As a fan of JRPGs, I hate hypersexualization more than most people do even just in general, especially in this medium, because it pushes me away from the thing I love. When I feel that the game I'm playing not at all made for me, it's just not fun. I know some women personally who've convinced themselves that it's fine, but I love games too much. They need to do better.
Is it wrong to present the case as like a "Japan" thing? Well, plenty of japanese people don't find that kind of thing good, or even entertaining. But as a whole, socially, the lack of the same taboos around sex have allowed the culture to perceive sexuality in a more open way. In a parallel world where Japan wasn't so conservative, I can even imagine japanese media becoming a haven for sexuality presented in a respectful and interesting manner. But coupling the sex-starved population, with a culture that generally mistreats women, you'll have a huge volume of your populace with really skewed perspectives of us. And that's not a "Japan" thing as in, it's not
because they are japanese. It's a Japan thing because it's a mixture of the unfortunate circumstances that led the culture to this day.
There are similar issues with american culture too. But the thing is, just like japanese mysogynists don't just decide to get up one day and be mysogynistic, american ultranationalists don't just get up one day and decide that they're going to be jingoistic gun-toting murderers either. It's a process.
So in that sense, it's wrong to say: "Japan is horny", and "Japanese people are horny". But it is correct to say "Japan has a sexualization problem", because it literally just does -- no other educated country in the world would be OK with selling pornographic comics with literal unironic children on the cover. And even though most of that has been made illegal nowadays (to sell, anyway), it's still produced en masse, and hidden behind plausible deniability bullshit that nobody in the world believes, except when being defended by its fans.
Outside of this, there's also a lot of cognitive dissonance when you point out those cultural issues to people, and a lot of japanese creators do believe they're making a "strong female character" when they design
some stupid shit like this. A lot of them don't see themselves doing it. And it's not just in Japan that this happens; it happens all over the world. It comes with being assimilated into a culture and taking tokens for granted.
For example, loads of people in America and even on this site consider themselves like the biggest allies of feminism and women's rights, and how they hate tokenism and fetishism and how objectification is wrong, but then they close the Resetera tab and go play Guilty Gear or BlazBlue or some shit, where practically every female character exists for the sole and clear purpose of looking sexy, and whose design is never made with the primary intention of creating a fun or interesting moveset, but rather eyecandy. Those same people don't understand that them doing that is fortifying the totem, is strengthening the existence of extremely harmful objectification of the female body in media, is participating in the exact same social stigma that makes so many women uncomfortable to play videogames in the first place. Push them on it enough, and you'll see their arguments slowly bend and morph into the exact same fucking arguments the people who defend pedophilic hentai use -- "it's just a drawing", "it's not hurting anybody", "why are you so sensitive about this", etc.
So, to summarize, I do think it's a gigantic problem with japanese media, and some games are slowly starting to shed that.
The Trails franchise has some really dodgy moments and some crazy designs ocasionally, but it's telling that 99% of all female characters in the stories (and the games have hundreds of fleshed-out characters) are competent, strong-willed, have a history, have motivations, are proficient at something and show agency. They're scholars, politicians, heads of organizations, CEOs, legendary warriors, strategists, professors, etc.
Final Fantasy XIV has taken some massive strides in this direction as well; almost all of the most important characters in the world are female, the heads of state and leaders of the free countries are all women, the strongest character by an extremely wide margin in the lore was a woman, and your character, being one of the strongest, can also be a woman if you so identify. And outside of personal player decision to dress their character like some weird fetish, even though the game has "cat girls" and "bunny girls", it's telling that none of them ever behave the way most people attribute to that kind of trope, not even a little. None of the characters ever refers to them by those monikers either, they're sovereign, intelligent peoples. Miqo'te exist as a referrence to mithra from FFXI, and Viera exist as a reference to the Ivalice games, but they're not treated like anime kemonomimi -- they don't meow, they don't purr, and they don't lapdance for master in a maid costume. It's the players who fetishize them.
Persona 5 got a lot of deserved criticism for some of its distasteful jokes at the expense of gay people, so it's definitely not perfect by any means. On the flipside, it uses its entire first chapter to explore the horrors of adults who fetishize young girls, and how, if they could, they'd very likely take advantage of them. It breaks this illusion by selling bikini DLC, which is so hilariously hypocritical that one can only assume that the writer had nothing to do with that -- and to be fair, they don't. But for as much shit as I give ATLUS, and for how much I can go on for days about how Persona 5 is just Persona 3 and 4 pre-chewed for far dumber/younger audiences, it still manages to tackle some incredibly serious topics about society in Japan which, until now, were largely unexplored. Topics which would get you fired for writing about, back in the early aughts, no matter how edgy your game studio was -- and believe me when I say that I mean that very literally.
These are small steps, but they are steps, and they should, when possible, be celebrated, because it positively reinforces that cultural shift. When people dismiss those attempts wholesale, it tells those same authors that our audiences don't mesh with that type of content, which is not the message we should be giving.
One thing I wholly agree with you on though is orientalism. The way people dismiss japanese games, or japanese stories as like "kooky weirdo japanese nonsense" really grinds my gears because it's orientalism to almost an extreme. You see it a lot with games like Kingdom Hearts and Metal Gear Solid and others.
Like damn maybe these stories are too "convoluted" for you because you can't even get past the most basic cultural barrier. Try shutting Netflix off and actually watch the cutscene with an open mind, and listen to the dialogue for what it is instead of imagining what it ought to be in a Disney movie, and maybe Kingdom Hearts, a game written for literal teenagers whose wikis were filled out perfectly
by teenagers, won't feel so opaque to you anymore.
Anyway, sorry for the spam.
