#eple

That said though, you can see some hardcore regressive Japanese attitudes at play in this game if you stop to look.

For one thing, none of the female characters so far have been important to this game at all outside of being the love interest of a male character, which is annoying and boring as shit. I guess Yukizome in Mirai-hen wasn’t enough, we need to give Akamatsu that treatment too. Literally the exact. same. treatment. (just less justified). I’m serious. Tell me how a girl in this game is important to the overall story without being a love interest.

Second, the game likes to reward characters who fit a certain ideal that Japanese society wants from women: i.e., are they willing to give up their career and own aspirations in order to raise a family? You see this most obviously in the Iruma and HaruMaki plotlines. As Shinguuji says, neither of them fit the acceptable mould for women in Japanese society, and they both pay for it. For Iruma, she dies and gets posthumously trash-talked, despite being more objectively useful than most of the other characters--no, her legacy is being raunchy, not her investions. For HaruMaki, her entire arc is presented as “oh, I’m a badass assassin struggling to find my humanity despite my years of psychological abuse...turns out what I was waiting for was having a dude look down on me and see me as a ‘real woman’, which means making assumptions about me based on my appearance rather than my abilities!” Like seriously. Does Momota ever in this game go “Hey yeah, we need to rely on HaruMaki’s awesome fighting skills to get us out of this!”? No, he fucking resorts to shit like “women shouldn’t use weapons” and “cute girls can’t possibly have killed people”. The fact that the story acts like this is an admirable trait of his rather than a character flaw is like fucking come on.

Third, this game will rub these hokey, unearned straight ships in your face like they’re some kind of earth-shattering love, when they’re at best teenage crushes. If you want to explore how being a teenager makes tiny, insignificant things in life feel like they’re a big deal, that’s pretty interesting, but don’t frame your story to make it seem like holding a girl’s hand once and attaching yourself to her hip for a few days is at all some kind of timeless love for the ages. Both of the main relationships in this game have the exact same depth and narrative weight as the Monotaru/Monofunny saga in Chapter 4, yet are, at least at this point in the game, trying to be played completely straight. (I may be drunk and ranty, but puns are forever in my chamber.)

Fourth, on the flipside, this game is so terrified of admitting anyone might be anything other than straight that it actually goes out of its way to gal pal the one relationship in it that isn’t boy + girl, unintentionally suggesting that a dude fucking his sister is preferable.

And finally, there’s all this religious undertone shit with the Gephel Plan and whatnot. Now, I do not think that this is exactly what is going on in the game because a) Ouma’s a goddamn liar, and b) like fuck a DR game is going to blow its mystery load in Chapter 5, but the idea of sending a bunch of dumb teenagers, talented as they may be, into space to restart the human race feels really...what’s the word I’m searching for...totalitarian? And also like the set up for a shitty American post-apocalyptic Hunger Games rip-off? It’s just this presumptuousness that no one could possibly be anything other than straight that makes me feel like I’m living back in the old days.

There’s a definite reproduction motif in the game overall: the Monokumarz existence, the shit with Monofunny and the bug in the Chapter 4 trial, HaruMaki’s fake talent, etc. Which means that now I’m just steeling myself for the inevitable “we’re going to validate all the boring het ships in this fandom by having their kids be the cast of this game” bs.

I am fucking furious that I sat through DR3, which went out of its way to not only diminish the trope-breaking female villain the franchise had but kill off every new female character AND reduce the existing ones to revolving around a male lead, only to have to play this fucking game which promised to be a departure from that shit before U-turning right back into it.