This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What was wrong with P5R's translation to English? Do you have examples?
From a non-culture-war perspective, there are a number of places that are still stilted, messy, or misleading. This piece is written from a progressive perspective, but it highlights a couple "little goofs", and the game has no small number of them. To be fair, P5R's translation is a vast improvement over the original P5 translation, which had a variety of plain errors almost everywhere, either words being untranslated or entirely incorrectly translated, sometimes to random unrelated words or even opposites of their original meanings. And there's still some janky stuff that's more under the broader problem of localization, like being quizzed on shogi rules in ways that would be hard to English-speakers to even Google.
From a culture war one, P5R is a heavily political piece even compared to the typical Persona game, and a lot of those politics are complex when anyone tries to handle them in other cultures. Previous Persona games have sometimes had this issue: is Naoto Shirogane a trans male or tomboy, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after a thousand pages -- under Japanese cultural assumptions it's a lot easier to see her pronoun troubles are tied closer to how the often-serious problems Japanese authorities have taking women seriously, while under American (even pre-current trans snafu) this screams gender identity stuff.
((For a more consistently translated (albeit easier) example from the same game, P4's Kanji reads pretty similar, as far as I can tell, from either Japanese or American culture assumptions. His Shadow's very clearly gay, but the Jungian shadow is what a person represses, rather than the whole of what they are; Kanji might be gay or bisexual, but that's just a small portion of his fear of being seen as unmanly for his interests.))
But where P4 is more focused on finding the truth, P5 is about corruption, and aggressively about the interfaces of power between adults and minors, including related to suicide, parenting, and sexuality. So this meant that it touched on things that were far redder-hot. One particularly controversial scene occurs when the protagonist Joker and Ryuji running into and being hit on by a pair of gay guys, first when they visit a local gay district for unrelated reasons and then later at a normal beach.
This is incredibly creepy from a Western perspective, partly because the first scene depends on a lot of context that might not even be obvious to native Japanese speakers (the two are basically sneaking into the Folsom Street Fair for unrelated reasons) and partly because of different social norms and expectations about personal space. It's still meant to be weird in the original, but it's not an actual assault and that's kinda important: part of Ryuji's character arc is explicitly about separating attacks from self-defense from fair punishment and so on, in both directions. These guys are doing something that's outside of the normal and Ryuji doesn't want, but the real answer's that he needs to say no and Ryuji hasn't internalized that -- something that impacts everything from his backstory to some of his behaviors very late in the game.
But it came across as homophobic because these were the only 'real' clearly gay guys you run into through the whole game and they're trying to get into a high schooler's pants so it ... instead had the pair trying to give Ryuji a makeover? Which... doesn't really solve the problem either direction.
There's also a minor character that's probably intended as a transwoman in both translations, and probably was originally a crossdresser (or more accurately something like a Molly) by Western standards, but I don't know that the sorta people that use Based everywhere noticed that one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link