Spot Check (Mostly Genre and Gender)

Random thoughts and reality check, on the aforementioned topics to the aforementioned degree.

• I think all you need to know about where far too many people are coming from, is summed up in a comment I read on one of those articles about "sexism" in games (by which they mostly mean "Japan refusing to go along with fads in the Western games industry"). The comment was, "FemShep is the best female character I've seen in a long time."
  
  Know what the joke there is? FemShep is the female version of Shepard, in Mass Effect. Only...Shepard is canonically male. FemShep is a re-skin and dub of a character written as male. Being a re-skin of a man automatically takes FemShep out of the running for "best female character", like being a re-skin of Peach takes Daisy out of the running for "best Smash Bros character". It is a gender-feminism self-parody, and I have no indication the person who said it meant it other than sincerely.
• You will hear, in discussions of things like various kinds of nudity in anime, or the fact tentacle hentai exists because of censorship (which is true), that the Japanese had no nudity taboo prior to Westernization. Which...if that were true, why did they wear clothes? They had different nudity taboos, although not that different if your country was never Puritan; but does anyone actually think "I was seen naked, now I can never be married" was a concept originating at the Meiji Restoration?
  
  We actually do know, in quite some detail, what the sexual ethics and modesty concepts of pre-Meiji Japan were. They were the standard Neo-Confucian ones, not the free-loving utopia people seem to be imagining. For instance, in urban Japanese society, it was kinky for a man to be in love with his wife, or a woman to enjoy sex with her husband. A married woman was the mother of her husband's heirs, not his lover in any sense at all. That was actually the case up until the "kasutori literature" movement—which is named after the cheap rotgut vodka they had to drink because of post-war shortages.
• Much was made of a conservative writer, at the time, claiming that the first Mass Effect's sex scenes made the game pornographic. It is true that they're not explicit. But...why do they exist? Leaving to one side whether you ever need to depict sex in real time, graphically or not, in fiction (you pretty much don't, at least 98% of the time it's as unnecessary as blow-by-blow pooping scenes), interspecies sex is a thing like faster-than-light travel, i.e. almost entirely impossible.
  
  Only, we grandfather in FTL for the simple reason it lets our plots happen. Interspecies sex advances no plots whatsoever. If your work has, as a major suspension-of-disbelief issue, something only included to excite prurient interest? It may not actually be porn but it's in the same spirit; it may not require societal outcry but it should be called out on its breathtaking puerility. I mean seriously, what are you, in tenth grade?
  
  Oh wait, these are the people who brought us Dragon Age. Stupid question.
• Hey, uh, you know the whole "Chosen One" idea? And how people always link it to Joseph Campbell-Hero's Journey-monomyth? Yeah. Um. Which mythic heroes are actually "chosen ones"? Because I can't think of any.
  
  Seriously, all the mythological heroes I can think of who remotely conform to the Hero's Journey model are not "chosen" in any meaningful way, any more than they were "chosen" to be omnivorous apex predators. Because their heroism is usually just a part of their nature—because they're usually the children of gods. Their mothers might've been chosen, but them? No, they're just going into the family business.
  
  I have a feeling there's also some kind of misplaced syncretism mixed up in here—Moses and the rest of the prophets are "chosen" in some sense, for example, and that's a common misconception about what being "anointed" means (hint, the "oint" part actually shares a root with "ointment"), but Judaeo-Christian figures otherwise conform quite poorly to the "monomyth".
  
  The whole "Chosen One" concept seems to have been chimerically hacked together out of scraps of other concepts, and I'd really like to know where it comes from. I'm thinking "post-Tolkien fantasy made it up to avoid having to figure out why this schlub's our hero", actually.
• Much is made of how everything nowadays—movie posters, for instance, and increasingly movies themselves—is orange and blue. It's gotten to the point where pointing it out is annoying, like being the guy who says there's no sound in space (rockets shouldn't be laid out like barges, either, but how often do you hear about that?). But how come nobody ever asks about the other options?
  
  See, orange and blue work well together because they're opposites. There are two other sets of opposites on a six-color wheel (and we really consider there to be only six colors, since English thinks "blue"/azure/cyan is the same color as "indigo"/blue)—yellow goes with purple and green goes with red.
  
  But we can't use yellow and purple without looking like the movie was sponsored by the Sinestro Corps (seriously, think how many villains have "purple and yellow" as their color-scheme). And red and green is Christmas. Our civilization brought this blue and orange apocalypse upon itself, by already having its alternatives bound to emotional hotkeys.
• Mars One is a company that claims to be recruiting people for Mars colonization (hence the name), and purporting to make the whole thing profitable by having the colonists' training, and the colony itself, become a reality show. Let's just say people (okay, Cracked writers—they do count as people before the law) have compared that company's ads to North Korean propaganda films, for a reason.
  
  Namely, ain't happening. The Moon at its furthest is 135 times closer than Mars at its closest, and we realistically won't be setting foot on the Moon again for a decade at least. We probably won't be able to reach Mars till sometime after the mid-century mark. And there are very real reasons to want a manned presence on the Moon (it's much easier to build spaceships in 1/6 Earth's gravity, just for one). Mars, on the other hand, is basically a useless gravity well with bad weather (planet-wide dust storms with 60 mph winds that can affect entire seasons), the very last place a spacefaring culture as rudimentary as ours has any business in.
• It is interesting how stupid or dishonest or both many people are, or rather it is galling, given that they then dare to argue with you. A while back I was discussing medieval mores with a person, who claimed that the Church considered the "missionary" position the only licit sex-act. I asked him to produce the Church document which made this claim.
  
  He linked me to an 11th-century (I think) Italian comic poem wherein the woman-on-top position is regarded by all the characters as kinky. I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure a Church document and a farce in verse are two different things, but then again I'm not mentally disabled. It's like if a 29th-century person should claim that this society considered pastry capable of consenting to sex, and when asked to produce a legal document as evidence, offers American Pie.
• And seriously, Tolkien's protagonists are not Chosen Ones, not in the literary sense. There is a sense, of course, in which the Bagginses are "chosen" (by Manwe or directly by Eru Iluvatar), but the only person who talks about it that way is Gandalf, who you will recall is in the retinue of that first guy and thus has an "inside baseball" view of the matter. But Gandalf talks about everyone else being chosen, too—Gollum is as much a chosen one to him as Frodo is, remember.
  
  As far as the Hobbits themselves, and everyone else who isn't one of the Ainur, are concerned, the Ring is simply the duty that happened to fall to Bilbo and Frodo, the way that another Ring is the duty that happened to fall to John-117. Nobody says the Chief is a Chosen One (although Cortana is his Gandalf—she even died on a bridge fighting a big scary godlike thing, and we all know she ain't gonna stay dead).