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Doki Doki Literature Club Redesign Controversy as a «mise en abyme» of Certain Culture War Issues
I saw a small-scale controversy on Tik-tok (ugggggh, I know right?) recently. First let me give the background. Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is a knock-off visual novel, in the same way that California Champagne is a knock off of Champagne. Visual novels are the video game version of anime and manga and as a consequence, they can only be produced in the Japan region of Asia. They are not really video games, but more like something in between a manga and an anime delivered in .exe format on a computer. The only dynamic element they have is a tradition of branching choices, which anime and manga cannot do.
Anyway, it is not that important that DDLC is a knockoff, except that it provides some background for the type of people who like it. The art of this knockoff is quite faithful to the real deal, but the story is not. I have never played it and am not planning on it, because I am a snob, but from what I have gathered, it's like the anime girl version of Depression Quest. It also features a lot of annoying deconstructive quotes like, «these girls are like if you took all of the traits that make someone human and just took the cute bits» said by the player character in the middle of it. Quite rude for some foreigners to do, no? Kind of like making something in California called Champagne but you somehow criticize the concept of using Chardonnay grapes and making it have gas in it while you're at it, while taking the alcohol out of it for tee-totaling Americans. Almost like it's a product of hatred for the original thing.
Well, it will turn out that you will of course get a lot of fans that hate the fact that it comes in a wine bottle. The wine bottle of DDLC is that the characters look like cartoon, moe, teenage anime girls. They have round faces, big eyes, cute mannerisms, and wear bows and and school uniforms for most of the VN, as is customary.
Here are some examples of official art from the game.
Now, what if they were designed to look like real girls? Obviously they would look like this, right (edit: this is one of the original redesign posts)? Well no, because they obviously look like cross dressing men here. The fact that those redesigns look like men is now being denied by real girls who look nothing like those men.
I can only describe this as gas-lighting. And it perfectly parallels the way gender discourse from the left happens in the broader culture war. Transgenderism of course is the biggest gas-light of them all, but feminism broadly is filled with some of the most bald-faced untruths of any political ideology. Many feminists believe women aren't mentally different from men, and can beat men in fights, for example. On the trans issue, we are supposed to believe that people can be born the wrong sex, that sex doesn't exist, that there is, in a meaningful sense, more than two sexes, and that sex changing operations are good for people. To me, these claims are about as credible as the claim that those redesigns look at all like 16 year old girls with two X chromosomes and not cross-dressing men. It is hard for me to understand how blind or dishonest one must be to really make those claims.
To add to the debating about whether Western visual novels are actually visual novels, or if they have to be Japanese...
Trends for video game genres are largely driven by technical limitations, not just by creativity, and for the purpose of technical limitations, VNs count among this. Japan's domestic PC market in the 80s and 90s was dominated by the domestic PC-98. These systems were designed with rendering Japanese text in mind, and because of that, required much higher resolution displays than comparable Western computers. However, their actual processing performance was no better. Turns out this is the exact combination that leads to Visual Novels, which are well-placed to take advantage of the combination of big displays and comparatively weak processing power by focusing on exquisitely detailed, static sprite art.
Western developers skipped this stage of technical limitations and went for WRPGs for their branching-choice games instead. Early ones driven more by gameplay than plot, and once the graphics caught up there was no need to dump the gameplay in favour of artwork by then.
As for whether they were drawing the DDLC characters as crossdressing men, when it comes to anime, crossdressing men are often just drawn identically to women anyway.
A lot of the late 80s / early 90s western games had self limited graphics because the artists were apparently incapable of using custom palettes and the companies had outdated ideas about common graphics hardware. See eg. Sierra games of the late 80s, many of which had basically CGA level graphics even though EGA had been the norm for many years by then and VGA had been fast becoming the de facto standard (and everyone upgraded their PC every 2-4 years, so having to support particularly old computers just wasn't a thing).
Huh? I don't think this is right. Sierra was one of the companies pushing graphical standards in games, from EGA to VGA to FMV cutscenes. Even King's Quest I (their breakout hit) was released in EGA on MS-DOS systems in the mid-80s, so I'm actually not sure what game with "CGA-level graphics" you're referring to.
If they had been, they wouldn't have released multiple games using CGA based graphics engine by the time VGA was available.
That's not EGA. That's a tweaked CGA text mode which is why the resolution is only 160x200 (with a fixed palette) instead of 320x200 and why the graphics look like ass.
King Quest IV was the first KQ to use EGA graphics. By the time KQ V (AFAIK the first sierra game to use VGA) was released the graphics could have looked like this on a run of the mill new 286 PC (without animation obviously). I should know because the only reason our first PC (bought by my single mother in 1990, so far from being high end) couldn't handle 640x480x256 mode was that the particular Triden 8900 chipset had a hw bug that made it require a multisync monitor.
By 1988 common PC tech (VGA) allowed up to 320x400x256 resolution (or 640x480x16) - not that almost any game took advantage of it (I remember Scorched Earth did in 91-92 and that was written by a lone hobbyist). It took forever for games to switch to using 640x480x256 resolution with Warcraft 2 being one of the first (1995).
You can see similar stagnation on the sound side where almost every game was composed by people sitting in their ivory tower studios for hardware that almost nobody had (Roland MT-32 & later General MIDI) and then degraded with anemic results on the hardware people actually used (Soundblaster). On those rare occasions the game devs and composers had a clue, the results were legendary (the second originally composed for amiga but the only difference is in how grungy the sound quality is).
Ps. If we want to get technical, this level of graphics were strictly speaking possible on 1983 PC hardware (I recommend muting the video, it sounds like ass). Compared to that Kings Quest 1 graphics look like something a first grader might draw. What was that about "pushing graphical standards"?
From the Wikipedia page for King's Quest I:
Not to mention that the screenshots you linked are distinctly labeled CGA and EGA (and include the comment "Very impressive graphics for its time")...
And VGA was absolutely not common in 1988 (it wasn't even invented until 1987, and it certainly took longer than one year to become highly adopted). The first VGA game I ever played was The Secret of Monkey Island, which was released in 1990. Wing Commander and King's Quest V, other major VGA releases, were also in late 1990. It's insane that you're linking to a screenshot of a 1998 game (when friggin' Pentiums were already obsolete) as an example of "what was possible" on a 286. You also can't compare even the contemporary demoscene (let alone modern retro demos) to game graphics of the time - it wasn't until Id Software's era that games started to catch up technically. Note that this had nothing to do with artists being "incapable of using custom palettes".
I'm guessing you're younger than me and didn't grow up in this era, which is why you're muddling the timeline so badly...? It was a different world. What was technically possible had little to do with what games actually looked like. (Note that game logic was also a significant part of the CPU's load, cutting into anything you could do with graphics.) During my childhood, Sierra games were the best looking games I ever had access to. If you want to argue this further, please give even one example of a contemporary game that looked better.
(Can't comment on the sound side. I was not an audiophile.)
If you look at them, the EGA image uses the same low resolution blocky graphics as the CGA, just with a different palette (same as in the Tandy version I believe). That limitation was present throughout all Sierra games made with their AGI interpreter until they finally moved to actual EGA graphics with SCI in Kings Quest IV. Of course even those were much lower resolution than what EGA was capable of.
It was common enough that not only were there multiple super VGA adapters on the market but that the industry recognized the need to standardize them in late 1988. Hells, there was even a ”laptop” with vga by 1988 (My mom used to take it home from work occasionally on weekends, so that was my personal hands-on introduction to PC and programming - in addition to playing games at friends’). And besides, we're talking about "pushing graphical standards in games".
If Sierra had actually pushed graphical standards (as opposed to persistently catering to the lowest common denominator), by 1988 the games could have looked like the second and third images here. First is original low res game graphics, 2nd is how it could have looked on VGA, 3rd is how that could have been displayed on EGA without requiring any additional storage and the 4th is Nano Banana reimagining of the original that was used to produce 2nd and 3rd images by downscaling to 640x350 and dithering to 16 color images with a fixed palette (not even optimized per screen) - all images upscaled to 1280x800 for ease of comparison and avoiding aspect ratio problems. In fact the games could have looked like the 3rd image by 1985 as far as the hardware was concerned (EGA was released in late 84).
Not only did I grow up in that era but by 1991 I was writing VGA graphics code, so I was familiar with what the hardware had been capable of with reasonable effort since the introduction of VGA (at least for paid developers who had actual budget to buy hw documentation books etc). Obviously I wasn't writing anything professional level, but did know enough to use the magic spells
mov ax, 13h; int 10handxor ax, ax; mov dx, 3c8h; out dx, al; inc dx; rep outsb(If you know you know and if you don't you may not be qualified to judge the topic in the first place).Sure, for an action game. For adventure games like the ones Sierra made? Not even remotely because they essentially had no running logic until you typed something in the parser or changed screens.
Defender of the Crown from 1987. Note the lack of fugly blockiness.
Falcon, also from 1987. Not that the graphics are pretty as such but at least they aren't a horrible blockfest.
For VGA graphics, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade from 1989 - over a year before Kings Quest V.
A-10 Tank Killer, also from 1989.
But like I said earlier, "A lot of the late 80s / early 90s western games had self limited graphics because the artists were apparently incapable of using custom palettes and the companies had outdated ideas about common graphics hardware." The problems were industry wide and it took until the mid 90s before parts of the industry started really pushing the envelope, Doom being one of the early examples.
Oh, believe me, I very much know, and your elitism is hilariously cringe. "I coded in mode 13h, you ignorant plebes wouldn't understand what good graphics are."
Going to ignore your technobabble (though the screenshots are fun), because it's irrelevant if there were no actual games being produced looking like that. Thanks for at least moving on to some examples, which (of course) look nothing like the first half of your post. I'll give you Defender of the Crown (though you picked a static screenshot - the action screenshots don't look that good), which does outclass anything Sierra had until KQ4. Falcon and A-10 Tank Killer? Meh. As for Lucasfilm/Lucasarts, I agree wholeheartedly. They were also a company that was pushing graphics standards in games - I did mention Monkey Island, after all, and I sadly missed out on Indiana Jones and Loom. Of course, when Sierra caught up, it also produced absolutely gorgeous games like Gabriel Knight and King's Quest VI.
So I'm genuinely putting some effort in here, trying to parse through your tech snobbery and find some interpretation that matches the reality I experienced. I think your point is that the games industry as a whole wasn't using graphics hardware to its absolute fullest in the same way that the demoscene would (a few years later). And I can agree with that! It's pretty amazing what you can get old tech to do with modern knowledge (and no need to attach it to a playable game); hell, there are C64 demos that blow my mind.
It doesn't change that Sierra was at the forefront of graphics in the games industry, and you're absolutely wrong that it's because the artists were stupid and lazy. Tools didn't exist, market pressures did. Art, design, and playability (and being able to support what you sneeringly called "the lowest common denominator") mattered more than raw graphics (this was the era when the underpowered NES was dominant, after all). Sorry, but if you were there in the 1980s you wouldn't have upended the industry with your brilliance, any more than you would have been a king in the 1300s. It was a different world and you're not smarter than everybody who was living in it. Even if you did code in assembly (gasp)!
I'm not nearly as versed in the technical side as you, but my impression from reading this blog is that you're sort of both right? It's just that the 1980s were such a rapid time for PC tech development that it really depends on which particular year you look at. At the very start, in 1980, Sierra made a splash simply by having graphics at all, when there weren't a lot of computer games for sale on the Apple II, and the few that existed were either text adventures (still limited even in how much text they could have) or something like a port of breakout with very limited graphics. You could do better with arcade cabinets or video game consoles, of course, but those were specialized machines, not a general purpose PC. In that world, the graphics of [early Sierra]](https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/the-wizard-and-the-princess-part-1/) really stood out, and it took some skilled hacking from Ken Williams to make it work.
But then Sierra turned into a real company, with pressure to steadily release new games, so they stopped trying to push the edge in graphics and just churned out varients of more or less the same game, using their tried and true EGA-based engine that the made for the first King's Quest in 1984. Which looked nice enough when it first came out, but quickly aged, so their main claim was being easy enough to work with that non-hackers could make games, and they could sell to a wide audience.
But then at some point that formula stopped working, and they had to really double down again on graphics with their VGA games in the early 90s. Which weren't exactly a huge technical breakthough- the tech already existed to support it, and would have been even better on the Amiga- but they did a great job of just hiring skilled artists to make the pixel art look amazing, even if it wasn't super high tech. So then they got a new lease on life as a company making relatively simple, easy, family-friendly games which looked gorgeous but were also easy to run on less expensive computers.
Would you agree with that summary of the timeline?
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Do you mean this in a literal linguistic way, as in if it doesn't come in Japan it doesn't technically count as a "visual novel" even if it's identical in every way, as in the Champagne example? Because this is entirely false. Neither "visual" nor "novel" are Japanese words. We don't have an equivalent word in English because that's what these are.
Or do you mean this in a less literal but more meaningful way, as in only the Japanese have the cultural competence to actually make one of these any good. Because I would mostly agree with that, I don't think I've ever seen a decent visual novel come from anywhere other than Japan even if hypothetically one could.
Warning: extremely pretentious weeb discussion below.
Personally, I would argue that they are different in the first way; in my view, the difference between a "visual novel" in the Western and Japanese sense is a semantic shift, in the same way that " マンション / mansion" in Japanese means a small apartment, but "mansion" in English means a large free-standing house, with connotations of land and status.
In the Western context, visual novels are really just considered cheap porn, and even when Western indies try to surpass this definition, it's much like trying to build a bigger apartment to try and re-create a mansion (in the English sense). Apartments are great and all (as many Western indie games are pretty great), but fundamentally they're just contained in different categories.
In contrast, there is a Japanese otaku subculture where visual novels are considered a serious artform, and as a result there are real auteurs, who would have been acclaimed authors of high society in another life, who end up in a position of writing high-budget erotic games (although again, "エロゲー / erotic games" is a bit of a semantic shift, the difference between Hot Singles In Your Area and Lolita).
For example, I would consider White Album 2, Ore-tachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai and Albatross Koukairoku (amongst others) to be legitimate works of literary art that equal or surpass much of the actual literary canon; there's frankly no Western "visual novel" that would even come close in my estimation.
I agree with your object level criticisms about how Westerners have approached this problem, but would categorize all of that under the second way. If a certain culture or group of people publish a bunch of smut novels and can't figure out how to write a decent novel they're still "novels", just not very good ones. If they start filming and publishing porn films, they're still "films". It's the same type of media, even if it's only one specific genre within that media. Visual novel is a form of media, and it's trivial to make something that's in the media. It's highly nontrivial to make one that's good. A mansion is a type of house. A building is a structure which can contain many different types and serve many different purposes. I argue that the word "visual novel" is more akin to "building", and the West can make those. You don't look at a log cabin and say "it's not a building because it's smaller than this mansion". They're not the same, they're not really in the same ballpark in terms of quality. But in a literal and linguistic way they are still the same category of object.
Yeah I think we're 99% on the same page here, that the Japanese are building mansions (of varying quality of course, most "authentic" Japanese visual novels are still awful, as most of everything is awful) while Westerners are only constructing a bunch of log cabins (apart from Katawa Shoujo as someone mentioned downthread, which is structurally identical to a Japanese mansion except in language).
I would say the difference between your viewpoint and mine is that I think to further torture this metaphor, that Westeners view the definition of "building" as identical to the definition of "log cabin" and cannot imagine a building to be like anything else that isn't a log cabin. DDLC broke fairly hard out of containment, and while Salvato himself is pretty tapped into Japanese VN culture, normie reception to DDLC was generally along the lines of "this is the only good visual novel, how did he do it?", which isn't helped by how the game is framed, from the normie perspective at least, as a structural deconstruction of every other visual novel being a cheap dating sim.
In Japan, while obviously still extremely niche relative to broader society, the conception of the building as something greater than a log cabin actually exists, and by extension the idea of the visual novel as an actual artform actually exists. Typing this out it sounds extremely pretentious, but I think this conception of "the building as greater than the log cabin" purely exists only amongst the Japanese and highly Japanese-influenced people, and hence it wouldn't really be wrong to claim that it's different in a real, linguistic way.
I don't think this is quite right. Because obviously a significant fraction of westerners have played Japanese visual novels and are aware of what can be done. And while this is not the normie, even the normie anime-viewer, neither are the people making western visual novels. The average normie does not write their own visual novel. And when someone who clearly does know and care about visual novels makes one, like DDLC, it's still not a full length visual novel. Not because they don't know or care, but because they can't.
The real issue is infrastructure. The big fancy good mansion visual novels in Japan cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, involve many high quality writers, artists, and voice actors. Anyone in the West who imagines a full length real visual novel cannot get the funding to make it, and cannot find/hire voice actors who would both be willing to work on the project, and good enough to do it well. There ARE no Western equivalents to Rie Kugimiya, Tomokazu Sugita, or Mamoru Miyano.
It's not merely an issue of imagination. Anyone can imagine things. It's the technology and infrastructure required to take that imagination and turn it into reality. And I suppose in some sense this is downstream of culture and imagination. The majority of Western audience imagine and ask for log cabins, so none of the investors or talents try to create this infrastructure. And if some rich visionary made an expensive AAA visual novel it probably wouldn't sell enough to recoup its costs, so the investors aren't wrong. But it's more complicated than simply "no one can imagine anything better". We can clearly see the better things, which is how you and I are talking about them right now. But even the most skilled and creative architect can't go out into the woods with nothing more than a rusty hatchet and make themselves a mansion. Individual people with ideas can only make indie games.
While I agree with you that budget is certainly a factor, I think budget alone kind of overstates the case that you're trying to make.
Two of the most influential visual novels in the genre, Tsukihime and Higurashi, were both literally created by a couple dudes in a basement each, and while certainly not gold-plated 6-figure mansion experiences, still vastly outstrip the scope, ambition and quality of any Western visual novel I'm aware of. Maybe they're kinda shabby mansions, but they're clearly larger and of different provenance to the log cabins.
Visual novels are like, the cheapest medium out there to create behind literal novels; while you certainly need budget for the best graphics and voice actors, you can get very far by just having a good writer, a good artist and a good composer.
While I agree that there's no, say, Western Clannad because of budgetary reasons, I think it's much more a deficiency of vision (and frankly, skill, because all the competent people do something respectable instead) that is why no serious Western competitor to something like Tsukihime or Higurashi exists.
Ahem. The OG Clannad might disagree about that.
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I usually find Western erotic games to be superior to Japanese h-games, even apart from the bother of setting up a Japanese locale emulator to get the damn game to run. But that may just be because I don't like ugly bastards. I certainly prefer anime-style graphics to something like Daz 3D, but in the age of Koikatsu Party and Pony Diffusion any Western dev can make those.
The obvious answer is of course to combine western player characters and Japanese love interests.
Edit: I present Exhibit A ("1girl" anime style) and Exhibit B (from Summertime Saga, an apparently popular western erotic game). Obviously somewhat NSFW. I realize that according to the internets (or at least many such western game creators) men are obligated to prefer HHH-size boobies but, at the risk of coming off as a deviant, I'm going to have to go with Exhibit A (even though it was created in 30 seconds using an ancient AI SD 1.5 finetune).
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This is the opinion that matters on this one. If anyone else disagrees I honestly dont care
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If you're just comparing quick cheap goonslop and/or small indie projects, then sure both of them can make some passable stuff. But if we look at proper visual "novels", masterpieces like Grisaia no Kajitsu, G Senjou no Maou, or Steins Gate, there just is nothing in the West even remotely comparable. The West does not have a sufficiently large audience, nor a sufficiently talented voice acting scene, nor the level of culture to put forth the kind effort and budget required to make a proper visual novel.
Um, I haven't played G-Senjou no Maou, but I've played the other two and I wouldn't describe them as "masterpieces". I'd describe them as "decent VNs with AAA production values" (well, Steins;Gate and Kajitsu; Meikyuu and Rakuen I'd describe as "AAA sequelitis").
(Kajitsu's way too long for its plot and a bit cookie-cutter; Steins;Gate has an interesting premise and then hamfistedly declares that 90% of the interestingness is arbitrarily denied by "convergence" and mostly does romantic misery porn instead. Chaos;Head's (a lot) less polished, but it delivers on much more of its premise than Steins;Gate.)
All of your criticisms are directionally true, I just think the quality of the games is high enough to make up for this (with the exception of Meikyuu which... meh, they could have done better). Maybe they just uniquely appealed to me and my sense of humor. I laughed throughout the entire (quite lengthy) common route in Kajitsu and would gladly have played more (which is why I've replayed it two more times over the years). The character routes, especially the flashbacks, can be a bit of a slog but are still quite good. Likewise, I think Steins;Gate is peak when it is making jokes and being hilarious, while the sad drama stuff does drag on a bit. Overall though, I think they needed the sadder slower parts to tell a meaningful story, and they did, and nothing the West has ever made is even slightly close.
...Hmm.
So, I find slice-of-life comedy completely useless (LCD sense of humour =/= mine, probably aspie-related). What I was saying was too long about Kajitsu was the common route, which has a pretty-terrible word-count-to-plot ratio; I liked some of the heroine routes (mostly Sachi and Michiru; Amane and Makina routes should have been combined, and Yumiko route is bleh).
I'm fine with romantic dramas (the two VNs I've ever rated 10/10 are School Days and Totono, and Saya no Uta's 9/10), but Steins;Gate pulls the same "blow up your relationship or the world ends, lol" trick four times (in lieu of any kind of creative solution, because "convergence"), which is why I called it misery porn.
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What about Slay the Princess or the Coffin of Andy and Leyley? They're both overwhelmingly positive on Steam, comparable to Steins Gate.
I don't generally do spooky horror stuff, so haven't played either of them. That said, they appear to still be small scale indie games with stylized but clearly budget art styles, little to no voice acting, and about 4 hours of content each. They are small indie games. Their target audiences apparently like them for what they are, but they are not what I'm talking about. Stein's Gate is about 30 hours and Grisaia no Kajitsu is about 60 if you play all routes. (And both have sequels with even more content, albeit slightly less amazing) These are big meaty stories with intricate details, whole casts of characters, recurring jokes, themes. They develop characters and make you feel for them. They go into backstories. They have slice of life and action and drama. They do everything because they are not constrained by the limitations of a 90 minute cinema timer or the indie creator's non-existent budget.
They are to full visual novels what Five Nights and Freddy's is to Elden Ring. They're different things which cater to different target audiences (with some overlap). But there's a difference in scale and ambition which (in visual novels) the West can't realistically match.
OK, slay the princess was short. But it was voiced and interesting. As for Coffin, I watched a streamer play through it and do voices for it and it was a pretty gripping, intense experience. There is a lot going on beyond 'incest haha'. There are themes, developed characters, intricate details for both.
Most of the reviewers had 10-20 hours.
Furthermore, the quality of a visual novel or any piece of literature is not decided by size. Otherwise Chinese webnovel bros would be the undisputed masters of writing. Visual novels don't need flashy graphics or voice acting to be excellent, the primary thing is the writing and all else is a cherry on top.
The test of quality should be in its review score. Anything overwhelmingly positive on steam has a perfectly good claim to high quality for its genre.
Japan is not more cultured than the West. Anything Japan can do, the West can also do and vis versa. They're just more into visual novel type games, less into shooters or grand strategy. They could make a first rate shooter or 4X game, they just choose not to. Just because a Western audience might generally prefer more gameplay (putting it up from visual novel to 'story rich') or less gameplay (novel, cartoon) it doesn't mean there's some deficiency in the West compared to Japan.
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Slay the Princess is fully voiced, at least as far as I played it (I got pissed off and quit, IIRC).
Which perfect woman was too much?
I got pissed off when I didn't manage to kill her the first time and then I got told "You cannot go further astray" when I tried to do it right the second time.
So IIRC I tracked down the save file, murdered it, killed her properly, got the deliberately-terrible reward, and quit.
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Get this guy a job in western AAA game maker.
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That last link says "fixing this ugly ass art cause they look like men" which sounds like girls are not denying it at all.
She is positioning her real self as the "artwork" being "fixed" by filters, meaning she identifies her real self with the ugly drawings.
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I think the person was being sarcastic.
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Something I noticed being in the Homestuck fandom for a while, during content droughts what seemed like the majority of the new fanart you’d see produced was like this; black butch Rose, trans Jade built like a linebacker, basically everyone brownwashed, visually queered, and made uglier and/or fatter. When big updates would drop, more normal people would come back to the fandom, and you’d see a lot more art that was pretty and actually representative of the characters. I think the people who are still making fan content for a more obscure piece of media that hasn’t seen updates in years are more likely to be weird, deep into queer subcultures, or have an axe to grind with representation.
It can get annoying, especially in the modern media environment where Twitter and other social media collapses the distance between creators and fans. Relatively small groups of very motivated people can exert surprising amounts of influence on creators these days, pushing for their preferred (queer) ships to be made canon. In the case of Homestuck, the creator would go as far as to reboot the whole story and make gay everyone who wasn’t gay yet besides John. See Korra and RWBY for other, less extreme examples.
It has made me much less tolerant overall, seeing how quickly fandoms get overtaken and everything has to be made gayer to accommodate them. I don’t mind LGBT people being represented in theory, but as a straight person I don’t get any enjoyment out of reading about such relationships, and representation seems increasingly zero-sum when a property giving some gay representation inevitably leads to them demanding more and more.
Viciously hates both the author and the other parts of the fandom and has done so for more than a decade. To be fair Andrew Hussie also hates the entire fandom intern and has not been shy in expressing this.
That was some kind of patient zero shit for tumblerism and reddit nonsense. I'm still wondering if the whole thing was a psy-op.
You have to press the Enter key twice in order to leave behind the blockquote.
Ah dang it. Thanks. You know you're getting old when you get filtered by reddit's markdown, specifically something which you already know how it works.
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Weird. I enjoy reading straight relationships just fine. Just not when they're bad and shoehorned in and superfluous to the plot, like a lot of Hollywood movie romance subplots.
What you might be seeing is that a lot of gay relationships in fiction are quite low effort, because they're being written cynically as representation slop, or because they're written by people who aren't gay (I would be fucking shit at writing straight romance, I don't know the internal experience of the courtship at all) or because they're being written as a wish fulfilment by the kind of gay authors who didn't have a social life.
Doesn't this describe like 90% of female romance authors?
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The issue is not that the gay relationships I see are not genuine enough (with the solution being to consume even more genuine LGBT media), it is that they come at the cost of things I actually want to read about. Whether it is the main focus or just the spice, I enjoy M/F romance in my media. Gay romance does nothing for me. Possibly it’s just a relatability thing, but I imagine this is why representation is such an important point for activists - most people want to see themselves in their stories. I believe you when you say you enjoy straight relationships, but I still would bet that on the whole, gay people don’t get as much enjoyment out of them as they do homosexual romance. I understand why they’d push for more and more representation, but it doesn’t change that their tastes are adversarial to mine.
Most of the examples I gave came at the explicit cost of a hetero ship that the story had previously pushed, sunk after years of fans aggressively pushing for the gay alternative until it became canon. Yang/Blake in RWBY is a pretty obvious example of this. Homestuck was even more egregious; by the end of the story it seemed like every character not named John Egbert was in a gay romance, or about to be. I would call these changes anything but cynical (the creators probably felt strongly about their inclusion by the time they did it), but they ruined big parts of the story for me nonetheless.
Somewhat related to this subject is something I’ve been wanting to write more about for a while. Non-toxic straight relationships in media where the man takes the role of protector and emotional anchor while the woman is more emotional, soft, delicate, in need of protecting, etc. are a lot harder to find these days. This has been stigmatized heavily from decades of feminist criticism, so writers tend to avoid depicting women that way with men. This type of pairing has not gone away entirely, though - the only time you see it is when the writer makes the man into a woman. Historia and Ymir in AOT, or the relationship between the two researchers in this SCP are the examples that come to mind right now, but if you keep an eye out for it you’ll see what I mean. You can probably find counter examples in anime, obviously, or in Western media if the couple is toxic, breaks up, someone dies, or is otherwise sunk.
To preempt the what does this matter response from other people reading: abandon the reigns of cultural criticism at your own peril. Much of what people believe about the world comes from the media they consume. Fandom culture is upstream of future creators. LGBT people are active and relentless in pushing for what they want, and as a result the media landscape has gotten much, much gayer in the last decade. Your family, friends, children, coworkers, etc. will all be influenced by media to some degree, so it’s something to take seriously.
The solution is that we shame and mock people who write bad, shoehorned in romances. None of us should have to read bad content.
I never really understood this. I don't need my heroes to be proxies for me. I appreciate good characters for their own sake.
I don't like instances of fandoms pressing things on authors, no matter the direction. Every author should just ignore their fandom and do what they were going to in the first place. Any time I detect that a decision was made in response to fan pressure, I hate it. Romance or no.
Same! If I wanted to read about someone like me, I'd just go experience life directly. I turn to fiction because I'm looking for something not like my experience.
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Or in other words, you want an actual romance that makes sense, not a religious screed about how much the author loves LGBTesus.
Christian media has the same problem; ironically, by writing something competent it also tends to cease being explicitly Christian media ("Lord of the Rings is evil because it has witchcraft") even if it was written with that exact intent (again, LoTR being a blatant example of that).
The most prominent Homestuck alumni has arguably done exactly this in his games; as despite what the LGBTesus-worshippers will claim "LGBT themes" in the game are completely-to-almost-completely absent (so no "I'm So Oppressed" scenes for the fandom to get off on, though this reaction is baited a couple of times) despite the fact one such relationship is prominent in the story and the main character is of indeterminate sex (it makes thematic sense for them to be a 'they'). One does notice that it may arguably be creeping into certain areas, but you have to go digging for it, it's played for laughs (and remembering that ghost writers carry their religion with them in a way this author does not), and there's a roughly equal amount of casual blasphemy if you're paying attention.
That's just called being selfish, though. I get that an explicit pillar of that religion is that these people get to be that way because Muh Oppression, but as always it remains the case that they're not making representation better, they're just
enshittifyingmaking fiction worse.You're being pretty vague here. I assume you're taking about Toby Fox's games? Can you get more specific about what you see as "casual blasphemy" and LGBT themes "played for laughs"?
Sure. In the most recent chapter, we have "only women can give birth [to slam dunks]", the antagonist casually misgendering-as-insult (the fandom is too stupid to realize this, though), and your gender identity owes me 5 dollars.
The closest thing that you could consider a trans allegory is... a lot more complicated than that. Her Undertale counterpart is kind of like that as well (she is yet another reference to this game). Most of that conflict is resolved in a way not comprehensible to LGBTesus-followers; it's a lot more prosocial 'coming to terms with oneself' than the 'fuck everyone else, I'm an X now'. It's actually something common to Japanese media covering this trope (basically, they don't make it your problem). Kodaka in particular has done it a couple times.
Otherwise, though, the main romance is a lesbian one, but this isn't treated as noteworthy in basically any way. (It's possible to read it that way, but I don't think that's what he means.) There's also a male character that gets catfished; the drama there is, well, that he got catfished, not that it's a guy on the other end.
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I don't know, I don't get particular enjoyment out of straight or gay relationships, most media I prefer isn't really improved by relationships though. Stories well told in my opinion strip out most things that aren't critical and romantic relationships are either very critical to the story or should be basically minimally addressed imo. And if it's a story where the relationship is critical, which I probably wouldn't want to read in the first place, I'd probably prefer it to be something more relatable like a straight relationship.
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Previous discussion
I feel like this came up in the previous discussion too, but there is the almost uncontrollable null hypothesis that it's still all subtle social conditioning (since it seems that disgust responses towards interracial relations were once similarly common but now I wouldn't be surprised if even a bona fide KKK member would struggle to muster visceral disgust at a WM*F couple making out). Of course if true this is a boon to the progressive case for deep social engineering.
Why would social conditioning be the null hypothesis?
Well, a wordcel beloved of many here once quipped that the sovereign determines the null hypothesis, and the current sovereign surely is not on the side of aversion to homosexuality being natural or inevitable.
More prosaically, if what you are seeking to prove is that homosexuality is unnatural, then the outcome that gut responses are not against it due to nature is a null result.
Not nature is not the same as socially conditioned though. Theres other options.
Not to mention I don't think you can socially condition people into finding things gross, well besides on an individual basis like a clockwork orange but that wouldn't scale. Disgust reactions seem very visceral and deep seated.
I can't, society at large surely can. Apart from the examples that already came up, there are the food cases of raw fish, animal meat, insects, milk and a variety of fermented products, of which I'd wager the majority of humans on the planet experiences disgust reactions to at least one of. How does your model of disgust reactions as something natural explain that?
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There's a conflict within the left between the faction that believes that beauty and art is acceptable, as long as it promotes the correct slogans, and the faction that glorifies the grotesque and believes that beauty is intrinsically linked with fascism.
This ain't no trans conflict. It's a conflict between these factions.
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You've been banned once for being egregiously obnoxious and this, if anything, is more obnoxious.
What is the content here? Basically "Look at these ugly trans girls" in some niche media nobody else cares about.
I know, not literally "nobody." (Yes, I am in fact familiar with
light novels[ETA:visual novels, those too] and probably many other people here are as well.) But this is still not anything of significance. It's somebody redrawing some anime characters as trans, and we should care why? Because you don't like trans? Because you want a disgust reaction?And I specifically warned you previously that "some rando on the Internet did a thing and I want to rant about it" is not worth starting a thread.
This is purely waging the culture war. What is "beliefs I don't like are stupid and bad" offering to discuss. Agree/disagree? And the feminism rant was a complete tangent from the main rant, which was "Trans bad." "Trans bad" because... someone redrew moe anime girls to look ugly.
You've run up a number of tempbans, your discourse in general is low quality dragged-in-from-some-Internet-rathole bullshit like this for you to rant about Things You Don't Like, and from a less obnoxious poster I'd just say "Knock it off" but you're already a ban evader we gave a long leash to because we dislike pulling the trigger when there is a small hope someone will actually improve this incarnation.
You're banned for a month. I should probably just make it permanent because almost certainly you will come back and do more of this and make us pull the final trigger in short order, or else you'll just roll a new account. In the extremely small likelihood that you actually care to modify your behavior and participate in a more meaningful way, know that the purpose of the Motte is not just to dump rants about things you don't like and rail about how much you hate your enemies. A disturbingly large number of posters have trouble accepting that, but few go on such a speed-run of shitting the place up every time they start a thread.
Besides the point but it seems that the redraw wasn't intended to be trans but rather "more realistic" which I suppose is more indicative of the artists reality then anything. Or perhaps she's doing that typical artist thing where they declare their own personal aesthetic preferences as scientific or realistic or whatever word will make their preferences sound objectively correct. I have some creative hobbies and meeting these kinds of people in them is never a pleasant experience.
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The idea that DDLC is niche media that nobody cares about is really bizarre.
This is equivalent to having someone post about Star Wars and you say 'I've heard of Star Trek but Star Wars? Yeah, you can google it up, but there's absolutely no reason to post about such a niche property. Banned for a month!'
He was not banned for posting about niche media.
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I think OP's post is a bad post, but I think your take is also a pretty bad strawman. DDLC is the most influential VN made by western devs (soon to be overtaken by TCOAAL) and arguably the most influential in the english speaking audience. When it went viral it firmly penetrated into the normiesphere.
The fansom has shrunk since then but I still think this incident is quite an interesting scissor statement that manages to piss off different people for different reasons.
Obviously I think OP is wrong but I have to accept that it's hard to grasp what is truly at the core of this situation.
It is the #1 most popular (as opposed to most liked) OELVN on VNDB, but only by a tiny margin over Katawa Shoujo. Admittedly, it's a biased sample insofar as non-weebs who read DDLC wouldn't tend to visit VNDB.
(For anyone reading this who's confused: Katawa Shoujo is not actually Japanese, despite the Japanese title. It was made by 4chan, and originally in English, though they did translate it into Japanese afterward.)
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Confusing them with visual novels casts some doubt on this assertion.
I do actually know what both of them are, but you are correct, brain produced the wrong token output.
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As someone who is not familiar with this style of art, I'm having a difficult time understanding what here is meant to be sarcastic and what isn't. Would you mind laying out your point a bit more plainly?
I am being plain. The redesigns look like men. Some users pointed that out and redrew the design to look like 3d girls. Then some girls who look nothing like the men started gas lighting saying that they think they look like the men drawings and not like redrawn girl versions.
Thanks for clarifying this. For what it may be worth, when I saw the character renderings, it did not occur to me that there was a trans acceptance angle. The characters looked kinda unattractive and mannish to me but I would have guessed that it was due to the artist being a lousy artist.
That being said, I concede that progressives sometimes push their agenda in deniable ways.
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It's unfortunate that I kinda like women with features that could be described as "handsome" or "boyish." And even I can spot the gaslighting.
I honestly just chalk it up to the original fan artist not being very good at figure drawing. I read enough badly drawn webcomics in the early 2000's to not see much strange in an accidentally "mannish" or "ugly" drawing of a female.
I genuinely feel like this is people making a mountain out of a molehill. Like, do we really need to transvestigate fan art that is in no way associated with the actual game? Someone made some bad art online, and some people apparently like it. You can judge them for their bad taste, but what are we doing here?
That's also what I thought.
For me, it's an interesting idea: That someone is using fan art to push a progressive pro-trans agenda. And to mix metaphors, perhaps the molehill has a slippery slope.
I just do not buy this. We live in the era of Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson. If people want to make progressive reinterpretations of characters they do so, openly and proudly.
There is no way that the fan artist here could have known that if they made slightly mannish images that so many people would go to bat for them, showing off their faces as "evidence" that teenage girls really do look like that.
I just see it as a combination of a bad artist, and teenage girls having low self esteem and body image issues, and accidentally creating the perfect toxoplasma moment.
After I made that comment, I went and looked at the other work of this creator. As an example, it includes illustrations of someone who is clearly a man who is wearing a cutesy little sailor outfit (including a miniskirt). Having had a chance to reflect, I would interpret this as art designed to appeal to those with a fetish for cross-dressing, autogynophilia, etc. That same fetish (in my opinion) drives much of the trans agenda, but given the context I am not ready to conclude that there's any political agenda being pushed by this particular creator.
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Are you certain that the correct response here is anything other than "take a breath, put the phone down, and go outside" ?
It's summer time, get a fishing pole and go do some catch and release.
Not here in Oz, it's not! I'll admit Victorian winter isn't that cold by Euro/US standards, but it's still wet and dark.
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This could apply to any culture war post.
Abandoning the field is a sure way to let your opponents succeed in whatever they're doing. And if you think the culture war is inconsequential, this is a strange place to be posting.
One would hope we aspire to more than to be some internet person's outlet for "look at how stupid this single internet user is".
We were being told it's a single internet user, or just a couple crazy kids on the Internet, for years. It then turned out that, among many potential consequences, expressing a contrary opinion can get you fired. Trying this argument again is just insulting to anyonr whp hasn't spent the last 10 years in a comma.
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2 is basically saying "if you do this you will lose the culture war". Isn't the whole point of the "don't fight the culture war" rule that you are not allowed to act like you are primarily motivated by winning it? So maybe this is a strange place to be posting if you are swayed by that point.
I don't think that's quite right. It's saying 'don't fight the war'. So don't try to drive out your opponents, don't chimp out, don't dox, don't dogpile.
Discussing goals and tactics is fine I think.
You might argue that 'if we don't talk about this, we concede' implies that talking about it is fighting, but that's the syllogism that got us to the point where it's almost impossible to discuss in the first place.
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Not quite. It's a visual novel, but it's a lot more game-side of visual novels (failure modes, bad ends, some basic minigames, a meta bit where using out-of-game contexts matters). I won't pretend it's some great and mechanically deep game, but it's not the schlock that DQ was.
And in terms of story, it's favored among the tumblrite set because it's a metaphor for mental illness, but only one (short-lived ) character is specifically depressed. The rest are more psychotic, and the actual narrative for them is much more externally driven as to why they're going increasingly nuts. Will admit there's a very self-referential deconstructive bit, though it's less gooner or anti-gooner and more Undertale-like as a comment about video games in general.
If you want a plot synopsis, the Random Encounters song covers it in less than five minutes (and is very catchy).
I... didn't play every route (again, not a great game, I'm not in its target audience), but I don't remember seeing that quote, and it'd be a little weird in-context -- especially in the middle of the game, thesurviving girls are definitely not just the cute bits floating around dereferenced.
I'm also not sure those are official updates. DDLC had a big redraw thing (that got some controversy) in the COVID era, and some pretty slop ports, but I'm not seeing any talk on their reddit about anything new coming down or any new hires. I didn't think there was much left for them to do; the paid version already had some goofy 'explained too much about the setting' content thrown in as a 'secret'.
I agree that it's weird art, even by the modern standards (or even old Excel Saga standards).
I'd never seen that. And seeing it now leads down a rabbit hole of different original songs about Doki Doki Literature Club rendered in Minecraft style, at least half a dozen of which have tens of millions of YouTube hits each. Despite the creepiness of the game, there's something super-wholesome about these sorts of inventive fan communities going off and doing their own things, connected by and occasionally going viral on the internet. It's like the Chaotic Good version of the "toaster fucker problem".
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Strange how much pushback you are getting for reporting on a revealing example of distortion. As you have already stated Doki Doki Literature Club is a fake VN, but considered real by its fans, instead of them thinking of it as belonging to the EOVN genre. The piece of media in question is by its fans thought thusly due to them lacking direct knowledge of what it was referencing, something perhaps even its authors did.
Fans of this work are mostly consuming echoes of shadows, parodies of stereotypes they never experienced expressed sincerly. (Some French 20th philosopher probably wrote about this. Also about this specific work, some blogger, but I can't find it right now.) Because they never experienced sincerity, they can't see anything wrong with further parody. If this work is by them indistinguishable from sincere works, it stands to reason they would not perceive the difference between sincere fanart of it, and unitentional parody.
I'm a casual fan of visual novels, and I don't see much point in distinguishing visual novels this way by region of origin, the same way we do with manga vs. comics or anime vs. cartoons. Visual novels largely originated in Japan, so most will be Japanese by default, but I'm not really sure that I would call something like DDLC or works like that 4chan visual novel, Katawa Shoujo, "fake" visual novels. They're just visual novels that weren't made in Japan.
Like, we can discuss them as works of arts by region the way we do with phrases like "French cinema", or "South Indian cinema", but it would be silly to say that French films are "fake" films because the first films were screened in New York City or something.
The comparisons in the original OP to Champagne don't make sense, because I don't think even the Japanese think of "noberugēmu" as a characteristically Japanese art style, even if it is far more popular in Japan than in the West.
I have played several Japanese visual novels, and I appreciated DDLC as a fun little horror parody of the medium.
I don't actually think the existential horror ofMonika's existence as a sentient side character in a video game is nearly as good a horror beat as when the childhood friend commits suicide, and all your saves are deleted, so you can't reload from a previous save to make a different choice . As someone who had learned to play VNs a particular way, make choices, restart when I got a bad ending, the fact that the game took away that option and made you live with the consequences of a story beat was really effective meta storytelling, whether DDLC is a "real" VN or not.
Funny you should mention that...
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You posted all this dumb shit about anime dating games (get control of your life, for god's sake) and didn't mention who did this redesign you're shidding and farding about. It was just, literally, some guy. Why did you waste everyone's time with this? Do you have autism? I don't even care if I get banned anymore.
Weird hill to die on, but ok.
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It's a horror game wearing the costume of a dating game. That's its claim to fame.
No, its claim to fame is that JAST took seven years to translate Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi and has a litigious policy regarding fantranslations, so the inferior DDLC hit the English gaming community first despite coming out four years later. (Admittedly, also that DDLC was free.)
(The time from when JAST C&Ded the fantranslation of Sumaga to releasing it is longer than the entire production cycle of Duke Nukem Forever. How much longer? Well, I dunno, because they still haven't yet, but I think we recently passed the 15-year mark.)
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Obviously this is unimportant. Just don't read if you don't like the subject matter (I don't know what it is about anime that seems to annoy so many non-fans, as if most people here don't waste their time with movies, TV, sports watching, and video games, which are all equivalent). It was just food for thought, it doesn't seem any worse to me than the median thread here in this regard? Don't we have media threads, for example, on the Odyssey movie, or gamergate++, pretty routinely? I skip more than half the threads I'd say because they don't appeal.
I don't think people are singling out anime here. I've played DDLC and enjoyed it.
But most of the other threads on the Motte touching on multimedia products are talking about the actual product itself, which is high budget, has backing by a major corporation, and there is always an opportunity cost where the resources going into these mammoth productions are not going to art that would appeal more to the non-woke or people on the right. There's more justification for them being in the culture war roundup than a "literally, who?" fan artist making bad fan art.
(I say that, even as I also tend to avoid a lot of those kinds of threads on here due to a general lack of interest.)
On one hand, I feel like I properly advertised the post as being about something unimportant and small scale. On the other, I also want to reject the attitude that individuals are categorically unimportant and worthless. The artist is a literally-who, but in the grand scheme of things, so is Blizzard corporation, or whoever. The idea that we must receive some kind of permission from above in the form of enough funding, enough recognition, enough attention, before we think, comment, and care, to me, is wrong. We should not let our minds be beholden to the collective in that way. I think we can produce fruitful thought by observing individuals who are not authorized by the blob to have millions of dollars or millions of eyes on them or dozens of published articles written on them.
I think that the issue is that the more niche you go, the sillier it seems to try and have a big hullabaloo.
To use an example from the other side. A while back feminists were up in arms on Tumblr about this picture, depicting a well-endowed, tan bimbo transforming into a more modestly endowed nerd. They said it was racist, sexist, etc.
But it was just a niche bit of fetish art, made by a niche fetish artist, that had accidentally escaped containment and reached a far larger audience than it was ever intended for. There was no larger political message in it, and the only artistic purpose was to help a small subset of fetishists get off to a debimbofication/nerdification image. I'm not even saying that that is beyond criticism or critique, but almost none of the feminist critique was coming from a well-informed place where anything they said was anything more than initial knee jerk reactions to seeing something they had no context for.
I agree with you, that people should be allowed to comment on, criticize and pay attention to small creators. There's no "you must be this big to ride", but I still think there is a discretion that is good to exercise when dealing with a strange tempest in a teapot.
As far as I can tell, this was not fetish art, and there are normal looking girls on tiktok insisting that they think they look like that. So it's a bit more normie/mainstream than your example, even if it's ultimately inconsequential.
Bit of a "lurk more" moment, I'm afraid!
It's a reversal of a older fetish meme. The original has the nerd pick up the book, turn into the bimbo. Bimbofication. Neither it, nor she, is that deep.
The reversed form ("Nerdification"? "Debimbofication"?) is perhaps making a statement (rah! Rah! Books!), but it's also a remix of the original fetish art consisting of just reversing the order of the frames.
And now there are lots of other remixes too -- they're separate people and dating!
It's true that you're not supposed to get off to either version, exactly, but the remix is 100% fetish art by volume, sssooo.
Edit: I think I have failed at reading comprehension; you didn't mean the (de-)bimbofication comic, but the original post's doki doki redraw. I'll leave my error, but apologize for my illiteracy!
Do you have a link? I've always thought this was the original image. At first I thought you mean "meme" in the original sense of the word, but it seems you had a specific image in mind.
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Japanese Wikipedia indicates that a few gamebook/choose-your-own-adventure manga works have been published.
Ah, good point, I remember some of those as a kid. Not manga, but paper choose your own adventure. But the base rate of branching stories in VNs is >95% I'd say and in manga it's the exception, obviously.
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So tell me if I understand this correctly. The controversy is that a fan artist, in no way affiliated with the original game, made bad Doki Doki Literature fan art where they made the teenage girl characters look mannish?
This truly seems like a tempest in a teapot to me.
Like, whenever I learn about a controversy on any social media site that I'm not on (and that's basically all of them), I always feel like I'm getting news from a parallel world slightly worse than ours. Is this seriously a controversy? Was the fan artist particularly well known or influential before this? Why should literally anyone not involved in the flame war on Tik Tok care one iota about this?
That's why I called a mise en abyme.
The idea is that it reflects greater trends.
The artist in question has about 400,000 followers, so, more than BAP on X.
My limited understand is that Tik Tok followers are different from followers on older sites like Youtube or X/Twitter. I remember hearing some influencer on a podcast or radio show say that Tik Tok follower counts are so inflated that advertisers and brand deals had to adjust in response.
I suspect a lot of Tik Tok followers are bots or fakes, more so than on other sites.
But even so. I just feel like going after a random fan artist feels like such small potatoes for the culture war in general.
Like, what does this battle accomplish in the larger culture war one way or the other? There were always going to be bad artists who made cringey art, and tried to defend it in social justice terms. Why feed the toxoplasma and take up arms in this case? When it's not even the actual video game studio doing the culture war thing, I don't see what anyone is hoping to accomplish here.
I just thought it was funny how people are gas-lighting about the art looking like men. It says something about human nature and the culture war more broadly.
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