CHRISagi

There are so many flaws in Kishimoto’s portrayal of romantic love, especially since he is awful (and has openly admitted to being awful) at writing female characters. These female characters’ storylines are entirely dedicated to their love interests. Sakura blooms from a young girl with a crush…and ends up being a single mother of a child that may not even be hers. Hinata has no relevance to plot other than her love for Naruto. Neji’s death bolstering Naruto and Hinata’s relationship is an outright insult to Neji’s own unique storyline, that he will refuse to be a child for destiny, that he will not die as a slave for the main branch (Kishimoto basically flips off Neji. It’s awful.).

This article is well thought out, and certainly parental and sacrificial love is highlighted, but the romantic love in Naruto is nothing short of disappointing.

As an aspiring developer, I think it’s worth adding in the capabilities and limitations of the game devs. Personally, I’m pretty disgusted when gamers are disappointed with the lack of result in their ‘false’ agency (see: Mass Effect 3 and Life is Strange). I think it’s a problem devs face whenever they want to make a choice-based game — how can I make every single choice impact the ending? The real answer is that you can’t, it’s simply not possible in a medium in which the developer doesn’t actually interact with every individual person playing the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, however, the DM knows the players, can adjust the world according to their interactions with the world. In order for games to give us this sense of agency, we’d have to transcend the dev – gamer boundary somehow, which is a conundrum of it’s own.

I loved many of the games you mentioned, and I’m glad to see someone else thinking critically about this medium.

I have a love/hate relationship with fanservice. It’s difficult for me to pin down fanservice to cater to the ‘male gaze’ when I, a pansexual nonbinary individual, happen to casually enjoy hentai. Fanservice, to me, has no place in stories focusing heavily on plot and character development. But fanservice itself has humorous elements, which the likes of Studio Trigger used to its advantage in Kill La Kill.

As a blogger on tumblr who follows many anime blogs, I find that fanservice transforms many female characters into icons, be it Ryuko or Asuka. But if you were to ask the fans of these icons why they like these characters, I would wager they would refer to their personalities faster than their T&A. This is an interesting aspect of fanservice that I think deserves more speculation.

Otherwise, this is excellently written, very thought provoking!