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accirax · 1 year

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Nene’s Role in Wonderlands x Showtime

The release of The Miniature Garden’s Coral seems to have confirmed some things I’ve recently speculated might transpire in future Wonderlands x Showtime events-- namely regarding Nene and how she may actually be the most important member of the troupe-- so, let’s talk about them! I’ll be using zui’s lyrics video for my translations, so hopefully they’re accurate.

With the past couple of WxS events in mind, it’s easy to see that this 3DMV is also about endings. While the MV begins in a sunny blue afternoon light...

...the characters and set eventually bask in a beautiful sunset orange, signaling the end of the day. The lyrics even mention being “between the end of the blue sky and the beginning of the night sky,” further emphasizing that we’re in the middle of the story. When the sky is blue, the troupe expresses uncertainty: Rui mentions that he feels lost, and Tsukasa, scared. But eventually, Nene admits that, in this beginning period, she was “spoiled by the sound of the waves,” AKA that the commotion surrounding WxS’s formation led to a troupe that became a source of comfort for all of them.

Once the sun sets, there are a lot of “even ifs.” Nene sings about how she’ll continue to sing this song, even if things are starting to look unsteady and she’s not sure if she should proceed. However, by the end of the song, she resolves to "still sing this song” while keeping up a smile.

I think that the fact that Nene says she will sing this song is incredibly important, because, as established, this song is about endings. Meanwhile, back in Mr. Showtime, Tsukasa firmly didn’t want WxS to end, and was holding out until closing time. Rui’s What Sort of Ending Are You Wishing For? and Emu’s Starry Sky Orchestra seemingly both acknowledge an ending as well, but it’s not at all easy. Rui seems to fall into a resigned depression at the thought, keeping a whimsical facade up when the very thought of separating kills him inside. The thought haunts him, MV riddled with hourglasses that he can’t get out of his head. Emu can only tolerate taking the first step towards a breakup with tooth-rottingly sugarcoated promises of eternal togetherness and literally holding hands as they go (I love her btw this is not Emu slander). She never even says the word “end,” only “tomorrow.”

Rui, Emu, and Tsukasa are basically Denialx3. Rui tries to deny his emotions regarding disbanding, Emu tries to deny that the ending is coming at all, and Tsukasa tries to deny that there’s nothing he can do to keep them from inevitably drifting apart. And that’s where Nene comes in again.

Rui’s dream is to perform technically complex shows that will resonate with an audience. He can do that from Phoenix Wonderland. Emu’s dream is to keep the Wonder Stage up and operating forever. She has to do that from Phoenix Wonderland. Tsukasa’s dream is to become the number one world star and make everyone smile. While this would likely take him away from the park, in another story, I could see it being possible that, in the end, Tsukasa decides that making the people in his local community happy is more important than trying to change the entire world. Thus, he could also follow his dream from Phoenix Wonderland, even if it’s not ideal.

But then there’s Nene. Her dream is, and always has been, to perform in Broadway musicals. Broadway is a live performance in New York City. There is no possible way for Nene to get what she wants while staying in Phoenix Wonderland. And that is possibly why Wonderlands x Showtime’s ending is the easiest for her to process.

Now, I’m not trying to say that Nene doesn’t love her friends. She adores them. Her three previous commissions have proven that. It’s the amount of love she has for them that will propel her to make what is actually the best choice for their dreams. Nene is the little mermaid, both when swimming freely the oceans with a beautiful, unstoppable song, and when enduring pain herself to stand with and for the ones she loves. Her friends, in this situation... are coral.

Remember that coral, “blurred” and uncertain in the water and “stained orange by the setting sun”? The miniature garden is Phoenix Wonderland; the coral is Emu, Rui, and Tsukasa; and that coral is stained orange by its desperation to keep rereading the final chapter instead of closing the book for now and putting it away to revisit in the future. Coral, while a beautiful living organism, is also completely static.

Static like stone statues which, at least by my interpretation, is what the rest of WxS turns into at the end of the 3DMV. The three of them (and Kaito) are paralyzed with the fear of the suffering an ending would bring. Only Nene is alive and human to be the one to show the group the benefits it can bring as well.

There are a lot of aspects of this song and Nene’s entire personality that lead me to believe that she will be the one to bring about change in WxS. First, she most often “has the braincell,” so to speak. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she performs this song with Kaito, the most mature of the WxS vocaloids, either. During April Fool’s 2023, she was put into the Solid Heart class. One might think that troupe leader Tsukasa should be the Solid Heart, and that shy Nene should be the Cautious Heart, but they (accurately) sorted it the other way.

Nene is a very strong-willed person. In other stories, it might be seen as a negative that Nene is always the most hesitant one to get into shenanigans, or that she would even dare to be the one to suggest a WxS split in the first place. What an ungrateful wet blanket Nene is, willing to throw away her friends for the sake of her own selfish dream. But in this story, staying at Phoenix Wonderland isn’t really what will make Rui or Tsukasa happy, and even Emu may have to graduate to focusing on the entire company instead of just one stage someday.

Nene’s friends brought her out of the darkness and into the light of day, and she is so grateful for that. She knows how amazing they are, which is how she knows that they can make more friends and continue to do even more amazing things in the future if they can bear to leave their high school part-time jobs behind and enter the real world, just like her.

So, Nene’s role is to be Wonderlands x Showtime’s guiding light. She’ll tell Rui what sort of ending she’s wishing for, and then console him when he can’t repress his tears. She’ll be the one to hold Emu’s hand while they take that next step into tomorrow. Her three best friends helped her to grow from the loner who operated a robot from the theme park bushes, and she’ll help them step out of that theme park and be who they truly want to be.

There is one other thing I wanted to mention, though...

Tsukasa.

As I mentioned previously, while all three of Rui, Emu, and Tsukasa are in denial, Tsukasa is the most actively in opposition to an ending. He’s also the troupe leader, and the sole creator of the Wonderland Sekai. If someone is going to actively try to stop Nene from suggesting separation, it’s definitely going to at least start with him. But as Nene has already stated in The Miniature Garden’s Coral, despite any opposition that makes her question whether or not she should proceed, she already plans to continue singing her beliefs about a bittersweet yet timely goodbye.

And, their conflict is something that’s basically been foreshadowed from the beginning too, right? Nene has always roasted Tsukasa, giving a counterpoint to his blindingly bright worldview. In upcoming chapters, however, I believe that may start to transform from simple fun banter into a genuine conflict with clear sides drawn...

And THAT’S why ColoPale gave them Childish War.

Nenekasa nation get ready, ‘cause I don’t think this is the last Nene and Tsukasa fight we’re going to see.

#project sekai #pjsekai #nene kusanagi #tsukasa tenma #rui kamishiro #emu otori #wonderlands x showtime #as always thank you so much for reading!!!#i can post things about the rest of wxs too not just tsukasa i love all of them #on that note though i was reading something lately about angstkasa #and how a lot of the people who haven't read the source material mischaracterize him (and others)#and uh well. i haven't actually read much of the source material #so i'm SUPER sorry if i'm mischaracterizing him here it is not at all my intention #i just hear a lot about what happens on JP and have thoughts and feelings about it so i post #my theories regarding sekai are always meant to be a best case scenario #where the stories are as interesting and the characters are as deep as possible #i fully acknowledge that what i wrote here might not actually be true #i don't want to get anyone's hopes up about something that i have no guarantees will actually happen #i just want to have fun while we're all here y'know? :)#that is all. i can't wait to see where the story goes from here #my theories #WXS

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dimiclaudeblaigan · 9 months

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Wrt localization, I can understand wanting to change let's say a joke if the context of the joke would be lost on people due to play on the language. But when someone changes the content of a story and characterization to the point where it's a completely different experience and then they have the audacity to say "have respect for the localizers. You support gg" or some nonsense in response to criticism, it's really disingenuous.

Not sure if you saw when I mentioned it before, but yeah. There are times when they have to make cultural changes (Pokemon did it with food to make more sense to the western audience!), change jokes that won't land in translation, etc. Those are reasonable changes that have to be made or the audience will just be confused/uninterested/disconnected.

Sometimes there are also jokes that in different cultures would be deemed inappropriate (like the sex joke aimed at Edelgard in the middle of the night - that makes sense that it was removed because western culture would've been largely uncomfortable with it). Age differences also account for this, in that what's seen as appropriate to a teen audience in JP is not necessarily considered appropriate in the west.

My viewpoint toward localization is that it should only be that. Everything else should be a faithful translation as much as is able, i.e. doesn't alter the message given in the original script. It doesn't matter if the content is from Japan, if it's a JRPG or what have you. If it was of French origin, I'd still say the same thing: that the messages and narrative of the French originating story should be handled faithfully and should be telling the same story/characterizations/etc to all audiences in any location.

Obviously in translation you can't make everything one to one or the sentences would sound off and/or broken. That's why you reword things to have the sentences structurally accurate in the translated language. Doing that, however, should not involve changing the meaning behind the sentence or trying to sell a different narrative. Doing that becomes a different story, even if only in bits and pieces. When a story nudges really fuckin' hard trying to tell you something that's wrong is right or that something right is wrong, but that narrative is only added into a loc and didn't already exist, it's a disrespect toward the writers and their original intention.

Even if, yes, the writers were very bias toward Edelgard (which they were as that was, again, confirmed in an interview), it didn't come at the cost of other characters. It didn't come at the cost of Rhea being worse, Dimitri being worse, or Claude being worse. It didn't come at the cost of her allies all being disgusted by their enemies that they were invading. They loved Edelgard when they were writing her, but they didn't make that cloud how they treated other characters (and while yes, the Nabateans get largely ignored in favor of focusing on Edelgard and such, it's not at the cost of their characterization or to make them seem worse).

Even if the loc heaps praise upon praise toward Edelgard and that doesn't harm the original intent, it's what they do to other characters that disrespects the original content. It would be like if they took FE10/RD and had Ike (who was actually just and a good person) spouting nonsense about Micaiah that just wasn't true, hyping up his allies to kill her because she Must Die.

Personally, I'm no Micaiah fan. She was one of my most hated characters in the franchise until Edelgard (and Berandetta) showed up. I still am not fond of Micaiah and she's still pretty low on the rung for me. That said, I would not enjoy a narrative where Ike wrongfully labeled her and her allies and provided his people (and the Laguz Alliance by extension) a false narrative about her. If those things about her were true I wouldn't care, but they wouldn't be. Why does that not work for Ike? Because it's not who he is as a character to say those things, and thus if he did, it means something is off.

The original has some ??? points about Edelgard that favor her/lift her up, but again, it's not doing harm to other characters. Yeah, we get the whole "they are the enemy" stuff from her side, but like... that's the point. If you team up with her, you're on her side and are seeing the story through her perspective, which makes her enemies, well, the enemies. They're viewed in a bad light on that one route.

But when you actually come into contact with the characters in question? It's not as bad as she makes it out to be. She, as the protagonist of her own story, makes other named characters and their ways of living sound very bad because she views them negatively, but we don't actually see what she claims if we personally come into contact with those characters.

What the loc does is have her say those things, understandably from her side, but then trash the characters' very characterization and personality to match her and her/her allies' opinions of them. The characters reflect her views with no pushback whatsoever, when it should be that the pushback is how those characters she talks about behave.

There should be a dissonance between her thoughts about them and who they truly are. It should make you question, "is this really right?". You should feel bad when you kill genuinely good people (like Sylvain. You shouldn't feel like he's some trash scumbag, but feel upset about his death and find yourself questioning why he had to die - not cheering for his death).

Point being, the loc changed that stuff because ??? I guess they wanted Edelgard to shine at her very absolute brightest, and the only way to do that was to harp on all the characters who opposed her. I don't understand why they would do that tbh (like I know the intent, i.e. making her look good, but I don't know why they went to such lengths to vilify her enemies and not just say hey, maybe she's wrong about these people but I'm still going to fight for her, if fighting for her is what you decided to do. The one idea I have is the final paragraphs of this post).

It just makes it feel a lot like purist culture, where if you've sided with her than they can't possibly let her be actually bad and do bad things. You've sided with her, so she simply cannot be a villain! It makes the loc team seem afraid of a concept of siding with the villains, feeling the need to change it because it's BaD to play a game/route where you do that. It feels like it's portraying the idea that if you do bad things in a video game, you condone those bad things irl.

Whether that was their thought process or not, that's exactly what it comes off as, and that since they loved Edelgard they couldn't portray her poorly unless there was no other option. In the times they do finally portray her poorly via other characters, there's always pushback in some form, like someone defending her, giving her the benefit of the doubt after everything she'd already done and still intended to do, or being sad about fighting/killing her. In the original that was still there, but the loc just added to it - just by doing a whole lot of damage to other characters in the process.

Meanwhile with Rhea, there's always negative pushback. If she does something good, there's a negative thought following her good actions. Obviously there isn't space for that to happen literally every single time, but when possible it's there. Again, this is another thing the loc amped up, and I can only guess it's because she's the head of the Church (and churches are viewed as the enemy in most JPRGs) and the main person Edelgard opposes (with no acknowledgement from the loc team, about why that is, being a bad thing).

It's like, the one time there's a game where the Church isn't actually the enemy, they... made it so that the loc reflected that the Church is still actually the enemy. Churches being the enemy are so common that it was intentionally used in the original script as a red herring. You think they're gonna be the big bads because they always are in JRPGs.

The point of that was meant to fulfill itself as a red herring, making you focus on them and scrutinize everything they said and did even heavier than you would anyone else. It makes everything Edelgard does get swept under the rug and causes the player not to notice until it's fastballed at you. That's why you end up fighting her and not the Church except if you're specifically on her route.

That was lost in loc, of course, and it got so overwhelmingly popular in the west (which I do believe is a reason they did it to begin with, i.e. made the Church the baddies by western viewpoint because the west apparently eats that shit right up) that Hopes catered most strongly toward the western audience, making the Church the big bads (who... don't even do anything wrong whatsoever in this game and hardly even exist to do so, but I can only guess they got largely ignored because they were so hated, and less positive interaction with them meant less worry of killing innocent people/more not caring about them as the enemy) of two routes out of three; not because that was the original script's intent, but because they just went with what was popular even if it went against their home game's intention. I was pretty unsurprised to find out this went over very badly with JP players.

In other words the loc was so widely understood as the true canon/intent of the story (despite its vast and drastic changes) that Hopes was crafted around the loc more than it was the original script. The loc of Houses altered so much that it changed the perception of the audience consuming it, so whether the JP writers are aware that that's why the game was consumed the way it was or not, they just knew a chunk of the western audience loved Edelgard and hated Rhea.

When I play a game I want the same story and experience that everyone has playing it. I don't want to understand it differently than it's meant to be understood and was understood in the region it was created in. If it's a dark and mature themed game, it should stay that way. It western audiences can't handle that, then the game shouldn't be played by them whether it comes out in the west or not.

If you can't handle the content of a video game, you shouldn't play it, plain and simple. No amount of "oh but I like this portion of it!" changes the overall narrative that you can't handle and/or don't like (and you wouldn't know you like a part of it if you didn't play it at all, which you did play it despite knowing it's largely not for you. If you didn't know but play it and find out, you put it down and move on). The game's messages should not be altered to fit purists or baby the players. If it needs to be edited that strongly to work in the west, my feeling on it is that it should not be released in the west.

If it is released, the story should not be altered to baby its audience. If people do play it despite that and can't handle it, it's their responsibility to stop playing it and not bitch at the people who released it (in any region) or bitch at the loc team for not changing anything (i.e. bitching that the loc team didn't change creative aspects of the story to fulfill another region's agenda).

Why does that happen though? Capitalism, quite frankly. Companies prefer the money added to their coffers than to keep the originality of a creative piece of art. They'll follow any political agenda that's popular, any social media agenda that's popular, etc, even if it means changing creativity.

They want the most people possible to purchase it, so if more people will buy the product, even if it means sullying the creative work of the original writers, they'll do it. That may not be true worldwide, but it absolutely is with many western companies. If the narrative of a game doesn't fit what western culture agrees with, they'll change it to make it so that western culture agrees with it (re: the Church).

Localization shouldn't exist to change a work of art/to change any media form for the sake of just releasing it in another region for the profit, but it does happen; hence why I prefer translation to loc. Over the years I've grown to hate western localization more and more.

If localizers have to work that badly to change what already exists (including changing the intent of the creator(s)), I have zero respect for their "efforts" for trying to alter a story and possibly even pursue a particular agenda (because we play games to have fun and enjoy something, not to have irl agendas thrown back in our faces).

Translators who go through loops upon loops to make sure the story stays as intact as possible with only changes of necessity are the ones I respect. Translating things to keep the meaning of a story is a lot more difficult and trying than just going "well how about we just completely change this and then we don't even have to think about how to work it out".

Also, there's a difference between pursuing an agenda or writing something to fix a glaring issue like racism. If there are aspects of a media that got changed in the west to eliminate racism (which is often, especially in Japan from my understanding based on other media I consume, done because of ignorance and not genuinely harmful intent), that's understandable.

That alone shouldn't alter a whole story though, and if it has to because the racism or whatever it is is that bad, then the work should simply not be released in the west! Simple as that! If it's that bad, why support those things by changing them to sound nicer/better and let the original product still generate revenue?

Now, is all localization this bad? No. Is Houses' localization bad enough that it changed an entire region's perception on the contents of the game? Yes. That's a no no for me.

I respect localization that does its best to keep the same story and change what won't work in another region (including what may be deemed unacceptable in said region or really toes a line of general regional discomfort).

I do not respect localization that sticks in the team's own biases or tries to push any kind of agenda to appeal to certain people. If a piece of creative media is created without the intention to push any kind of agenda, it should remain that way and not suddenly have things added to it for that purpose.

I respect creative media. I don't respect capitalism and changing content to cater to a specific subset of an audience, including the staff's own.

#DCB Ask #my response to this isn't just about Houses (that's a chunk of it) but also about loc itself #if I ever made a book or even just an eBook that got translated #I would NOT want what happened to Houses happening to my writing #personally I'd just straight up ask it to be removed and unavailable in that region unless/until #the people behind translating/localizing it fixed it to fit the narrative I set for my /own/ writing #if there were consumers from another region who got a different story entirely from the region I released it in #there's something wrong that happened between regions and unfortunately most ppl don't realize that #most ppl will assume whatever is in the loc was the author's intent #which means anything that looks bad in that region now reflects on me as the author #and it's even worse if it causes controversy. for example like the stuff we get in Hopes #the amount of underlying racism. I haven't seen the entire JP script but like #at this point I don't know if my concerns should be aimed at the localizers or the original writers #I wouldn't want that for my own writing. I wouldn't want people questioning ME based on loc changes #when I view in depth how I feel abt smth I prefer to put myself in the situation #and figure out how I'd feel about it. that's why with Houses I don't find it acceptable #it's not something I'd want to happen to my own writing. look at how Edelgard is viewed now overall #she's the most controversial character surrounded by negativity that FE has ever seen #despite having a character borderline identical to her in the past in one of the most beloved and acclaimed titles #and most of that is... bc of the loc :(

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