My mom asked me a question yesterday after reading the blog, which, she might be the only one at this point, but anyway she asked me what Aang’s last name was. I had no idea. He’d just introduced himself to me as Aang. So I asked him if he actually had a last name, or if he just had a first name, like Cher. He said, “No, not like Cher! I just don’t like my last name. Sounds too much like ‘duck penis.’” He refused to elaborate further; I think the mystery might be better than whatever the truth could ever be.
But that wasn’t all that my mom wanted to talk to me about. She Googled “visual novel” and within a couple of clicks came upon the term “hentai.” It’s fair to say that visual novels, as I said in my last post, are often of an erotic or pornographic nature. But that did not prepare me for the verbal onslaught coming off of my mother. She’s apparently very worried for my soul.
Which is odd, because there hasn’t been a hard decision on adult elements in our story. I mean, I’m not against it, and Aang is pretty gung ho, and even our artist who is fairly slow in getting any balls rolling has been enthusiastic about the idea. But it isn’t settled. The story I want to tell can have erotic elements, I suppose it does, but whether those play offscreen or on hasn’t been decided.
And I don’t understand that revulsion at all erotica. I don’t think I’m going to convert my mom on this point, but even when I tried to explain that if we pursued sexual elements, it would be done tastefully, and in a manner where any of those themes were integral to the story (not boobs for the sake of boobs- though Aang tells me that can be an excellent selling point).
I know a part of her reaction came from clicking through to some “examples” of Japanese erotica, and, you know, that does explain some of it. I know why Japanese erotica evolved the way it did. The country outlawed certain aspects of sexuality, so erotica evolved ways to circumvent the censorship. Can’t show male genitalia? Tentacles are basically the same, but don’t run afoul of the law.
The humiliations involved in Japanese erotica often get a bad wrap, too, but if we’re honest we’d admit they tend to stay this side of hardcore BDSM, and frankly, that kind of culture is relative; what’s good for the goose in North America isn’t necessarily good for a gander that evolved in Eurasia. Japan might be the country that invented Rapelay, but it still has far lower occurrences of sex crimes (even per capita) than we do, so it’s hard to claim any moral superiority there.
Which is not to say that I’m defending all Japanese erotica ever. Some of it is deplorable. So is a lot of Western erotica, too, if we’re honest. But the problem I have is when people conflate the content with the genre.
Because visual novels are a genre as well as a medium.
And whether or not our visual novel embraces the sexual tropes of the genre or eschews them, it doesn’t have to be antifeminist, it doesn’t have to be pedophilic, it doesn’t have to sexualize excretory functions or do any of the other things that creep me out that do seem to have become staples of the Japanese form. That’s part of why Aang and I wanted to do this. Because Japanese visual novels are created for that culture and society; we don’t get a lot of what’s in them, and it’s unfair and unrealistic to expect that we would.
On a side note, even in Japan the visual novel has been evolving. They started out as nukige, masturbation games, but the industry has started to shift and many visual novels are no more erotic than your standard romance novel. In fact, their ability to produce emotion has become their most stand-out factor, which is why visual novels are often called nakige now, crying games.
We still mostly import nukige, because in a niche market like this where it’s already hard to make a buck, and particularly where the audience is both emotionally stoic in our John Wayne fashion and corrupted by the expectations of the genre, it’s a hard sell for emotionally compelling work to be translated. Nakige’s a genre that doesn’t exist in Western culture, except as the occasional imports. But an import is always going to be a little bit culturally wrong, because even if you scrub all the erotic elements out of it, the experience is still very definitely foreign.
So mom, and everybody else, that may not change your minds, but hopefully at least it helps you understand a little more about it, about what we’re attempting, and where we’re coming from.
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