There all machinist? H***** are all rape games?
Iām going to go ahead and speak from experience in that what is sexual assault in Japan and the West is very different.
Because of Japanese values, many otome games involve sexual assault, sometimes even rape. Porn of children is also allowed and legal in fictional form and the age of consent is 13, leading to many games having a āyoungerā romancable character for many male-marketed games. Incest is also fetishisted and also physically beating your child is fine, if not encouraged.
In young adult otome games this is most notable, as men will lie, verbally abuse, drug, and sometimes sexually harass the female protagonist with little ability for the player character or narrative to speak out or resist. It is considered a ādesirableā situation.
The closer to sexual otome games you go, the worse this becomes as Japan has an idea of female romantic and sexual submission that has not responded very well to the rapid feminist gamer movement.
It is not marketed as catering to a specific fetish. It is normalised and romanticised and marketed towards most if not all young women as a desirable situation.
āHentaiā å¤ę means pervert, by the way. Thatās just literally what it means.
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Choice of Games also markets to a certain audience. Thatās implied in their mission statement as an āinclusive, feminist, sex-positiveā publisher, which is naturally going to alienate some people (to be fair, most of those people I wouldnāt want as fans anyways).
My personal interpretation of that mission statement is that writing for CoG means subverting or defying gender-based character roles, and actively fighting against the sort of skewed perceptions readers might have regarding gender, race, sexuality, class, and certain character archetypes. Obviously, I can choose to be more subversive in more creative ways outside of the strictures of power fantasy (I canāt make a commentary on how the gender inequalities within a culture can be used as justification by outside imperial powers to intervene from the perspective of the colonised if the entire setting is gender-equal), but I think one of the most powerful tools available within the realm of power fantasy is to do onesā best to create characters as theyād be without the baggage of real-life heteronormative patriarchy shaping their design.
Thatās why when Iām writing official CoG titles, I try my best to divest characters of the cultural baggage their gender would saddle them with in our world, and demand that the readers do the same. I present men who can express their fears and their weakness without being mocked for it, and women who can be respected for their authority, their sexual agency, and their competence instead of feared or reviled for it, then I ask the readers to see them not as characters from our world, but from an arguably better one, and request that they immerse themselves in that world by leaving their own preconceptions behind.
Obviously, I donāt always get it right, but I do like to think Iām improving with the help of experience and feedback, and I certainly think itās something worth striving for.
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Yes exactly as you said I did a small essay for legal philosophy in the college. I had to see some nasty weird stuff ā¦ Japanese law accept rape basically the punishment is rare and usual only for tourist. The hentai is almost all full of machism violence against women and any other way around. Trans and non binary are more prevalent than in occident but they are as mistreated like woman more 80% use rape abuse against women and more 50% incest. rape and forced with teen are more searched words in those type of pages.
You are improving a lot In first heroes it was meh the women in there. Also I WANNA TEST SECOND PART ā¦First had a severe lack of bard using and spying.
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I havenāt touched one since I was 16 so been a while. So youāre telling me thereās no game at all of this pornographic category thatās not gear to a female audience heterosexual otherwise? Remember when I was doing ethics paper on pornography that I can count I was trying to find feminist pornography which is a thing that exists but apparently itās very hard to find on the internet. I remember teenager this may sound weird but it always has bothered me out how the men were never as good looking as woman in in my mind I felt the men had to be equally good-looking as the women, and how artificial it all was. Nothingās hotter than people actually genuinely attracted to each other.
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Literally I have never found a Japanese original otome game that has not demeaned women in some way.
H o n e s t l y.
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Gender might impact how readers view a NPC, but I donāt think it will to the degree that a situation is completely improbable. In the Walking Dead Game, I (tried to 
)saved everyone because I was a boss regardless of their gender. Thereās an episode on Malcolm in the Middle where the dad Hal (before his drug days) helped a group of body builders.
If Iām not a boss, I canāt help myself let alone anyone else. But, I would at least listen to someoneās plight regardless of gender.
I only think different gender characters need more umph if the situation drastically changes (aka readers say this character needs improvement), but it would probably be good to apply the changes to both gendered versions (if possible) or that negates the whole point of gender flipping characters.
Like I was less sympathetic to a male Roman gladiator reptilian prison roomy than the female because we really donāt know if itās his baby or not. We have never heard of his mate which means we canāt be certain that theyāre serous or monogamous. The same can be said for the female, but we know itās her egg. We are slaves not an orphanage; we canāt take in every baby that crosses our path, but I donāt play as a male and donāt really care.
You canāt control how readers view a character and as long as the feedback isnāt unanimously bad, the character is probably good.
I bet you were just waiting for the right opportunity to use that visualā¦ 
If I thought there was a pathway forward that wouldnāt require selling out Iād consider itā¦ Itās much easier to preserve your principles when youāre sitting on the sidelines throwing darts however.
While it might well have that effect, the women who buy these stories do so willingly, and they do so in such numbers that romance novels are the hottest selling category in fiction. In particular, the romance category so dominates ebook sales that more romance novels are sold than all other fiction categories combined.
Now these sorts of stories are tailored for a very different audience. Itās pandering of a different sort.
I canāt really comment on Japanese originals, but itās kind of interesting that the English-language otome game market is driven by straight women. Iāve heard some gay men complain that so too is the yaoi game market.
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If I may offer a slightly different take from someone who actually lives hereā¦ Japanese sensibilities are about as different from western ones as you can get. Otome anything are designed with Japanese women as the target audiance and are extremely successful as a genre locally because women buy them. What may be considered offensive to women by western standard is not to most, if not all, Japanese women.
I sure someone will make some kind of statement about how Japanese women are universally oppressed or something. I wonāt dispute that opinion because it is a stupid argument to have, but I will say based on living here since 2009 we have a hell of a lot more to learn from them on building a desirable society then they do from us.
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Guilty as charged. 
Maybe there will be, or maybe the state of the USA by that point will necessitate it, you never know. I donāt see a return for myself to politics anytime soon either, but never say never.
Agreed and its what Iāve been doing for the past couple of years too.
That may well be true, but their justice system, where the prosecution seemingly wields all of the power would be an exception there. 
All true.
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And yet they have only ~74,000 people incarcerated out of a population of 127M and one of the lowest crime rates on the planetā¦
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Do you mean R18 rated games or just normal otome games? I play the latter part and while a lot of games throw in the Yandere who drugs the protagonist (most often through a kiss, brr) there are a couple of games that avoid that, which is very nice. That being said sometimes the Yandere routes are interesting for the stupidity of the protagonist alone.
What I find really interesting is that Toma, a character from Amnesia who puts the protagonist in a cage (out of tru wuv because thatās how those Japanese stories roll after all) is absolutely loved by the Japanese fanbase. Meanwhile the English fandom was freaked out by him and preferred the characters that were mostly unpopular in the Japanese fandom.
I think in the end it isnāt much different from our clichĆ©s in western media, they just happen to be different tropes. Japan has the manically in love Yandere, the Shut-In who just needs to be shown what the outside world is like, the Ice Prince(ss) who insults the protagonist until they can thaw their cold heart and so on. We have guys like Kratos from God of War who gets all the ladies and murders almost everyone in gruesome ways and lady killers like Mr. Grey from 50 Shades, as well as the mysterious, glittering Edward Cullens who just casually watch their Love Interest creepily while they sleep. We also have Anders aka āI just casually blow up the chantry lolā.
I think the difference lies in the fact that Japanese media hypes and embraces those stereotypes as the over-the-top things that they are while Western media downplays all of those creepy aspects to make it seem completely normal.
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How does Japan pull off such a low crime rate Iām hear the countryās overall is very clean.
I have no idea, but Iām trying to learn.
R18.
I totally agree with you though! Good post OP.
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At the cost of the death penalty and wrongful prosecutions going mostly unresolved, even when discovered.
I guess it is values dissonance but for a system with so few prisoners and a 99.8% conviction rate an estimated 10% of all convictions being wrongful or at least tainted is far too high.
That coupled with the trend towards decreased community policing, which is what the Japanese justice system owes its track record to and increasing police militarisationā¦
Of course Iām a criminal defense attorney so that no doubt informs my view a fair bit too and letās say that I donāt envy my Japanese colleagues for whom failure seems to be the only option.
Oh and some of the most brutal prisons on earth, just like the US, except that in Japan sadism is a requisite to be a prison guard and they do most of the brutalization themselves, whereas the US (and to a lesser degree many countries in Europe, including ourselves) like to farm that out to prison gangs and organised crime.
Low immigration rates, comparatively little racial, ethnic and cultural tensions and a history of community policing are the foremost pillars of that I believe.
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Thanks man! Couldnāt have illustrated by point better if I triedā¦
Well the golden rule in any country is to try to avoid contact with the justice system, itās a necessary evil at best.
My teachers in the college talked crap about Japanese systemā¦ (Japanese civil code is a rip off of classical German one) The defense of presume guilty people is a joke same thing with the people with murder or long term sentences and the opportunity of rehabilitation is nule. At least that was they say.
Japanese culture is different from ours. Yes, and? That doesnāt mean that we canāt say how terrible their concept about women trans and forced is. Itās like say I canāt critize the mutilation of female genitals in Africa because Itās other culture ā¦ It is popular there. that one thing be popular DOESNāT MAKE IT RIGHT . HELL INQUISITION execution parties was very popular in Spanish antiec regimeā¦ That doesnāt mean it was a good thing.
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