interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
I’m not sure I agree, to me the difference between JRPG and RPG is like the difference between anime and animation. In a western audience, the label has been coopted by games closer to home with tropes we’re more familiar with. That doesn’t make the labeling of Japanese media othering in that sense, so much as it allows us to understand what contexts it is both from and for.
I can see how, to some people, it might be a turn-off (just see all the people that turn their nose up at anime conceptually even if they’d like it) – see the people that may have seen edge of tomorrow in theaters and enjoyed it, but would likely sneer at being told to read all you need is kill, differences in media notwithstanding. But as the media landscape changes and grows it’s useful to have different ways to sort of illustrate the differences in audience as well as the differences in creative context.
Is there a possibility that the usage of anime is also othering? In Japan, “anime” means animation, and if you ask a Japanese person what their favorite anime is, they might say Disney movies. If you translate “anime” into Japanese, it will become “Japanese anime”
However, it seems that there are some animators who think that there is a difference between anime and animation.
One of my favorite takes on the difference between anime vs animation is that anime is an artistic movement. In some sense it might be othering in the sense that it’s a genre of art that someone might be more or less predisposed to enjoying, but imo it’s not different from “musical” or “visual novel” in that regard – neither of which is necessarily othering implicitly, but people do tend to have strong opinions about their merit as art or the quality of that movement