#but a Japanese media cannot and should not be expected to conform to Western sensibilities

[ajora]

When work is slow (usually when I’m waiting for someone to get back to me), I pull out my phone and see what’s on discord sometimes. Most times the connection is so bad that it’s 1x at 0 bars. Or a big X next to the absence-of-bars. Sometimes it connects but I can’t respond because I’m old and can’t thumbtype quickly, and then conversation moves on so quickly that I can’t follow up. It’s a pain and makes me want to ramble about FFV, but I’m kinda afraid to because I ship something a lot of people hate. Maybe I’ll take it all to Dreamwidth, where maybe 2 active people still follow me, but at least I won’t stumble into someone frothing at the mouth at how dare I ship fictional characters in a way they don’t like.

Anyway, it was an interesting discussion in that my experience with FFV was... I played the original game with fan translations. Then I used the game to brush up on my Japanese. When the PSX localization came out and people ragged on me for my IRC ident (I still have Faris there and am not letting it go ever), I kinda dropped things because the PSX localization was terrible. And yes the GBA localization is great, but it’s still a localization. Jokes got added where there were none. The localization was written to appeal to a Western culture and sentiments. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but...

Eh, I’m gonna put the rest behind a cut because I don’t want fights and arguments over opinions, especially because I am not going to share yours because my familiarity with the Japanese text is not going to gel well with English-only audiences. Also, being a lifelong anthropology nerd (and being part native Mexican), I’m a bit horrified by how Western (let’s be real, primarily US/UK) fandom insists they know better than non-Western fandoms. Your imperialism is showing, y’all.

Lenna’s often treated as boring and/or annoying by Western fandoms who aren’t aware of her background, how she shifts between formal and informal based on her temper, and focus on Faris because of course, Faris is cool and awesome and a lot of people have internalized misogyny and like to latch onto not-like-other-girls types. Someone on discord said Lenna was too passive, which I find bewildering because all the trouble she usually gets into is because she’s impulsive and barges forth and falls into it face-first. I love that about her.

Goddamn but I want to write up a defense for Lenna and how she drives much of the story, and why she too defies Japanese gender norms as a character who was originally designed as a tomboy.

I get why people latch onto Faris and project their own identities on her. Which... is half her problem, honestly. She never says she’s a man, she acts like one because 海ぞくで、女じゃあバカにされるからな (”because among pirates, women are [treated as] stupid/fools”). Her entire performance as a man hinges on social expectations of how men are supposed to act. She actually does say she’s a woman, in Japanese ( 女だからってバカにすんなよ! {”Don’t treat me like a fool because I’m a woman!”}), but it gets lost in translation for something flippant. Additionally, she comes from a long tradition of both East Asian women crossdressing as men to access male privilege, the Takarazuka Review, please compare Lady Oscar to Amano!Faris, and Mary Read and Anne Bonny, both of whom crossdressed. This is not to dump on anyone who wants to claim that Faris is ___, but... she’s a Japanese character, made for Japanese audiences as a commentary on Japanese gender roles (and this is a whole trope in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese fiction), and Western sensibilities don’t really apply.

Also, gender noncomforming women, nonbinary women, and butch women exist. I should know. I’m butch with a very, very tenuous grasp of gender identity in general*. Really wish people wouldn’t throw us under a bus for their trans-but-still-binary rep :/

Also, there was talk about Gilgamesh today in that discord chat and I really wished I could have popped up and said he’s a loving parody of samurai ideals--his bios in the Japanese texts point out that he seems to come from a land that prizes bushido, and that colors his interactions with the gang.

I really do want to talk more about FFV, but fandom is so much more vicious than it used to be and I keep expecting to be attacked every time.

Oh well.

* I had fits when I was younger over... maybe I was a trans man? but then I sat and had many, many long discussions with myself and how patriarchal society (rural Mexican Catholicism + 1980s Texas) made me think being a woman was so terrible and tried to shoehorn me into a role that didn’t fit. And then I discovered the internet and “butch lesbian” seemed to fit me perfectly.