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Comment on What games have mastered "Both emotional extremes"?

NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Japanese developers tend to excel at this because Eastern culture/media is much more willing to acknowledge emotion and moral ambiguity. The West likes misty eyed men whereas East Asians are all about that former boyband member sobbing. And The West only allows a Bruce Willies level character to beat on an abuser.

A couple days back Aftermath posted an excellent blog on Kamen Rider that kind of exemplifies it aftermath.site/kamen-rider-kuuga-tokusatsu. But the quick summary: There is a meme clip going around of a sentai character beating the ever loving hell out of a monster. And the context is that the hero of that series is a super happy man who loves children who was faced with a villain who murders children in a way that maximizes suffering for everyone around them. So he just completely snaps and crosses every imaginable line while unleashing all of his powers with no wind up or ceremony. And, most importantly, there is no moral hand wringing about how “Yes, he deserved it but what is this doing to you?”. Mother fucker was unquestionably evil and got what was coming to him. And while it does tie into the overall themes of Yusuke being worn down and broken by the weight of the suit, it also acknowledges that… somebody needs to be. Which is a theme common in the Gundams and so forth.

Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.

As for games that pull this off? I’ll contribute Dust: An Elysian Tale. Most of it is happy go lucky as the amnesiac protagonist and his cute and cuddly and obnoxious companion fight against the evil military with some good laughs. But it also touches on the theme of “you can do everything right and still people get hurt” which works REALLY well in the video game space where you are conditioned to believe the golden ending will always be happy and perfect.

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Goodeye8@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think you're just having a blind spot for western shows. Breaking Bad, The Expanse, Game of Thrones, Barry, Mad Men and probably a bunch of others that I can't remember off the top of my head where characters act like people with their own personal motivations and moral compasses. Without spoiling anything in one of the before/mentioned shows one of the main characters literally kills their close friend to protect the fact that they're a shitty human being.

There are also western games that nail the moral gray area. For example New Vegas and Baldurs Gate 3.

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- NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  … I would genuinely love to know what the Barry of video games is. Maybe Spec Ops The Line but that never actually is anything BUT melodramatic and dark which wasn’t the prompt. The Expanse might be a better fit but that was generally a book/show about plot progression over character studies outside of (minimizing spoilers) Everything Around Rescuing Peaches. Which, again, was almost entirely melodrama.
  
  That said, I do think Barry is a spectacular example of the kind of story that can make you laugh… maybe not cry but something approximating that. But if we are going into the kinds of stories that games will never touch then… I give you “literature”.
  
  I’ll disagree with those CRPGs because there are so many gameplay mechanics tied to alignment that it largely undermines things. I would MAYBE suggest Tyranny as a better fit although that has many of the same problems. But I will fully agree that CRPGs are much more willing to explore nuance but, similarly, tend to focus much more on a single emotion. You tend to have an Eder style character who will crack a joke to ease the tension before giving a haunting line like “It’s a good thing you weren’t braver”, but there is a pretty hard shoeing out the clowns moment when it is time to get real.
  
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Aielman15@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.

As opposed to eastern culture/media, where the average shonen protagonist will punch the villain enough to convince them to join the good team? Like, you are oversimplifying so much, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m also a bit confused by your point because you lament western characters only beating evil guys to a pulp, then contrast them to an eastern character doing the same.

If your point is that characters in western media don’t display emotions, there are tons of western movies that do exactly that. You won’t find them in generic action movies, but that’s true for pretty much any media around the globe, including eastern ones.

Rambo (the first one, the only good one) has Stallone crying his heart out at the end of the movie. Stand by me has the characters face their insecurities and inner demons throughout the entire movie. Lord of the Rings, Interstellar, Lawrence of Arabia, Saving Private Ryan, Silence (western movie based on Japanese book, maybe this is cheating?). Automata’s entire point is to challenge toxic masculinity.

I could also mention animated films such as How to train your dragon, Tarzan, Puss in Boots Last Wish, Wall-E, Treasure Planet, Finding Nemo, Wild Robot or Emperor’s new Groove, which all have either human male individuals, or male-coded characters that happen to be animals/robots/aliens.

If your point is that there’s no moral ambiguity in western media, half the above examples still stand. Rambo beat countless (evil) cops, but he’s not seen as a hero for doing so, and he’s a broken man by the end of the movie. Lord of the Rings is choke full of morally ambiguous or conflicted characters, although the most prominent and a fan favourite is Boromir of Gondor. Interstellar has the main character abandon his family to save humanity, and the movie doesn’t explicitly condemn nor praise him for his actions. Saving Private Ryan has the characters conflicted on what to do with a captured german soldier within enemy territory. There’s the entirety of the Goodfather series following an explicitly evil, but charismatic set of characters.

As for videogames, moral ambiguity was the entire point of TLOU2, although many people disliked that one for various reasons. Styx 1 has you play a character which does good for the wrong reasons, and bad for the good ones. Life is Strange 1 and 2 (haven’t played the rest of the series yet) has lots of morally ambiguous characters, often including the characters. A Plague Tale, especially the second one, weights on how violence can ruin a person, even if they are forced to commit it for their loved ones.

I’m just mentioning titles off the top of my head, and I’m probably forgetting a lot which could further my point. Point is, I wholeheartedly refuse this idea of eastern media being the only ones capable of displaying emotions or moral ambiguity.

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- Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  The only real lesson here might be that both Western media as a whole, and the Eastern anime industry, have regressed a lot. Rambo in particular is marked by tragedy with the way sequels warped him into a false image of raw masculinity. Many anime authors have even said as much. But the Eastern gaming scene appears to still have some very dedicated auteurs.
  
  It’s even sort of harmed the feminist movement for Western media to be so simple - often showing women as unemotional, infallible badasses to try to “equal the score”, ultimately just causing people to hate them and even misconstrue women as being the issue with those movies.
  
  But I’m also glad to get more examples of poignant Western media; I felt upset that I could only think of Eastern examples, when I know there are some great ones made more locally.
  
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- NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.
  
  Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.
  
  But you’ll also note that the example I brought to the table was Dust: An Elysian Tale. Which is an American (I thought Canadian but wikipedia suggests no) studio. And OP mentions The Walking Dead and Borderlands which are similarly Western. Nobody was implying exclusivity outside of you.
  
  But let’s look at two of the more interesting examples you brought up.
  
  The Last Of Us 2… kind of is emblematic of video games’ (West and East) problem with masculinity. TLOU1 has two particularly strong emotional beats and both involve a Man losing his daughter. TLOU2 is MUCH better in that it actually allowed people to be characters other than “Sad Dad” but it is incredibly telling how much of the game revolves around the second of the strong emotional beats from 1. Ellie is driven by her conflicted feelings over Joel taking away her agency to protect her and Abby is driven by… Joel taking away her entire family. And… I think it speaks a lot to Druckmann and Naughty Dog that the character who has the strongest parental narrative is the very masculine woman who angered the internet for obvious reasons. And that is kind of supported by the mess that is the Uncharted series as well.
  
  As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta. Homie destroyed at least one entire planet (its cool, it was filler and he obviously never did that when he was rolling with Nappa), allowed Nappa to destroy an entire city, murdered Nappa, probably murdered a bunch of Namekians (too lazy to check), definitely murdered a lot more people when he went Majin, and is Goku’s best friend because Krillin is too busy tapping dat ass. Except… not really. Because if you actually go back to DB, the vast majority of The Z Fighters are kind of just rivals that Goku respected and occasionally teamed up with. Outside of Krillin and MAYBE Yamcha, they weren’t his friends. And that is where Vegeta was too up until he went Majin. It was only after that when he acknowledged that he cared about something more than power (Bulma and Trunks) and that, even after his eyes were opened by Frieza, he was a monster. And while Super brushes over a lot of that because it is meant to be a direct sequel to DB, that characterization is still there.
  
  Which is similarly something that a lot of people clown on Yakuza/LAD for. Yeah, Kiryu and Ichiban and even Yagami end up teaming up with a lot of people they beat on a few dozen times. But, by and large, it is not a 'you are my best friend" and more “I respect you and now understand why you did those evil things… but things aren’t over between us”. And then you have the inverse with Ryuji who is pretty unrepentantly “evil” to the end… but it is also impossible to view him and Kiryu as anything other than friends as they fight to the death because that is the only way they know how to communicate.
  
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  - Aielman15@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Nobody was implying exclusivity outside of you.
    
    Slip of the tongue. I likewise reject the idea of eastern writers being “usually” better at writing emotions and/or moral ambiguity, or doing it more frequently. There are countless good and bad stories on both sides.
    
    I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.
    
    Most of the examples I mentioned were mainstream movies and videogames that sold millions of tickets/copies. Or at least as much mainstream as Kamen Rider and Yakuza. There are tons of examples of well-written human drama.
    
    I also fail to understand why action = video games. There are tons of successful games where action is not the main focus, or sometimes it’s not even present at all. I enjoyed the cozy vibes of Life is Strange, for example.
    
    Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.
    
    As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta.
    
    Brushing off the first Rambo movie because of subpar sequels, and then using Dragonball (a series that had nowhere to go after Frieza and yet still gets milked with subpar sequels to this day) as a talking point is just nonsensical.
    
    Mentioning Vegeta as a good example of moral ambiguity is hilarious because he is probably one of the worst written characters of all time, who single-handedly ruins the characterization of the entirety of the main cast.
    The dude committed genocide or attempted one at least once per narrative arc and everybody was okay with spending their time with him for literally no reason. If I had two bullets and was standing in a room with Vegeta and Hitler, the safest option for Earth as a whole would be to shoot Vegeta twice. There is “respecting” another person, and there is “brushing off crimes against humanity because that character is cool”.
    
    By the way, I don’t want to imply that eastern (Japanese? I don’t think you mentioned other media outside of Japan) writers are worse than western ones. I loved the first Yakuza game (the second one was very dumb and killed my interest in the series; maybe I’m missing out). Metal Gear Solid and Xenogears are, to this day, two of my favourite games ever. I went to the cinema twice in a row to watch Godzilla Minus One. I could also mention Oldboy for something outside of Japan, or Red Cliff, and those are both very much mainstream as well, and action too.
    
    I just reject the idea of them being somehow better.
    
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MotoAsh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I will never understand people that are against obliterating the absolute most vile people… Against the death penalty? Sure, that’s about not empowering an imperfect (and sometimes outright corrupt) system. Though not blowing away unquestionably evil shitstains?!

Insanity.

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