SenorArdilla
Member
Rhajat? They're not even being subtle about this. I suppose I'll get over that name decision after the game releases.
Nintendo Removes Controversial Fire Emblem Fates Conversation
- Thread starter Tom Nook Sawyer
- Start date
The Japanese name is also a name scramble of Tharja's Japanese name Sallya.
It reminds me of Draug, which is guard backwards lol
KirbYuuYuu
Member
It reminds me too much of that one song about being Ratchet
DecoReturns
Member
I'll think the characters are more for the fans of awakening then lazy. Would be more appreciated if awakening wasn't the last game released.
SenorArdilla
Member
Awakening saved the franchise though.
There was an anagram name in the Japanese version too, but with a different character. (Tiamo -> Matoi)
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Hopefully not-Cordelia doesn't sound mangled or like a song.
Tharja's and Gaius's reincarnations were anagrams as well.
I've made some guesses in the Community thread ... and they all sound horrible, the other obvious choice would be another shakespearan reference. I kinda like Suiga for Gaius.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
She's a shitty lesbian.
Simbabbad
Member
Actually, I mostly commented on the 2/100 proportion. I admitted openly not being sure about the dialogue issue because I didn't know enough about it, and because your post was well written and indicated it may indeed really be controversial. But as I said, it was removed anyway, and what really annoys me is that an actually correct proportion is seen as "conservative" and a "first step". That is victimisation and entitlement.
Also, I think it's cool an homosexual character you can mate with is a bad guy. He sounds much more interesting than most clichés.
She's a joke character like all the kids are. Going to spoil her a bit heavily here.
She's Inigo from Awakening's daughter, his character traits are he hits on his girls and strikes out all the time despite being a pretty boy, which he does to compensate for his shyness and he likes to dance. She hits on girls but doesn't have the concept of shame (which leads her into pretty much harrassing other characters) and is a horrible dancer. The joke is that she's more successful on macking on girls than her dad, and that she's not even a lesbian.
I'll be honest, I"m kinda glad that she's not a lesbian, because she reinforces a Japanese negative stereotype of homosexuals if she did (oversexed harrasser who will not listen to the word no). She's honestly a really annoying character.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Doesn't her being heterosexual still enforces a negative stereotype? That it's only a phase for teenagers?
Seems pretty clear that she's bisexual. So yeah, it would have been better if there was a female option for her.
The two same sex romance options are overused negative stereotypes and the character this thread was created about is another negative stereotype.
Wanting to be thrown more than a pity bone isn't victimization or entitlement.
Yes.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Double post
She's a really annoying character, it's a shame because her actual design is great.
Valdfellgar
Banned
Uh-- maybe you need to reread his posts.
Simbabbad
Member
Except I'm 100% homosexual:
BTW, the "you're straight so you have no right to speak about this" card is becoming old and very used, and the reverse attitude would rightfully shock a lot of people.
A proportion actually close to real life proportions isn't a "pity bone". What you want is a disproportion, and why not? But complaining that a proportion close to reality is some sort of scandal is, whether you like it or not, victimisation.
Also, I'm happy Niles looks to be a much more interesting character than the cliché I expected. After talking with Steve Youngblood, I admit I don't know enough about Soleil to judge, even though I'm 90% sure the trick to make her marry men is just to broaden her options, gameplay-wise.
And in real life a guy wouldn't be marrying a woman after five conversations. This is a self insert fantasy game with romance options. Everyone should have options.
Broaden her options? Soleil can marry no women in the game. One of her romance options is an androgynous man that she says is good enough because she can pretend that he is a woman.
I'm glad you think Niles is interesting, but that doesn't stop him from being an overused negative stereotype.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Support conversations have never been used to broaden horizons. It's men or nothing. With or without Corrin's interrference.
*flips table* What a mess. Good luck to Treehouse.
Crash Station
Member
Uh, are we getting into unmarked spoiler territory? I'm seeing things that might be twists.
Anime tropes are part of Japanese culture. Not mainstream culture, but all creations are culture, and something prevalent like that would definitely count.
Anime tropes are part of Japanese culture. Not mainstream culture, but all creations are culture, and something prevalent like that would definitely count.
Weltall Zero
Member
Isn't the fact that you have found no moving homosexual romances evidence of the very problem, though? I understand when you say that you don't need the couple onscreen to be the same makeup as your own to feel empathy (and as a straight guy, I did find Brokeback Mountain moving), but not everyone is the same, and many people (straight or gay) simply emphatize more with people closer to their circumstances, and there is nothing wrong with that, it's just how they are (this is a not-so-self evident truth I've come to learn after getting to intimately know people with very low empathy that are otherwise genuinely good people). Having more gay romance stories both helps promote empathy and familiarity from straight people, and as a bonus, gays that have every right to want more stories like these will get them.
You can read the argument above as saying that we're so different that we need to be catered for or that we need movies to help understand "these weird aliens" on the other side of the fence. Or you can read it as "there's never too many works that promote diversity and mutual understanding, let's make more". One example I found quite good in this regard was the recent Netflix series Sense8, which got me interesting into better understanding transgender people after realizing how little I knew about them and how little representation and visibility they get. It's also similarly open about gay couples (there's two just among main characters) which I found refreshing.
tl;dr It's OK for gay people to want stories to cater to you, and it's OK for straight people to want stories that broaden our horizons.
Simbabbad
Member
It's fine to want a gay game, but Nintendo doesn't owe you one. Equality isn't everything to be 50/50, especially when one side (and the market it represents) is actually 3% of the population. Again, I'd happily play a gay Fire Emblem clone, but calling Nintendo "conservative" or even "homophobes" because they don't over-represent homosexuals compared to reality is IMO unfair and misguided (talking about numbers, here).
I mean options in gameplay. I'm 90% sure this powder thing is a plot trick so you can do more out of the character gameplay-wise and "explain" why she can marry this or that man.
And you know, the one major thing that improved the life of homosexuals is actually not related to the fight for gay rights, it's simply the Internet - I know because I started my sexuality before it was mainstream (yes, I'm old). Before then, it was awfully hard to have options, and obviously, in a medieval context, it was basically impossible if you weren't the king or something. Read any XIXth century homosexual novelist like Proust or Gide and they tell the same thing, they all suffered from a lack of options and having to make compromises - even eventually marrying women, not necessarily as a cover-up, but because it was easier to fall in love with a straight woman than find another homosexual man whom you could fall in love and work as a couple. Marital love was tough to find back then simply because of rarity, which explains why homosexuality was then mostly lived as quick sexual intercourses, falling mutually in love was ridiculously unlikely, simply because of statistics. So Soleil's situation makes sense in context.
She can marry a female avatar, can't she?
Weltall Zero
Member
Pancake Mix
Copied someone else's pancake recipe
It's beyond sad how messy FE has gotten. I want to ignore all this bullcrap and enjoy the gameplay which apparently is a step up from Awakening, but I fear it'll feel like walking in a minefield of cringe worthy writing and shameless otaku pandering. And there's nowhere to go, there's no alternative to Fire Emblem.
If you want to go that route - gay and bi aren't interchangeable terms, and there are no asexual characters just like there are no actual gay characters. Accurate statistical representation is not what this game is going for, lol.
If we're going building rosters based on real world statistics, Nintendo is pretty forward thinking for including the tiny minority of people who turn into dragons in their historical sim.
To be fair, I generally expect homosexuals to not be blithely dismissive of homophobic tendency in media
Sadly I am disappointed.
I'm straight though? I have issues with straight people being jackasses about this, but I also have issues with homosexuals doing that. As we have determined.
And now you demonstrate that you literally have no idea what you are talking about.
(I do wonder if you'd have this same attitude if it were an apparently gay man who could then only marry women though)
No, she cannot marry any girls, whatsoever.
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Nope
They could have just written her to not be gay.
Like.
Her character description was not handed down from the heavens on clay tablets
NO
SHE CAN'T
THIS IS LIKE THE ENTIRE ISSUE
Percentage of the population that is bisexual is heavily under-reported.
Pancake Mix
Copied someone else's pancake recipe
It doesn't work that way though. I'm saying it'd be at the back of the minds of heterosexual members of the design team to include any gay options, especially in a less tolerant country like Japan. 2 probably makes sense, though later games might have 1 for each version and gender, sure.
Edit: I get that this isn't what you guys want to hear, but I don't mean anything negative by it whatsoever. Just pointing the elephant in the room out.
It was an observation, not an accusation. They allow same-sex relationships only for the avatar, so nobody (homophobic) might get unexpected pairings in the game.
It might still happen in a dudebro pairing with Nilen, haha.
Be it as it is, there are characters in the game (and the game before) that exhibit interest in the same gender, but the game won't run with it.
Simbabbad
Member
But is it homophobia like some claim, or is it simply because homosexuals are a tiny minority, and there are therefore simply much less stories made about them? And the ones that get made are so careful or militantly advocating something that it's hard to get any sort of genuine identification? Heterosexual romance is IMO universal, anybody can identify to it. Why shouldn't I perfectly empathize with the couple of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
I'm obviously happy there are more and more homosexual characters in movies and TV series, of course, and mostly about those relationships being treated as natural and ordinary. I enjoy the eye candy and it's nice. But what irritates me is saying a lack of over-representation is "conservative" or even "homophobic". I think it's unfair and problematic.
Excuse me while I roll my eyes.
Well, that is completely idiotic.
As someone who doesn't really care about story in games, I can tolerate bland writing - but not cringe worthy ridiculous writing. All these pastebin links I've read are the latter, lol.
I'm just popping into thread because it seems horribly overwhelming, but I've read something that I think explains this.
Supposedly the things about lesbians in Japanese media is not that they're invisible, but that they're depicted as a practice phase that young women eventually grow out of when exposed to real relationships. So you get a lot of media that shows girls in high school being touchy-feely but not so many showing them staying together as adults. So the way that that the folks at Intelligent Systems may have intended us to view the scene may have been that the avatar is trying to help the woman grow out of her immature lesbian phase.
Mind you, I'm just parroting things I've read here. I can't really vouch for it personally. Actually, if there's a video I should probably watch it, maybe it doesn't apply here anyway.
"Class S" (which is what that is called) is definitely a thing in Japan (and other places, but its still a notable theme there) and saying that it plays a part here is probably accurate.
Which just makes this WORSE because Class S and the mentality it fosters is seriously damaging to queer women in particular.
Like, its bizarre how many people in this thread just don't get how bad this is. What would you need to see to explain it? Do you not get how having basically no positive examples of non-straight relationships is hurtful? This game barely manages to have two bisexual characters, and the ONLY non-straight pairing either has is with the main character. Thats IT. Thats so barely above the bare-minimum that it almost shouldn't count.
Also, you can't use "she was written that way" as an excuse for why she's written that way. Its a blatant tautology and utterly irrelevant, because the writers could have written something else
Goddamn this isn't hard people. Could you attempt a little empathy!?
It might not be homophobia (I don't think it is), but Fire Emblem is an ancient series with a ton of characters, and now it has two bi characters. That's -not- statistically accurate at all, so that argument is pretty weak IMHO. And seriously, what percentage of the population are princes? Half-dragons? It's just weird to me to suddenly take into account statistics into this.
People care, there really isn't anything we can do. Us westerners can scream and shout all we want to, but it's up to Japan themselves to make the changes in society.
I knew that. Just used the wrong word... Fixed my original post. Just in case.
Lots of people in this thread don't care though, many don't even try to understand why they should care.