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two weeks pass...
one month passes...
Thanks to Leee on the Last of Us thread for recommending that Something Rotten podcast. I've listened to most of the LoU2 episodes, and while it's often chaotic or incoherent (per hang-out podcast protocol) and I often disagree with their takes (which are steeped in not just general cynicism but also the sort that comes from spending way more time with this particular game than the vast majority of people) it's also often very incisive, and it's all been worth it for the (more or less) last installment with Cameron Kunzelman, who I was unfamiliar with, and whose smart presence sent me scrambling for a pen and paper to note down all the other stuff I wanted to pursue. Kunzelman's book, for example, The World Is Born From Zero, and his other writing on video games, or writers like Stuart Hall, who I also don't know. Not to mention Jacob Geller's video essays, or the epic game analysis videos from Noah Caldwell-Gervais.
For example, I was watching one of Caldwell-Gervais's videos on the Souls games, and he brought up a very interesting point, how almost no matter what action game you are playing, from Last of Us to Doom to Spider-man to Uncharted or whatever, but especially conventionally story-driven games, no matter how easy or difficult, everyone ends up at the same place, more or less the same way. But in Dark Souls, et al., no two players - and in a lot of ways, no two playthroughs - are the same, and how you reach the end is as ambiguous as what the end even *is*, which makes the games particularly rich, mysterious and entrancing. As a more or less casual gamer I'd never really considered this aspect.
I've also got a bunch of books about games queued up. Blood, Sweat and Pixels; Masters of Doom; All Your Base are Belong to Us; Extra Lives. Go figure, there are a lot of books out there about video games.
― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, 21 October 2023 13:41 (seven months ago) link
three months pass...
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one month passes...
it's again, i do less _reading_ than i do _watching_, i've kinda got a thing for video essays lately, idk why
anyway i enjoyed this followup to a previous jan Misali video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ddmjcy3lEs
the thing that fascinates me is the way queerness kind of seeps through
like there's nothing overtly queer about it, but it gets to the part where jan Misali is talking about how some mario games _do_ have a meaningful story element and up pops Vivian from Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (TTYD).
it's a small moment but it's a significant choice... i don't know to what extent people know how controversial this has been lately
in the original thousand year door, the character of Vivian was portrayed in Japan as an "otokonoko", a Japanese term that doesn't really translate well into English. it's often translated as "crossdresser" which... _kind of_? it doesn't have the _specificity_ associated with the english language term. an otokonoko isn't necessarily "trans" but she's not _not_ trans. it's kind of like how in japanese, the term "gei boi", although to some extent derived from english words, doesn't mean _quite_ the same thing as the english term "gay boy" would. "gei" suggests "geisha", suggests something distinctly feminine. so when a character in _funeral parade of roses_ refers to herself as a "gay boy" the term is maybe more equivalent to the contemporaneous western idea of the "street queen", people like marsha p. johnson.
anyway that kind of nuance gets lost in translation, which maybe is one of the reasons vivian was portrayed in the original English version as being a cis woman.
anyway the remaster just came out - and IMO TTYD is the best paper mario game BTW. i like "super paper mario" but it's not really an RPG, which is a shame because TTYD was a really good RPG. the timing based stuff in TTYD is tough for me, i don't have a good sense of timing.
anyway, the remaster just came out and in the english version, lo and behold vivian is a trans woman
of course there are a lot of Gamers on the Internet who are just _livid_ about this, Nintendo Gone Woke or whatever. it is fascinating to me honestly to see the development of understandings of gender in Japan... my understanding is that lately the Western concept of "transgender" has taken hold. i can't say i'm totally unhappy about that, as otokonoko aren't necessarily treated respectfully in the way that trans people are... they maybe don't get treated to the same extent that an "okama", a term that roughly translates as the "f-slur", does, but "otokonoko" do tend to get viewed as not being "real" women and are often gendered as male by cis people, even when they use female pronouns. if you look at the way nintendo has treated the gender identity of birdo, which is _not_ well, that's kinda the dynamic there.
i'm kinda curious as to whether the japanese TTYD remaster treats vivian as a straightforward trans woman as well, or if that's just how the english translation portrays her. i haven't seen any information on that either way. in general though i am seeing a lot more representation in japanese media that fits the "transgender" framing.
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it's more than that, though, i watch a lot of what one might call "nerd" or "weeb" videos, these things that... i love the way jan Misali explores the different ways to categorize mario games, the way they go through the different ways and decide that it's a question of how people _use language_, a linguistic question in other words rather than a question of data analysis. like jan Misali i am interested in both things, and i agree with their conclusions. i mean you can see my love of how we interpret language from the preceding section lol. taxonomizing in this manner, i do think there's something implicitly queer about it, because it's how we make sense of _ourselves_, of who we are. i couldn't recognize myself as a "transsexual" or a "transvestite" but i _could_ recognize myself as "transgender". (as a result of that i _do_ also now recognize myself as "transsexual" - language is complicated!)
even something like stevem's recent video on cyberpunk anime, it doesn't _center_ queerness but it's implicit, implicit in the genre. the idea of "lowlifes" is _very_ queercoded. and again, you do see queerness seeping through. you start with anticapitalism and then you ask why so many cyberpunk protags are girls and you get to donna haraway and suddenly queerness is on the menu.
anyway neither of these videos is explicitly queer, and one of them isn't even about video games, though it does take a critical view of cyberpunk 2077, but these are the videos i'm into, and this kind of analysis, this kind of video essay, _is_ to me implicitly queer, is one of my special interests. i'd do this kinda shit myself if i had the spoons to make it presentable to an audience lol.
― Kate (rushomancy), Wednesday, 5 June 2024 18:20 (two days ago) link