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three weeks pass...
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 (thirty-eight minutes ago) link