Why Toby Fox is NOT a Pervert

[Lutras]

This is the most autistic thread I've ever read in my entire life

[Lutras]

This is the most autistic thread I've ever read in my entire life

Chara's tetas I do hail though....

[Guest]

It is a product that is purely marketing, and so the audience that is against marketing picked it up and marketed it. It will happen again with a similar ugly and worthless piece of work.

People try to ascribe worth to it, and so you end up with autism. Judge a book by it' cover, because that is the book.

[Svevlad]

Anthropomorphizing animals and other creatures is an ancient tradition (and occasionally vice versa), especially in Europe (Whites btw), what we call "furries" are just another Gay Nigger Communist Zionist Occupied Government or whatever the fuck you wanna call it ploy to ruin another aspect of our culture.

As for Toby Fox, he's just one of the few remaining actual normies; though to some daring to connect "normie" and "creation" is anathema, you can easily tell this from his work. He's a sensible Obama-voting centrist who to some extent still thinks that "internet politics" and "the woke" are just a few loud kooky people online and aren't actually real (one of the few instances where the "mainstream" is more correct than the woke (which doesn't actually exist), insofar as the mainstream is the actual woke, making it nonexistent as well btw). I seriously suspect he's a type to jack off to pokemon or atrocious Mexican deviantart "works" and if you suspect that he is, then you've internalized the faggot narrative anyway.

As for the fanbase, there isn't much to discuss. Most "fans" today are obsessive trannies (both literally and "spiritually (not real btw)), so if you judge anything by the fan base, you just become a reverse tranny, a mere contrarian, who lets other people decide what you think - implying you can't judge a thing for yourself.

As OP said, there's nothing explicitly "gay faggot" about the game. It doesn't order you to be gay faggot. There are no "opinions" preached, you can decide by yourself if it's "gay faggot" or "keyed Hitlerian" or anything if you want to. Just because a bunch of nigger cattle tranny fans of the game say it's "gay faggot" doesn't make it true, just like how when the real-life soyjak film-maker and his even more soyed internet entourage says that his cool action movie is actually an anti-war satire piece doesn't make it true. You can actually contextualize and interpret anything however you want, who's gonna stop you?

[oyakodon_khan]

Why does Toby Fox share the same naming scheme as Tony Hawk?
What are the implications of this? How are they connected? Are there more of them?

[anthony]

Okay, sorry, I started writing this yesterday and then got distracted and lost it. I'm very overdue to post in this thread, I played Undertale even, and did discuss it elsewhere, but never got around to here. Kind of missed the boat on it. But I suppose it's all right now, this thread can get a second run.



As I just said, I did play Undertale. And I liked it fine. I discussed it at some length in a couple of other places, so a few people already know what I'll think. I'll use the shoutbox discussion to give myself prompting and direction as I'm still not really sure what to put here.

Virtue said

My theory as to why we didn't receive the third Lavonranson post and Anthony reply is this: I think the Undertale thread is where the supremacy of Japanese taste in video games gave out, since the game used Japanese conventions and did something novel with it, there were no counter arguments beyond furries le bad and the Japanese did it better. The game also receiving Japanese praise was the killing blow, PIGSAW had no proper response. This awful game being congruent with Japanese tradition of video game taste and culture meant that, the said culture was growing decrepit. So Anthony, Lavonranson and PIGSAW came together in a secret 'cord server, and reached a consensus where the Japanophilic tendencies of Toby Fox were to be downplayed and the Japanese praise the game received was to be downplayed as well. This consensus ensured that the Anthonian sentiment of Japanese taste above all would stay unchallenged.

I think this is mostly structured as an attempt to prompt me into talking, so I'm not going to make too much of the particulars or general severity of the post.

There was no ulterior motive to letting the thread settle down where it did, it's just that nobody posted further. If the beliefs alleged were held by me and believed to be correct, why wouldn't I post about them? If I have no counter argument for something wouldn't I change my mind? I would like to think that we're just having a bit of fun here.

But of course I haven't been mentally cornered in any such way. I'm not hiding, just found that the thread took off without me. Let me catch up now.

Undertale. It's a western game built on Japanese conventions as you say. Saying it's built on Japanese conventions might even be an understatement. Its almost entirely built on Japanese ideas to the almost total exclusion of any western influences we can cite. It's a western work which emerged from the Japanese gaming tradition almost as though the western one never even existed. The strongest western influence seems to have been Homestuck, a piece of online multimedia which is itself heavily japan-influenced, and something which Fox himself did some work for.

Fox himself freely admits his influences as far as I know. You call the game "something novel", like it's using old Japanese parts to make something fundamentally new. I disagree, and I actually think Fox might even disagree too. I believe that a significant driver in the game's success was that it was seen as something novel by a certain kind of westerner who is only familiar with Japanese conventions via memes (every JRPG is 5000 hours of grinding line battles and nothing else). There are probably people who thought that "talking" to an "enemy" in a "battle" was a mindblowing conceptual leap of genius, and not one of the first things the Japanese did with the western idea of an "rpg battle". There are people who never played Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga who found the idea of a JRPG "town" being its own weird little anime narrative sequence full of goofy games and interactive sequences riffing off of the logic of video games to be the most amazing thing ever. If your mental picture of what a JRPG is is all just memes this looks like the Japanese getting owned. But it's not. It's a white (effectively in this context, haven't seen his 23andme) guy doing Japanese stuff.

Maybe we could say Fox let peoples' excitement carry them away when praising his work. I'm not going to say an artist has to talk people down. Money is nice. Praise is nice. But this game's reception is sort of like how I felt about Quentin Tarantino when I was 13. If you haven't seen Drunken Master Kill Bill's fights look like some kind of miracle. But of course it's not a miracle. Tarantino is building using stuff he knows works. It's all stuff he saw before. He's consulting that stuff, and in the case of Kill Bill even bringing in the same people to do it again for him.

But the popular gaming audience is not very mature, very ignorant, and shockingly racist frankly (racism is real but only towards the japanese). And of course the critical audience is just an extension of the popular audience if not worse. I would imagine all of the retarded copywriter slaves working at IGN and wherever else were all equally ignorant.

Tarantino's reputation stays grounded because popular film culture, while quite bad, is nowhere near as retarded as video game culture. People could see what Tarantino was doing, or at least had older not retarded guys to tell them, he is appraised accurately, and what he is in fact doing is not taken as a mark against him. It is just appreciation. You are not owning a Tarantino fan by pointing out the old movies he's building his own out of. Anybody who's not an idiot poser will find that cool. It's more insight into the mind and tastes and intentions of Tarantino. The films become richer as their source becomes less obscured.

But I can imagine a certain kind of Tarantino fan existing who would feel threatened by such knowledge and would not appreciate being told. And I believe that much of Undertale's praise and following, especially in the aspiration poser circles when it was new, were just such types. Fox was building his game out of japanese parts, but I also believe he was consciously playing to contemporary western cultural standards of the very specific era of its release (2015; the late obama dark age). He knew better than to actually take anything from western prestige games, because they're dogshit. This era is largely forgotten and I want to write about and draw attention to it. This was the time when people were in awe of the oscar-worthy writing of Bioshock Infinite. Early video essays about Spec Ops: The Line. Games are ART now, Dad. We will call these games Obamavaniabornelikes.



Fox saw this, and knew what these people were looking for. They were looking for it so hard they would go into a frenzy at anything close enough and just hallucinate it into another stunning and brave ludometa statement on the horrors of war (as I've written elsewhere Spec Ops the Line literally doesn't make sense on the most fundamental levels and is most readily read as a pro american work, but was taken as a genius anti-American anti-war thing because that's what was desired).

Many may have forgotten that this game started with a Kickstarter. A very meme-driven format. To succeed there you need to either be very lucky or very savvy when it comes to reading and playing people. Fox is obviously the latter. Not a mark against him. Obviously it makes him a very strong artist in certain ways. Or at least great at crafting sentimental shit. However you prefer to read all of this.

Bear with me, this is a little hard to explain. Where I'm going is that what Undertale is, on its most basic level it's a JRPG homage. A big sentimental remix of popular and historic tropes and conventions. But it is also simultaneously built to be taken as something entirely different while not being that. It's a JRPG homage tactically presented and marketed and timed to be interpreted by status-anxious westerners as a stunningly original and political art-game which is about how violence is bad. It's absolutely not that in my opinion, but was built to deliberately trick stupid people into being able to make that mistake if they choose to.

I'll leave it to readers to decide if being both able and willing to do this makes Fox a great or terrible artist. My immediate thought is that this is the kind of meta audience fuckery Neil Druckmann
fancies himself capable. But the fact he has to constantly insist he is doing it is proof against that. While as far as I know I'm the only one suggesting that Fox did this. Fox made a JRPG history homage, and left enough clues and signals for it to be taken as an Obamavaniabornelike without actually tainting the work with the real essential traits of those works which made them awful (nobody plays any of them anymore, except me because of my historical interest).

Fox obviously hates these people even if he would never admit it (probably wouldn't) since he moved to Japan. The most right-wing vote one can make with their feet. He won't even speak their language anymore. If he could he'd probably get a Tropic Thunder style surgery to change his race.

Forgive that aside, third important point of what Undertale is and how it was taken. What it was to The Japanese. The main subject of Virtue's little conspiracy. The Japanese really enjoy Undertale. What does that mean and what do we make of it? Forgive me, I haven't consulted any Japanese guys about this yet (if I do I'll get back to you), but it looks fairly mundane to me for the most part. It was a PC game that was cheap, successful, familiar, and easy to run. Just very novel on multiple counts. "Hey look at this cool western thing that's not really scary or different and it runs on your toaster and it's like our stuff but an American made it isn't that cool and weird?"

The charge is that "the supremacy of japanese taste lost". That's a very strange statement. Again. Virtue said:

Japan and Japanese taste lost when they thought Undertale was a good game, the fate of those who don't read Icycalm.

I think Undertale is basically a "good game". Did I "lose" too? Did AmarnaForum now "lose"? Am I "decrepit"?

Let's read a few more comments before we continue...

JohnTrent said:

To put my own spin on it (I really don't want to post in the Toby Fox thread since I have only played Undertale for a half hour total and am indifferent to Toby Fox as a person), the Japanese can receive Western cultural products but how they continue to make art is another story. I am sure that some Japanese audiences do watch capeshit to a degree, but how affected are they really by viewing these movies? If I have your argument down correctly, Undertale receiving praise calls Japanese taste into question. What I wonder is this: will a more prominent role of Western-imported art change the nature of Japanese art?

Then Virtue said:

"Undertale receiving praise calls Japanese taste into question", yes this is indeed my argument.

"will a more prominent role of Western-imported art change the nature of Japanese art?" we should look to answer this question, along with this one, will a more Western audience for Japanese art change the nature of Japanese art?

What is the specific charge against Japanese taste being made here?

Before you answer I'll give my own brief reading of Japanese taste. As I see it the Japanese are very naive, not really heavily socialised in the neurotic sense compared to us (low political consciousness in the average person), while not that interested in western works on the whole they are very easily flattered by western interest in them still (vestigial American prestige for a while longer yet). 

Ghosts of Tsushima I think is a great example of all of this playing out. This game did quite well in Japan as I understand it, and I can imagine why. If you basically haven't touched a AAA western game in years, if ever, then the rather tired assassin'screed2vaniabornelike format will look kind of neat and exciting, rather than the most boring thing in the world. And the heavy handed production values and western-style movie-like presentation are impressive the first few times. And Gaijin made a game about your country. Isn't that exciting and cool that they care about your history?

Am I personally interested in the game? No. Am I tearing my hair out in despair and confusion over the Japanese interest in it? Also no. It's probably a perfectly fine game even. Just not of interest to me.

This is my answer to Virtue's prompting, and the ball is now in his court again, if he'd care to answer. And if he was just trying to get me to finally post in this thread, good job. Of all the calls to post yours made it through.


Now some additional specific thoughts on Mister Fox and his work. I was talking about Undertale more as phenomena than a specific work above. What I'll say for Fox, tying into all the above, he really knows how to work an audience. He is great at pop-sentimentalism. He really knows those fine subtle beats that make the typical emotional anime thing climax work. The conflicts, the slow, and then successively faster revelations, the human stakes, the apparent earnestness and openness of the emotions coming into play, Undertale's ending is like the emotional programming of Joe Hisaishi music at the end of a Miyazaki movie paired with the base sentimental strike of Pikachu crying at the end of the pokemon movie. He's fucking merciless, he's totally calculating, but it's all relatively nice, so do I really mind? For a piece of software you can blast through in a few hours that runs on a toaster he can take you on quite a run if you're willing to get into the spirit of things. It's a funny little remix of stuff that works in other games, neat to see it all understood and successfully riffed on, I can mostly enjoy all of that end to end, and it's a work with a lot of personality. You can say it's shallow or stupid, tropes piled on tropes, but curation is an expressive act. Which parts of old Japanese game culture fascinate him is somewhat interesting. And, there's the fact that this leads into Deltarune, which I only played a bit of (sorry Lavranson).

Probably the most important thing I can say for Undertale as a work of pop-art. Is it worth the time? Alone, I'd say only if you're interested in the broader Undertale phenomena. Taken as the first part of something that leads into Deltarune, maybe there's a lot more to it and it is just plainly worth it. I think that remains to be seen, but it does seem like in Deltarune Fox is able to really be himself a lot more. He no longer needs to play pretend that he's an Obama-warrior and can start actually expressing himself at some point maybe. Unfortunately Deltarune is not finished, so we can't say yet. But I think where it goes will determine whether or not I consider Undertale worth time for its own sake (or rather, as a window into Toby Fox). We will see if Fox is a real artist, or just a guy messing around with The Best of Japan Gaming History who's good at playing on peoples' emotions.

[Cyber Viking]

You know Anthony, Ghost of Tshumshima might not not have much to say meaningfully to the typical western mind, it does have something to say to the Japanese mind. Which at the end of the day, despite all of America's attempts to destroy it, still fucking loves the idea of the Samurai. Of Bushido. Honor, tradition, justice, conquest. The Samurai is a warrior of light who destroys all falsehoods with his powers of good, the Samurai is Samurai Jack. Machines and false Gods fall to his holy powers, for the very Gods are on his side.

Only, in real life, the Samurai lost. The Samurai fought with honor, they all sacrificed their lives for the Gods, Emperor, Shogun, and people. Yet the forces of darkness cheated. The servants of Aku had great and terrible technological machines to do the fighting for them them. The forces of darkness are cowards who refuse a proper duel with swords. They instead prefer to poison and corrupt, slaughter the innocent, and turn brother against brother. In Ghost of Tshumshima, the forces of darkness are symbolized by the Mongols. But in real life, they're symbolized by the left, and America.

Ghost of Tsushima's main villain is Khotun Khan, an evil man of immense strength who refuses to fight fairly. Khotun is but another bureaucratic warlord of the Empire of Rape, and already has plans to murder his cousins in order to usurp their thrones. Khotun is a man of strength, but no character.

Ghost of Tshumshima is a story of a Samurai learning that the only way to fight the forces of darkness is through fighting fire with fire. For good to prevail, the good must use the methods of the evil, else their people will end up as nothing but slaves and servants to that evil (Once its' done raping them) I haven't finished the game, but I found the ideas in the game interesting. The gameplay is middling, but I don't think that really matters to why the Japanese like it.

Ghost of Tshumshima is also a beautiful game, Japanese like beautiful things. Simple as.

[BillyONare]

Bro I had such crazy ludonarrative dissonance yesterday. Had to call in sick to work.