Perversion Subversion - Examining Hentai Sensibility - Extra Credits

so Japanese media has this I guess tradition it tends to sprinkle in something that we don't really have a good word for in English other than I guess perviness but of late I've seen a few Japanese games play with that tradition and try to subvert it and some have done this really well some not as much the Japanese language has a handful of words describing a concept that again we really don't have proper terminology for in English these are words like hentai or it's milder derivative pecchì they essentially mean lewd or perverted but they don't come with quite the same baggage that those words do in English this hint high sensibility can range from relatively innocuous double entendre to the more disturbing or uncomfortable moments like the accidental boob grab looking up a girl's skirt or spying on them while they're bathing accidentally or otherwise now obviously Japan doesn't hold a monopoly on pandering ly sexualized

content we do plenty of that here at home as well but this particular tradition has become a well-trodden trope in Japanese media and Japanese games have featured their share of these moments but interestingly I've noticed a few Japanese games lately that are consciously exploring this trope and subverting it calling attention to or steering away from the layering and non-consensual aspects of this stuff and instead using zany humor or context to make it easier for us to discuss and question the things which society has taught us are embarrassing to talk about today I want to talk about two games one that does this well and one that does this poorly let's start with the example of this done well Yakuza zero of all things I am as surprised as you are to be citing Yakuza for this but it's their zany tenner and soap opera earnestness that give them such an ideal place to approach this from or maybe it was just that somebody on the dev team was really on the ball about approaching these pervy moments tactically very minor spoilers ahead we have to start with mr.

libido in yaakov zero there's this collection mechanic where you basically collect trading cards of real-life Japanese porn stars very real women who have little or nothing to do with the game are turned into literal objects and then scattered around the town for you to find and collect it's the exact sort of stupid sexually pandering feature that we've seen in numerous games before but then comes the subversion what do you get as your reward for collecting all these cards well you get to interact with mr. libido the game's most ridiculous character mr. libido is a wacky even more over the top than usual rendition of the pathetic horndog trope and he is the game holding a mirror in the players face to basically say congratulations this is you all mr. libido wants to do is look at these cards and fantasize about the women on them and the game is basically suggesting that if you two are all excited to collect these fairly tame images of real life porn stars you are mr. libido it's a clever subversion

that's funny on point and successful in ribbing you for spending hours hunting scantily clad lady cards rather than doing all the other fun stuff the game has to offer it's not especially mean about it but it's meant to make you realize how is silly and juvenile this activity is both in this game and in all the other games that feature this sort of thing then there's the scene where a literal child asks you to buy porn for him this is played for humor with the joke basically being isn't it funny that a grown man is buying porn for a prepubescent boy alone in the street so okay that's the pervy bit but then the game actually goes and makes this a really endearing story that asks us to consider what actually matters here Yakuza's main character Kazuma was an orphan he grew up always being let down by adults or feeling like they'd always lied to him and he has carried that weight all of his life when this child asks Kazuma if he'll buy a magazine for him Kazuma naturally says yes on the condition that the child goes home afterward coz the streets not a

safe place for a kid alone then Kazuma realizes that the kid is asking for a porn magazine the child doesn't even realize what the magazine is he just thinks it must be amazing cuz it's the only magazine he's ever seen that people apparently think is important enough to protect by sealing in plastic then after Kazuma tries to convince the child that he shouldn't get it the child starts to cry and talks about how grown-ups always lie to him so now this semi scenario has turned into an interesting choice do you let this child feel the same hurt that Kazuma grew up with or do you just get him the stupid magazine in the end Kazuma decides that it'll do far less harm if he just buys the thing for the kid better than teaching him that adults can't be trusted oh and then actually procuring the magazine is this adorable little stealth minigame because your main character is embarrassed to be seen buying porn then there's the dominatrix this one's really just about bringing in aspects of sexuality that not everyone might feel totally familiar or comfortable with no usually these scenarios are played for Laughs as an

opportunity to mockingly say isn't this weird everyone laughs at the weirdos but that's not what's happening here at all the humor here plays completely differently the comedy here is instead that the professional dominatrix is simply too shy and polite to be good at her job in fact that's why she took the job to learn to be more outspoken and confident so your character has to let her practice her craft on you until she gains the confidence to do it well and the best part of this is that it humanizes her they're not making her a one-dimensional character played off her comedy because boy isn't the idea of a woman dominating a man funny ha ha ha and they're not mocking her for being a sex worker either instead you get to see her insecurities and the humor is in the fact that being a nice person in this scenario means participating in BDSM roleplay and giving her tips on what you think a male client might want from a dominatrix instead of framing all of this as disgusting or weird this sequence makes

BDSM and everybody involved seem human and normal and there is plenty more of this in Yakuza that I could talk about like the host cafe minigame where they try to humanize some of the hosts or the 30 or so ultra softcore live-action videos that they made specifically for the game which are just embarrassingly bad though I'm not sure that the subversion is quite so successful there but there's one other game that I wanted to bring up here persona 5 again some pretty small spoilers here now I have spent a lot of time with the persona games and persona 5 is great in a lot of ways but I think they stumbled pretty hard and playing with this trope and it's really a bummer because they start out so strong an arc that's cognizant of the worst aspect of this trope the boss of the first dungeon is the signature hentai character the leering man who runs around in his underwear and the story surrounding this dungeon revolves around sexual harassment physical and sexual abuse and sexual coercion from a position of power and it treats all of those evils with the gravity they

deserve but then in the very next dungeon the game just completely face-plants by having this whole bit where one of your characters is being pressured into doing nude art modeling and the whole situation is presented as isn't this funny because she's gonna have to get naked even though she doesn't want to this is the same character that was just the victim of threatening sexual advances from her teacher it is cringe-worthy there's even this moment where her two male friends tell her that she should just go through with it they even pressure her into doing so for the sake of the team rather than finding some other alternate solution to the problem heck your main characters even given a dialogue choice where all of the options basically boil down to making her feel bad if she doesn't strip then there's this other moment where you find out that your homeroom teacher moonlights as a hostess and your main character functionally threatens to blackmail her for sex and of course there's an option to romance her without any discussion of the power dynamics in a student-teacher relationship or what even in many Japanese prefectures would

be considered an underage relationship it makes everything that happened in the first Castle just feel like lip service like the team wanted their game to deal in serious issues to impress us with how aware and conscientious it was with these things but they didn't have the dedication to properly explore or subvert those old tropes every time they fell back on them persona 5 ends up being a perfect example of the other side of this coin of the awful stuff that your game can unwittingly normalize if this hentai sensibility goes unexamined again there is a lot to like about persona 5 but it's really important that we don't just shrug off that kind of gross misstep if nothing else persona 5 shows us just how very aware we have to be of what our content is actually saying and don't misunderstand me I am absolutely not suggesting that we should be afraid of using sexual humor there is a fine and long standing tradition of body comedy that goes back just about as far as humans have had the ability to write some of

the best of it even forces us to examine ourselves and really carefully think about the moral systems we may have grown up with leading us to either question them or knowingly embrace them but there's a fine line between racy humor and leering objectification Yakuza zero convinced me that this type of hentai humor can be used for good and persona 5 showed me just how valuable it can be to start a serious discussion about the harmful side of such behavior even though it stumbles into glorifying that same behavior barely hours later overall games like these have made me cognizant of just how careful we have to be with this particular aesthetic to make sure that we aren't celebrating sexual acts without consent violations of privacy or pressuring people into sexual things that they're not comfortable with that's not a thing you want your game to normalize see you next week [Music]