icarus-daedelus said:
Part of the overall schizophrenia of this game is that the story delivery changes pretty radically during Pulse, and by that I mean that in comparison with the rest of the game there are hardly any cutscenes at all. It's a jarring shift, to be sure, probably even more so if you were 'into' the story. And for me, it's not an overall hate of anime that makes me dislike the anime-ish parts of the storyline - I'm mature enough not to hate on an entire medium for whatever reason - it's more that the game takes inspiration from the worst cliches of anime characterization (particularly with Snow and Vanille).
I definitely understand the Snow/Vanille complaints by this point..
One thing about the way people have phrased that argument over the last month, though: People are always saying "they are adhering to an anime cliche".. as if genki girls, shounen heroes and such are some sort of meme that was created out of thin air, and no one actually likes, but they are just some sort of stock TV character that we are doomed to copy over and over again. I think that's kind of a foreign view of it, though I could be wrong. I believe they are making these characters in Japan because they think people (Japanese people, but in their minds just "people") will actually like these characters. They don't go to their drawing boards and say "ok, make a genki girl because that's what we do in anime stories"... it's just that there is a long tradition of cutesy characters in their history, so it probably seems perfectly natural to make characters like that. That's a viable protagonist in the mind of a Japanese fiction creator.
We can label it a terrible cliche after the fact... but I don't think they set out to specifically make characters that adhere to some standard character trope. That's just what they end up designing when you ask them to create a young girl character. We might label it a genki girl. We're especially sensetive to objectifying it as some "type" of character if we aren't actually in the culture which might have seen these characters as normal occurances.
It's like if a Japanese person was talking about Gears of War, and he said "Marcus Fenix is an non-realistic character, because those Americans were trying to make one of those "Macho" characters again. They're trying to copy Hollywood action films which feature the "Macho" style of character."
^ A foreign observer could objectify strong, macho characters as some sort of "type" that Americans are silly enough to keep remaking over and over.... but in reality, this is just what an American will create when you ask him to make a male hero.
Just some musing on that topic. It's not a defense of these anime stereotypes at all... I was just thinking about how this argument was presented to me over and over again by different people who seem to be more familiar with "anime types" than I ever was.
