q: Why has this post been made almost a year later?

Yes, I do agree that from the looks of it, Lolthia’s actions are old news. After I was informed, I personally did not want anything to do with them, and decided to let it go.

However, recently, my friends in the same fandom spaces have not had the luxury of curating their own online experiences because according to them, they are constantly remaking blogs. Furthermore, it was not easy for them to work up the courage to make this post, as being wrongfully accused of wanting someone’s death is not easy for anyone. So, I decided to back them up with the hard evidence they lacked.

Thank you for reading. 

[garfield-milk]

if i see one more straight woman writing only mlm romances im going to set myself on fire

[1o1percentmilk]

whew that felt good to get off my chest even if it doesn't really matter to anyone besides me

[thesealfriend]

forgot the controversial twink's name and nearly called him timothee shawaddywaddy there, now that's a tribute/parody act I'd like to see

like whatever else you wanna say about the man, he do have pretty little angel eyes 🎵

[featureenvyproductions]

"Why does everything need to be Gay now it's so shallow to make men attracted to each other when they could be Pure Platonic Friends -"

oops sorry I can't hear you over the sound of me Doing What I Want Forever because I have been watching movies, TV, and animation since the 80s and have watched enough shallow heterosexual romances that would have been stronger as mlm-wlw solidarity friendships to fill the space between stars in a galaxy

[allisonreader]

My heart hurts. Not physically, but emotionally. I don't like the news, I tend to avoid actively searching it out, for that exact reason. I ache because as people we just can't seem to get along. Learn to compromise and fully try to understand the other side. It's exhausting to understand why people are against certain things, even when it's the opposite of what I personally believe in.

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

Wrt localization, I can understand wanting to change let's say a joke if the context of the joke would be lost on people due to play on the language. But when someone changes the content of a story and characterization to the point where it's a completely different experience and then they have the audacity to say "have respect for the localizers. You support gg" or some nonsense in response to criticism, it's really disingenuous.

Not sure if you saw when I mentioned it before, but yeah. There are times when they have to make cultural changes (Pokemon did it with food to make more sense to the western audience!), change jokes that won't land in translation, etc. Those are reasonable changes that have to be made or the audience will just be confused/uninterested/disconnected.

Sometimes there are also jokes that in different cultures would be deemed inappropriate (like the sex joke aimed at Edelgard in the middle of the night - that makes sense that it was removed because western culture would've been largely uncomfortable with it). Age differences also account for this, in that what's seen as appropriate to a teen audience in JP is not necessarily considered appropriate in the west.

My viewpoint toward localization is that it should only be that. Everything else should be a faithful translation as much as is able, i.e. doesn't alter the message given in the original script. It doesn't matter if the content is from Japan, if it's a JRPG or what have you. If it was of French origin, I'd still say the same thing: that the messages and narrative of the French originating story should be handled faithfully and should be telling the same story/characterizations/etc to all audiences in any location.

Obviously in translation you can't make everything one to one or the sentences would sound off and/or broken. That's why you reword things to have the sentences structurally accurate in the translated language. Doing that, however, should not involve changing the meaning behind the sentence or trying to sell a different narrative. Doing that becomes a different story, even if only in bits and pieces. When a story nudges really fuckin' hard trying to tell you something that's wrong is right or that something right is wrong, but that narrative is only added into a loc and didn't already exist, it's a disrespect toward the writers and their original intention.

Even if, yes, the writers were very bias toward Edelgard (which they were as that was, again, confirmed in an interview), it didn't come at the cost of other characters. It didn't come at the cost of Rhea being worse, Dimitri being worse, or Claude being worse. It didn't come at the cost of her allies all being disgusted by their enemies that they were invading. They loved Edelgard when they were writing her, but they didn't make that cloud how they treated other characters (and while yes, the Nabateans get largely ignored in favor of focusing on Edelgard and such, it's not at the cost of their characterization or to make them seem worse).

Even if the loc heaps praise upon praise toward Edelgard and that doesn't harm the original intent, it's what they do to other characters that disrespects the original content. It would be like if they took FE10/RD and had Ike (who was actually just and a good person) spouting nonsense about Micaiah that just wasn't true, hyping up his allies to kill her because she Must Die.

Personally, I'm no Micaiah fan. She was one of my most hated characters in the franchise until Edelgard (and Berandetta) showed up. I still am not fond of Micaiah and she's still pretty low on the rung for me. That said, I would not enjoy a narrative where Ike wrongfully labeled her and her allies and provided his people (and the Laguz Alliance by extension) a false narrative about her. If those things about her were true I wouldn't care, but they wouldn't be. Why does that not work for Ike? Because it's not who he is as a character to say those things, and thus if he did, it means something is off.

The original has some ??? points about Edelgard that favor her/lift her up, but again, it's not doing harm to other characters. Yeah, we get the whole "they are the enemy" stuff from her side, but like... that's the point. If you team up with her, you're on her side and are seeing the story through her perspective, which makes her enemies, well, the enemies. They're viewed in a bad light on that one route.

But when you actually come into contact with the characters in question? It's not as bad as she makes it out to be. She, as the protagonist of her own story, makes other named characters and their ways of living sound very bad because she views them negatively, but we don't actually see what she claims if we personally come into contact with those characters.

What the loc does is have her say those things, understandably from her side, but then trash the characters' very characterization and personality to match her and her/her allies' opinions of them. The characters reflect her views with no pushback whatsoever, when it should be that the pushback is how those characters she talks about behave.

There should be a dissonance between her thoughts about them and who they truly are. It should make you question, "is this really right?". You should feel bad when you kill genuinely good people (like Sylvain. You shouldn't feel like he's some trash scumbag, but feel upset about his death and find yourself questioning why he had to die - not cheering for his death).

Point being, the loc changed that stuff because ??? I guess they wanted Edelgard to shine at her very absolute brightest, and the only way to do that was to harp on all the characters who opposed her. I don't understand why they would do that tbh (like I know the intent, i.e. making her look good, but I don't know why they went to such lengths to vilify her enemies and not just say hey, maybe she's wrong about these people but I'm still going to fight for her, if fighting for her is what you decided to do. The one idea I have is the final paragraphs of this post).

It just makes it feel a lot like purist culture, where if you've sided with her than they can't possibly let her be actually bad and do bad things. You've sided with her, so she simply cannot be a villain! It makes the loc team seem afraid of a concept of siding with the villains, feeling the need to change it because it's BaD to play a game/route where you do that. It feels like it's portraying the idea that if you do bad things in a video game, you condone those bad things irl.

Whether that was their thought process or not, that's exactly what it comes off as, and that since they loved Edelgard they couldn't portray her poorly unless there was no other option. In the times they do finally portray her poorly via other characters, there's always pushback in some form, like someone defending her, giving her the benefit of the doubt after everything she'd already done and still intended to do, or being sad about fighting/killing her. In the original that was still there, but the loc just added to it - just by doing a whole lot of damage to other characters in the process.

Meanwhile with Rhea, there's always negative pushback. If she does something good, there's a negative thought following her good actions. Obviously there isn't space for that to happen literally every single time, but when possible it's there. Again, this is another thing the loc amped up, and I can only guess it's because she's the head of the Church (and churches are viewed as the enemy in most JPRGs) and the main person Edelgard opposes (with no acknowledgement from the loc team, about why that is, being a bad thing).

It's like, the one time there's a game where the Church isn't actually the enemy, they... made it so that the loc reflected that the Church is still actually the enemy. Churches being the enemy are so common that it was intentionally used in the original script as a red herring. You think they're gonna be the big bads because they always are in JRPGs.

The point of that was meant to fulfill itself as a red herring, making you focus on them and scrutinize everything they said and did even heavier than you would anyone else. It makes everything Edelgard does get swept under the rug and causes the player not to notice until it's fastballed at you. That's why you end up fighting her and not the Church except if you're specifically on her route.

That was lost in loc, of course, and it got so overwhelmingly popular in the west (which I do believe is a reason they did it to begin with, i.e. made the Church the baddies by western viewpoint because the west apparently eats that shit right up) that Hopes catered most strongly toward the western audience, making the Church the big bads (who... don't even do anything wrong whatsoever in this game and hardly even exist to do so, but I can only guess they got largely ignored because they were so hated, and less positive interaction with them meant less worry of killing innocent people/more not caring about them as the enemy) of two routes out of three; not because that was the original script's intent, but because they just went with what was popular even if it went against their home game's intention. I was pretty unsurprised to find out this went over very badly with JP players.

In other words the loc was so widely understood as the true canon/intent of the story (despite its vast and drastic changes) that Hopes was crafted around the loc more than it was the original script. The loc of Houses altered so much that it changed the perception of the audience consuming it, so whether the JP writers are aware that that's why the game was consumed the way it was or not, they just knew a chunk of the western audience loved Edelgard and hated Rhea.

When I play a game I want the same story and experience that everyone has playing it. I don't want to understand it differently than it's meant to be understood and was understood in the region it was created in. If it's a dark and mature themed game, it should stay that way. It western audiences can't handle that, then the game shouldn't be played by them whether it comes out in the west or not.

If you can't handle the content of a video game, you shouldn't play it, plain and simple. No amount of "oh but I like this portion of it!" changes the overall narrative that you can't handle and/or don't like (and you wouldn't know you like a part of it if you didn't play it at all, which you did play it despite knowing it's largely not for you. If you didn't know but play it and find out, you put it down and move on). The game's messages should not be altered to fit purists or baby the players. If it needs to be edited that strongly to work in the west, my feeling on it is that it should not be released in the west.

If it is released, the story should not be altered to baby its audience. If people do play it despite that and can't handle it, it's their responsibility to stop playing it and not bitch at the people who released it (in any region) or bitch at the loc team for not changing anything (i.e. bitching that the loc team didn't change creative aspects of the story to fulfill another region's agenda).

Why does that happen though? Capitalism, quite frankly. Companies prefer the money added to their coffers than to keep the originality of a creative piece of art. They'll follow any political agenda that's popular, any social media agenda that's popular, etc, even if it means changing creativity.

They want the most people possible to purchase it, so if more people will buy the product, even if it means sullying the creative work of the original writers, they'll do it. That may not be true worldwide, but it absolutely is with many western companies. If the narrative of a game doesn't fit what western culture agrees with, they'll change it to make it so that western culture agrees with it (re: the Church).

Localization shouldn't exist to change a work of art/to change any media form for the sake of just releasing it in another region for the profit, but it does happen; hence why I prefer translation to loc. Over the years I've grown to hate western localization more and more.

If localizers have to work that badly to change what already exists (including changing the intent of the creator(s)), I have zero respect for their "efforts" for trying to alter a story and possibly even pursue a particular agenda (because we play games to have fun and enjoy something, not to have irl agendas thrown back in our faces).

Translators who go through loops upon loops to make sure the story stays as intact as possible with only changes of necessity are the ones I respect. Translating things to keep the meaning of a story is a lot more difficult and trying than just going "well how about we just completely change this and then we don't even have to think about how to work it out".

Also, there's a difference between pursuing an agenda or writing something to fix a glaring issue like racism. If there are aspects of a media that got changed in the west to eliminate racism (which is often, especially in Japan from my understanding based on other media I consume, done because of ignorance and not genuinely harmful intent), that's understandable.

That alone shouldn't alter a whole story though, and if it has to because the racism or whatever it is is that bad, then the work should simply not be released in the west! Simple as that! If it's that bad, why support those things by changing them to sound nicer/better and let the original product still generate revenue?

Now, is all localization this bad? No. Is Houses' localization bad enough that it changed an entire region's perception on the contents of the game? Yes. That's a no no for me.

I respect localization that does its best to keep the same story and change what won't work in another region (including what may be deemed unacceptable in said region or really toes a line of general regional discomfort).

I do not respect localization that sticks in the team's own biases or tries to push any kind of agenda to appeal to certain people. If a piece of creative media is created without the intention to push any kind of agenda, it should remain that way and not suddenly have things added to it for that purpose.

I respect creative media. I don't respect capitalism and changing content to cater to a specific subset of an audience, including the staff's own.

[softpine]

i’ve been so confused about everything that’s happened this week because i already had most of these people blocked for ages 😌

[buysomecheese]

I'm so confused by high schoolers wtf. Literally no one is every mean to me but my best friend has people telling them that other people hate them just randomly for no reason?? Makes no since we are basically the same-

[a---fire---inside]

Fabrizio Moro - La Mia Voce @Tim Summer Hits