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The treatment of women in this series



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GoldenBarry

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tbh Kingdom hearts never felt that progressive when it came to its female characters. It felt par the course for a pre-2000/early 2000s shonen anime and in some instances worse. Even compared to the Final Fantasy/Disney holdovers they always felt like they were lagging behind.

So I wasn't surprised by 3's portrayal nor let down and I hope that KH does better in the future.
 

KHFan91

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Can't always get what you want, I'm afraid.

It isn't easy to accept, I know, but there isn't anything you can do about it.
 

CDD

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How should women be treated in this series? Let's expose those who don't know what they're talking about.
 

alexis.anagram

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maximumlight8

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considering that Pirate's has been a lot of people's worst received world so far, It's sad there's not even a PATF world for more representation.
 

Smithee

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XAROS

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Recon

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I just can't forgive Nomura for the scenes with Aqua. Defeated by Vanitas. Let's Terranort slash Ven and just stands there. Stripped of her keyblade. Waits for friends in the RoD and does nothing but hope. After everything that happened in 0.2? After being a keyblade master? After given more development than Kairi? It's bad writing.
 

alexis.anagram

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I can't play something that sexist anymore.
I'm with you. KH3 is definitely the end of the line for me, and I hope that now that people got their ending (of sorts, lol, I don't even want to talk about it), they'll consider making the same choice to move on and show that this isn't the right direction, either for this series or gaming as a whole. Every other form of media has had to contend with the shift in cultural dynamics that has accompanied conversations surrounding gender and sexuality over the last few decades, I don't see why the video game industry should be exempt.

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destinykh

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I wonder, is all this related to culture? Speaking as an Asian living in an Asian country, the discussion around minority and women's rights is nowhere near the huge thing it is in the West. Maybe we are looking at KH through a Western lens, a lens that the Japanese creators and players may not care about or even know about. (Though of course my experience as a person of Chinese heritage is not generalizable to Japan).

I wonder if anime/Japanese media that is not KH is making any strides towards being progressive.

I am fine if people feel like they have to jump off because of this though. I've long given up on the story myself.
 
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Swing

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Kingdom Hearts was always more of a Shonen series anyway... so... yeah, that is how female characters are written in those types of stories. Maleficent is probably the best female character of this series since she is the only one that is more her own character without any depends on a male character. Heck, she even has a male henchman that she can order around.
 

XAROS

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Yep. First problem was substantiating your value statement on the premise of its relative popularity. Of course it's never "cool" to point out prominent attitudes in society that alienate and marginalize classes of people, because it makes the majority class who blithely perpetuate those attitudes and/or downplay their impact uncomfortable. So sorry to ruin your day and "force" you to care about something like that.

You didn’t force me to care about anything, it’s just not a big deal to me, thus my point. Also my statement was substantiated on the premise of asian culture (see two posts above) and trying to apply western culture to a JRPG. I am glad you are taking action by not playing the game anymore though.
 

Oracle Spockanort

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I can’t let this go. It’s the worst thing they could have done for this series. And the only person we can blame is Nomura since he handcrafts the story himself and writes the script. This is all on him and it’s clear he doesn’t see it as a problem. He doesn’t know how to write female characters. His comments about people liking Aqua back in the BBS days makes more sense now. He didn’t understand the appeal of her character and didn’t think people would be drawn to her character type because he personally did not feel drawn to what he had written.

And then they just nerf her in the game. Sure, gameplay wise we get to play as her and she’s badass, but storywise she is treated so poorly.

And I don’t know how many times I can complain about Kairi without reiterating in shock that Nomura never intended to develop her in a meaningful manner and it is as clear as day now. She is just a device—a vehicle for Sora’s affections and motivations in the latter half of the game. She amounts to nothing more but the love interest that sits there and dies to give the hero his driving force to fight. I’m so disappointed.

I don’t think this is just an Asian culture thing. We have plenty of good female characters from Japanese media, and from shonem series at that. Obviously those tend to be more of an outlier than the norm, but we see these piss-poor depictions of women all across various cultures in media. Only in the last decade have we seen a major paradigm shift in how media approaches female character development now that people are more likely to call this stuff out on social media. But despite that, it is clear that this isn’t a pervasive movement in media in Japan, although it is getting better like it is in the rest of the world.

The problem begins and ends with the writer behind the character. If Nomura had even given a fraction of the same treatment he gave other characters like Riku got during the entirety of the series, the female cast of this game would be so much better off. Instead he treats them like props.

I thought Kingdom Hearts was a little different. Of course the female characters were driven by their interactions with their male counterparts and women were outnumbered by a huge margin, but the game’s depictions of Aqua and even Xion stood out as outliers among most shonen-inspired media. They were strong in their own ways. Even Namine felt intriguing despite her bare-bones appearances in the series. So to go from what we had in previous games to this is insane.

I thought this series was done with being a shonen-fest after KH2.

Depending on how I feel after I finish KH3, I’ll decide how I want to engage with this franchise in the future. As it stands right now I’m just utterly disappointed on this aspect.

The easy fix for this problem is to hire a writer but that won’t happen since Nomura has been unrestrained as the script writer since 2006.
 

brandedkarma

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It feels like Nomura went full Naruto with KH3 and I say this as a fan of both. Kingdom Hearts and Naruto have had a lot of similarities already (though a lot of them are regular tropes and shonen tropes) but the crappy way in which Nomura wrote his female characters in this game just reminds me of how poor Kishimoto was with the female characters in Naruto.
 

Sephiroth0812

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I'm having a strange deja-vu back to the time when KH II was new.


Wasn't that title also a hot mess that relied too much on an overload of general shonen tropes?
 

destinykh

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Lol yeah, the fact that 12 of the original 13 Organisation members are male has long indicated to me that this is not a feminist, or equal representation, series.

You're telling me of ALL the people in the world, males are the ones who have strong hearts, worthy to become humanoid Nobodies?

And I know we have answers now as to why these specific 13 characters for Organisation XIII, but when KH2 came out, 'strong hearts' was all that was given with regards to Organisation membership.
 

Nukara

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I can’t let this go. It’s the worst thing they could have done for this series. And the only person we can blame is Nomura since he handcrafts the story himself and writes the script. This is all on him and it’s clear he doesn’t see it as a problem. He doesn’t know how to write female characters. His comments about people liking Aqua back in the BBS days makes more sense now. He didn’t understand the appeal of her character and didn’t think people would be drawn to her character type because he personally did not feel drawn to what he had written.

And then they just nerf her in the game. Sure, gameplay wise we get to play as her and she’s badass, but storywise she is treated so poorly.

And I don’t know how many times I can complain about Kairi without reiterating in shock that Nomura never intended to develop her in a meaningful manner and it is as clear as day now. She is just a device—a vehicle for Sora’s affections and motivations in the latter half of the game. She amounts to nothing more but the love interest that sits there and dies to give the hero his driving force to fight. I’m so disappointed.

I don’t think this is just an Asian culture thing. We have plenty of good female characters from Japanese media, and from shonem series at that. Obviously those tend to be more of an outlier than the norm, but we see these piss-poor depictions of women all across various cultures in media. Only in the last decade have we seen a major paradigm shift in how media approaches female character development now that people are more likely to call this stuff out on social media. But despite that, it is clear that this isn’t a pervasive movement in media in Japan, although it is getting better like it is in the rest of the world.

The problem begins and ends with the writer behind the character. If Nomura had even given a fraction of the same treatment he gave other characters like Riku got during the entirety of the series, the female cast of this game would be so much better off. Instead he treats them like props.

I thought Kingdom Hearts was a little different. Of course the female characters were driven by their interactions with their male counterparts and women were outnumbered by a huge margin, but the game’s depictions of Aqua and even Xion stood out as outliers among most shonen-inspired media. They were strong in their own ways. Even Namine felt intriguing despite her bare-bones appearances in the series. So to go from what we had in previous games to this is insane.

I thought this series was done with being a shonen-fest after KH2.

Depending on how I feel after I finish KH3, I’ll decide how I want to engage with this franchise in the future. As it stands right now I’m just utterly disappointed on this aspect.

The easy fix for this problem is to hire a writer but that won’t happen since Nomura has been unrestrained as the script writer since 2006.
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