Video Game Tirade
Video Game Tirade
Ep. 1 (T) - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - Where Did One Anime Trope Start?
Warning: This episode contains mature language and discussions of mature themes and topics. 18+ strongly recommended.
(Also parts of the audio are strange due to needing to re-record due to microphone error!)
In this episode, I talk about a little bit about Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and one aspect of the animation style in the game that's also quite uncomfortably prevalent in modern anime: women and their large... torsos.
Ending and Beginning links:
Beg: https://youtu.be/lEHM9HZf0IA
End: https://youtu.be/r75cTpUS7tM
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Hello, y'all, and welcome to Video Game Tirade, the show where I talk about games I've been playing and whatever they remind me of and yell about it all for an hour, give or take a little bit. Uh, my name is AJ and lets get this rant running real quick! 'Cause today is gonna be a long episode. So, lately, I have been playing a game called Xenoblade Chronicles 2. There's been a couple of other things but it's mostly just been XBC2. The game is from a studio called Monolith Soft, which might ring the ears of some gamers out there, as they are a Nintendo subsidiary studio who has assisted development on other famous Nintendo titles such as Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 1 and 2, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons - just to name a couple of their illustrious history. Uh, this specific game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, is a JRPG on the Nintendo Switch console, and to get into the plot a little bit to explain today's topic, uh, the game takes place on an ocean. Not an ocean like you and I know it, with water and salt and fish and all that fun junk, but a cloud ocean, actually super-compressed clouds that have the same density as water but are still functionally air. Uh. In this Cloud Sea, there are no natural landmasses, such as continents or islands, at least in the way that we know them in our world, where the rock is connected to the Earth in huge undersea volcanic, tectonic uplifts, you know, they-they're connected into the planet. Uh - No, livable and arable land in this world only exists on the backs - and other body parts - of giant creatures called Titans. Titans can actually come in all shapes and sizes, from as small as a cat to as large as a Blue Whale, creatures so big they can eat humans without registering it, and doesn't that give you some fucking terror nightmare fuel. Uh. For further context, one of the biggest towns you can visit, both in gameplay and in-universe, exists on *part* of the left shoulder of the humanoid Titan that this country lives on. Just *part* of the shoulder! So, yeah, uh, Titans can get pretty fucking big! There's a problem though - Titans are living creatures, just like animals and humans, and they're dying out. One of the very first cutscenes with our main character, a Cloud Sea salvager named Rex, is witnessing a rather large whale-like Titan dying and sinking beneath the Cloud Sea to never resurface. Rex and the Titan he lives on, whom he calls Gramps, discuss how the people living on this whale probably all evacuated already, and Rex monologues throughout these first initial cutscenes to introduce the world that this continuing die-out of valuable biodiversity is leading to conflict over the remaining landmasses and massive immi- and EMmigration efforts. In case you haven't gathered from that description, this game is a very thinly-veiled commentary on global warming - one of the strongest countries is literally conquering others for livable space because their home Titan is dying and off-putting more and more and more heat as a result. I'm not gonna super get into that topic - ever - but uh its good to note just to have some context on what the game is about, and uh its not today's topic, so let's continue talking about the game to get into that topic. uh. In this world, which Rex introduces as Alrest one L, there exist roughly 3 classes of people, beyond the usual rich/poor, young/old, etc that we're already familiar with: Drivers with a capital D, Blades with a capital B, and people who are neither who fall into all the other rest of the classes. We get to see what these 2 capital-letter special classes of denizens are pretty quickly into the game, I'd say within the first hour, when we're introduced to Jin, Malos, and Nia and her Blade, Dromarch. Notice how I said Dromarch is Nia's Blade, implying possession. Blades are themselves living creatures kind of sort of, but they cannot exist without the assistance of a suitable person who then becomes their Driver. Drivers must bond with a crystal that holds the unawakened Blade, and if the bond takes, the Blade awakens and gains their usually-humanoid form. (There are spoilery reasons as to why 90% of Blades are humanoid, and I would like to discuss that in a later episode but that is also not today's topic!) Now, beyond that special ability to awaken Blades, Drivers are typically just normal people. They aren't uniquely strong or smart or kind or whatever. They just have just enough luck to manifest a Blade and just enough skill or willingness to train for it to actually lift the physical weapon that corresponds to each Blade and use it in battle (sidenote: Blade weapons are not necessarily blades. they could be things other than swords and daggers, for example, like, I don't know, shield hammers! God i hate shield hammers). As a uh counterpoint, Blades are extremely unique. Blades possess the ability, beyond their special manifestations and all the fucking - they come from a crystal and all that fun junk - they posses the unique ability to harness the ether in the air - which is fancy Xenoblade speak for "they can do magic." uh. This ether harnessing - or magic, if you'd like - presents itself in a few different ways: Blades can focus their ether-magic on their Drivers and form shields to protect them in combat, or they can create a bond between them that passively grants bonuses that gameplay-wise present themselves as buffs - things like temporary critical hit chance up, evasion up, more damage against certain enemy types, etc. etc. Each Blade has an element corresponding to one of the 8 classical JRPG magical elements: light/dark, fire/water, wind/ice, and electric/earth are the pairings. And finally, of course, Blades can manifest their ether-magic in powerful elemental attacks focused through their own unique weapon once they have it back in their hands, 'cause Drivers are normally the ones using the weapon. These attacks, gameplay-wise, are dubbed Specials, and they can be combo'd together based on the elements being used to do progressively more and more damage and cause special debuffs. Uh Circling back to plot, and this will be the last of it so if you're interested either play the game please or watch Chuggaaconroy's LP for an in-depth love letter to the game. It actually picked up back again which I'm super happy about, it's very long and it's very good and the story's great and you should listen to it. Anyways, our MC, Rex, starts out as a not-Driver, but through plot elements that I'm not gonna get into, uh he becomes the Driver to the strongest Blade in history, the Aegis. Unlike that defensive name, she's actually a sword, and her name is Pyra. Like THAT name, her main element is, allegedly, fire. And that's finally all I'll say about the plot, because what I actually want to talk about today is the visual style of this game, which shows itself - the thing I want to tall about shows itself when you meet Pyra. Uh. Don't get me wrong, I love the anime-like style a lot and I think it was a very smart move for Monolith Soft to go that way. Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and X were both very realistic styles and a lot of the detriment of why they weren't as popular is because their realistic style even 2 years later was very hard on the eyes, particularly on older softer like Wii and Wii U. It was very much obviously outdated and it was very hard to get past the appearance to experience the wonderful multi-hundred-hour long stories. Um. It was so successful, this anime-like style, that they actually recreated Xenoblade Chronicles 1 with the same anime engine for the Switch to, uh, to increase its accessibility and longevity, since it's a very well known fact in the video game community that more goofier animated styles tend to hold up better versus realism. I'm saying all this to focus on the fact this anime-like style is VERY anime-like, and the thing I wanna talk about today - my main gripe with the game - is that, uh, in a very anime-like way a vast majority of the adult female-presenting Blades have MASSIVE boobs. Like, I'm talking HUMONGOUS homgonongologongos, like HUGE! The cutscene that Pyra first speaks in has a joke where she's says "Now, put your hand on my chest" and our boy MC predictably goes "Uhhh?!?!? Are you sure?!?!" This disproportionate body shape is not an uncommon trope in anime, and I'd like to discuss a little bit of where that comes from in the anime sphere of media by getting into the history of anime a little bit. Unfortunately, I don't have the time today to discuss precursors to anime or manga or anything similar to anime - i'm glaring at you, hentai - so this will just be a look through anime history starting with the first anime! Uh, fair note, this is also not going to get into, like, super technical, like, psychological evaluations or anything like that, this is just gonna be a look at anime history and seeing what specific anime started this trend of Huge Gazongas. Before I get into that, the financing team would like to share a few words about this project! I actually don't have any sponsors - yet - but I do have a Patreon! I also have a business email and a Twitter for this podcast, where y'all can send in your ideas and suggestions for games I can play or topics to discuss in the future, or if you're really gelling with what I'm talking about today, you can join the conversation on the topic, either by @-ing or using the hashtag, uh, #VideoGameTiradeAnime. All the links, including for today's opening and ending themes, will be in the description. And now, it's time to unpause and get back into the action! So, according to wikipedia, the first ever actual anime was a production that began in 1961 and was called Instant History, and it was a historical documentary that displayed past events in an animated style with occasional splices of actual footage or photos to highlight the points being made. The next few actual anime follow in 1963, which features notable entry in the history of anime Astro Boy. For those who don't know, Astro Boy is a quasi-revamp of the Pinocchio tale, where a robotic boy is created and given "life" a la advanced robotics, and most anime adaptations follows the titular Astro Boy's antics learning how different he is from other boys but still much the same. For example, he has a very common childhood desire of wanting to be a hero, and with his advanced robotic capabilities, he is frequently capable of carrying out this wish, and several of the more recent adaptations - specifically the movies - focus on this particular desire. More notably, anyone who has seen Astro Boy can tell you the kid is naked except for some robotic briefs and jet-propelled boots. Reading into his backstory a little bit, he was initially made by a scientist who had lost his son and is then sold to a circus who pits their robots against each other in gladiatorial-style fighting matches, so the design makes some more sense when thought of as a similar style to wrestling outfits, I guess. However, this an example a very popular refrain throughout the fandom with regards to characters drawn with any degree of nudity or questionable body proportions - and that refrain is the artist/author made them that way on purpose. Uh. This is - you know - anyone who draws a character with big boobs draws them that way on purpose. It doesn't matter what their superower, jumpsuit, whatever is made to be rationalized in the actual content - they're drawn that way on purpose. An example is Momo Yaoyorozu from My Hero Academia to draw on something that probably everybody knows about, at least if you're at all interested in anime. Um, she has a superpower where she can make things from out of her body, provided she has enough food backup from lipids and enough skin area to make actually make the thing. And, predictably, she has enormous boobs! Uh, she's one of my favorite characters - 'cause she's super sweet and I love her and she's really great as a character but like - her power is not plot relevant. It's *useful* but its not - the vehicle of her needing to be naked or virtually naked and showing off how sexy she is as a MINOR is not at all plot relevant, ever. Uh. If her ability is actually plot-relevant, you can easily satisfy its necessity by having her ability just be her thinking super hard about something and having that pop out of the air, like, just... Pop out of the air! And if she thinks too hard or makes too many things, the drawback would be her getting a nosebleed or something, rather than exposing herself to the world. Like, she was drawn that way on purpose! um. All of this is to say, Astro Boy is virtually in his underwear way back in 1963 for a reason, and that reason point-blank is someone wanted to draw a boy in his undies and have flames coming out of his feet. At some point during the development process, this depiction was rationalized - he looks that way because he's a robot and it doesn't matter, he's a child and kids don't keep their clothes on, he was made to fight Gladiator-style in his robot circus, etc. etc. etc. But whatever the reason is, he still IS basically naked. The curtains ARE blue, whatever the deeper reason, if there is one. He's just a boy in some briefs and shoes. That's IT! I'm making so much point of Astro Boy to discuss another anime in 1963 to establish a timeline, but also to point out how Astro Boy is very much the first creation that was recognized as anime, even if it wasn't the "first" anime. So, what do I mean by that? Well, Astro Boy experienced a MASSIVE amount of popularity in the early years of animation. Wikipedia alleges that as much as 40% of Japan watched the show in late '63 when it came out with a 3-part special. It's been recreated at least 3 different times, most recently that I can recall in 2009 with the 3D-style movie of the same name. I also personally know a lot of people who at least distantly what the deal with Astro Boy is, and that's impressive considering the age of this anime! 1963! And this anime, with all this recognition and success, 60 years old, stars a near-naked boy! (Not the 2009 movie, though, he's got clothes on mostly in that one. Mostly. Astro Boy has to be naked at some point. ...Lets not get into that.) The other production from '63 I wanted to mention is called Sennin Buraku, whose anime Wikipedia alleges is the first late night show anime. The manga is described as a sex comedy, so you can see where the "late night" part was supposed to be going - is this village of ascetics and follows a researcher whose apprentice is obsessed with 3 lovely sisters in the village. The 8-panel comic on the Wikipedia page shows a heteronormative couple, with the woman taking off her clothes, throwing them in a box, the couple getting into bed together, and then the woman leaving. The woman is notably drawn with more detail than the presumed-man, she's shown divesting her clothes, and she's depicted with drooping breasts, which honestly take up a large portion of her depicted figure. They aren't necessarily as large as common anime depictions, the woman is just tall and proportional in the comic and drawn from the waist up, so her boobs appear to be larger than they actually are. Uh, The black-and-white anime movie has more women dressed similarly, with uh breast-bands or tube-tops and/or in various states of undress, showing quite a lot of cleavage, although important thing to point out: all the women depicted are proportional. The issue I have with modern anime is that they are NOT proportional and the boobs are GINORMOUS for no reason, and looks painful. That all being said, the first time a woman is portrayed in an anime, she is all cleavage and allure. It's easy to see how that can get focused on and then exacerbated in later years. It seems that this scared the Japanese media at first, however, because very few adult women show up in the years following. Most anime in the first few years after 1963 are more family-focused, depicting children in a similar art style to Astro Boy, and even once other styles and stories begin to pick up, the vast majority of anime before the turn of the millennium revolve around kids or families in their family-friendly adventures. Uh, getting back to Sennin Buraku's influence, we don't really see prominent girl figures other than children until 1967 with Speed Racer's Trixie/Michi and the titular character in Princess Knight. 1970 gives us arguably the first magical girl anime with Maho no Mako-chan, a take on The Little Mermaid. Um. We see another magical girl in 1973, although Limit-chan is much younger than 15-yr-old Mako-chan. The first thief girl comes about in 1975's La Seine no Hoshi. I could continue listing teenagers until the cows come home - hehe, udders - um, but I believe the point has already been made that, of the things that came out of early anime, Astro Boy had a significant effect on the next 2 decades or so of the genre, with dozens of titles seeking to emulate either its visual style or its themes of family and kids having fun being cool kids, and even the ones that weren't this way were very much more man-focused, with very few women playing any kind of role, let alone a visual one so prominent as walking basketball storage. So here's the fundamental question: when did all of that change? There's a lot of things I can get into about anime but I'm trying keep this a video game podcast, um, and there's - hmm. There's a lot of things I could say and let's just leave it at that. Um. I scoured all the various years of Wikipedia's list of anime by year of release, so if you have a different answer to this question, please feel free to let me know. And also, you can compare for yourself against that list of lots and lots of anime to see where I got all my information from. I also consulted a couple of other sources, uh, KissAnime as well as a couple of other, um, less than savory anime websites, just to see visual representations of anime that weren't depicted on Wikipedia, and the first depiction across all these sources in anime of a woman or teenager with comedically large breasts that don't suit her art style is, drum roll please, Ranma 1/2.
A lot of you are probably thinking "Oh, Ranma 1/2, that makes a lot of sense" and those of you who don't know what Ranma 1/2 is, its essentially an anime/manga about a boy who gets cursed to turn into a girl when he's hit with certain temperature water and turn into a boy when hit with the opposite temperature. uh. And when he's in girl form, and also all of the girls he has a crush on, have Giant, like I'm talking huge, like softball-sized boobs, despite the fact that this dude is drawn like he's 12 and is, like,16. Its not proportional at all in the art style, its not - its not even funny, even though the anime is supposed to be very funny, its listed first as a comedy. Uh, and before I get into anything else of what my research showed, I want to acknowledge that this is an opinion. This is - I didn't do a lot of research for this, I spent a couple of hours looking through Wikipedia's pages and comparing anime pictures. Um. I didn't do any research, like, psychologically, like I said at the top, um, and this is based on my opinion on what is proportional given an art style. Um. And to explain some counter-arguments, there's obviously different art styles that showed - and different shows that showed teenagers and women very bustily way before Ranma 1/2 in 19-85 question mark?... Did I even list where Ranma 1/2 was in my notes? Ehhh, I did not! Anyways, I do know for a fact that, uh, The Kabucha Wine from 1981, also known as The Pumpkin Wine, is the first anime to depict a teenager in a buxom manner, but this is in a more realistic style and NOT grotesquely out of proportion like modern day anime and Ranma 1/2. Similar things can be said about most of the anime in the 80's and early 90's, as they all have very, very similar styles to either Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Sailor Moon (although I want to point out this is not an exa- this is a later example of the style and not the style-setter), Mobile Suit Gundam, or Fist of the North Star once they came out, and I'm purely talking about art styles here. There were not very many art style differences in the early years of anime. Once Astro Boy took off, that's pretty much it until the 80's. Um, 1985's Lupin the 3rd part 3 looks to be the first anime that is riding that line pretty hard of realistic depiction and cartoonish in terms of boob size with relation to the ladies, although an argument can also be made that the few - the FEW female characters, let alone the busty ones, in that show are proportional in that art style. That's the argument that I'm making, that they are proportional and Ranma 1/2 is not. The same argument, actually, can be made for virtually every woman or teenager who appears to have a larger-than-normal chest in most of the anime between the 70's and the 90's. I can also point out, to continue countering my own argument, throughout the years from the mid-70's onward, women started being depicted in more and more form-fitting clothing, exaggerating their body shapes even when they were still proportional and realistic, and shows like Sailor Moon depict teenagers in what are objectively very skimpy outfits, so there is visual - visible and tangible traction towards the modern giant boob standard throughout the years. To rephrase that, even if their art style is proportional, if they're wearing skintight clothes like in a lot of the space anime from the 80's, their chests look larger, just by virtue of the fact that there's more detail in that area. Uh. In searching for an anime that fits the bill by modern stereotypes - childish faces even for adults, woobified and chibified character proportions, a "soft" overall feeling to character stylization, and just an absurd breast size for the style, age, and size of the character given the art style - I believe personally the culprit that FIRST checks all these marks is Ranma 1/2, and specifically with the female version of Ranma, who I explained early is often depicted in more mature situations than his age should dictate, and is far more bequeathed in the curves department than anyone I knew when I was a teen. Uh. Ranma is also attracted to various other women who also are generously drawn, VERY generously drawn, even accounting for the style, leading to a lot of comedic gags that are essentially "boys like big boobs and get stupid seeing them, ha ha ha." Actually, that's a good point that I wanted to bring up as my closing statement here for this episode. A lot comedy in the anime sphere seems to have a large influence on whether proportion goes out of whack. The next show to show absolute bazongos on a character is 91's Ghost Sweeper Mikami, which is also a comedy, followed by Yamato Takeru in '94, which is a mecha comedy. It isn't until borderline oughts that we start getting more serious shows also depicting bozangas, such as Evangelion, Elfen Lied - is it "lied" or "lee-ed"? I've always been confused about that - Revolutionary Girl Utena is another very serious anime, One Piece which started in '99 could arguably be both serious and uh comedic and by the way I did mention it started in '99 if that makes you feel old, 'cause it makes me feel old, Inuyasha also has characters with ginormous titties and is very serious... I could go on. You've probably gathered my point at this point. Um. In my research, I seem to have discovered that, actually, the big boob trope seems to most frequently show up for comedic effect, being a staple in comedy genre, and being played for laughs or comedic relief (or just straight-ass fanservice, honestly) in most other contexts. And there-in lies the sexist crux of it. As we can see even in this very short snippet of anime history, a lot of the titles I listed were either directed at men or boys or predominantly featured men or boys. Ranma 1/2 was written by a woman but the main character is a boy and the whole plot revolves around very boyish issues that he has to deal with ON TOP OF being able to turn into a woman! Astro Boy is arguably the first successful anime, and I'm not sure if the original '69 - '69 hehe - '63 run had a female anywhere in it. And as much as modern sensibilities hate it, sex and sexiness do a LOT to sell otherwise garbage material. I mean, Keijo with 8 exclamation marks is a bad anime objectively - badly written, bad characterization, why do the boobs have super powers, like, please make that make sense to me - but goddamn is it enticing to watch because the whole premise, the entire premise of this show, Keijo with 8 exclamation points is boobs-and-butt-ONLY wrestling on a tiny platform in a pool in bathing suits. And that's NOT a hentai show!! Tell me you're not interested in watching THAT just to see how the mechanics work. Anyways, Ranma 1/2 was the first anime with ridiculous boobs and I will begin blaming it going forward whenever I see a character like this who just has too much mammary. I mean, seriously. Pyra is a great character, circling back to Xenoblade Chronicles to just round out this podcast; she is so sweet and so charming and very relatable and, looks-wise, VERY, very cute in both her 2D and 3D depictions. She's just a lady, and I love her! Except she also looks like her back must be KILLING her, and that's not even glancing at her actual outfit, which itself is a nightmare. She got a thong - OVER mini-shorts? That's gotta hurt, that's gotta hurt a lot, she's gotta have a MAJOR wedgie, constantly. Like, it just - its just begging you to ask what's wrong with the in-universe creator and also the in-our-universe creator of these characters like what... Who wronged you? Who did you wrong to make you feel like depicting a woman this way was a good idea? A lot of things must be wrong, but we'll save that for later, or probably never, that's a giant can of worms that I don't want to get into! Um. So. That... That was all that I wanted to talk about today. So with that long rant and travel through history over, that's gonna be it for me today! The songs played at the beginning and ending of this episode are Flutter by Diamond Eyes and Bugs & Daff by Duft Pank, respectively, whoops. As a reminder, all links are in the description of this episode, and please feel free to like this show wherever you get your shows! It lets the system and me know when y'all like something, so I can keep doing it and get more listeners to hear me yell at myself for an hour, give or take. Uh. Thank you for your attention on today's tirade and have a nice day!