In Deadly Premonition 2 you get your standard incest plot with a side of transphobia since the brother in question here is actually a trans woman. The game came out in 2019 but feels like it was written in 2005 with how the character’s gender is handled
The game is just all over the place. Swery wrote an incestuous perverted trans murderer and constantly misgenders her but also has several scenes where Francis York Morgan chastises small town hicks for their transphobia 
Obviously Swery didn’t consult anyone while writing the game and it’s interesting no one in the localisation/translation team flagged these issues in the script either. Swery got predictably pilloried on Twitter when the game came out on Switch and they scrambled to patch the game to make the dialogue less offensive. Yes, the PC version you see here is the patched version of the game 
Aside from all the transphobia, there’s plenty of other iffy shit going on with the game’s writing. The main villain is building up to be a black guy and his monstrous, morbidly obese blonde wife which feels a bit weird with how many of the game’s black characters are written, like the black lady who starts every sentence with OH LAWD. There’s also a running theme of older male characters being in love with much younger female characters, the most extreme example being a 16-year-old girl dating an adult man that looks to be in his thirties which is NEVER REMARKED UPON and treated as completely normal. York also has a 10-year-old girl sidekick in this game and some of the shit he says to her just comes off as really fucking weird sometimes
Francis Discord Mod Morgan
I’m nearing the end of the game and it’s just shocking how bad Deadly Premonition 2 is compared to the original. The graphics and gameplay being absolute dogshit could be explained by the game having basically no budget but how the fuck is the writing so awful when that was the glue holding Swery’s previous games together
Libertarian brainworms have also affected Japan it seems
The main villain is building up to be a black guy and his monstrous, morbidly obese blonde wife which feels a bit weird with how many of the game’s black characters are written, like the black lady who starts every sentence with OH LAWD.
The heavy use and emphasis of casual anti-black racist caricatures and stereotypes in Asian media deserves analysis. And I say this as someone in SEA
Black characters in anime be like
YO! SOUL! FUNKY
Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball
The heavy use and emphasis of casual anti-black racist caricatures and stereotypes in Asian media deserves analysis. And I say this as someone in SEA
People in other countries are usually basing their perceptions of black people on American propaganda and media, and it is extremely right wing and often racist. And the more pro-American someone is, the higher the probability that he would be very racist.
The part you quoted was also in Baki hanma prison episode whatever his name was fights Che guevara. His wife was in a state where she couldn’t get out of bed. The series was mostly a bit and I checked it from the middle randomly and landed on the Che guevara bit. (Che defeated Amerikkka with just a few trained men all with their bare hands without firing a shot and also he was a pirate ) I dropped it at part where the guy he was fighting bought his wife while she was on the bed on the prison grounds to fight Che and the prisoners were trying to laugh but couldn’t because they were scared of him.
Wait I don’t remember this did Baki unironically have Che Guevara
with a similar sounding name but it was obvious when I saw it from the references. https://baki.fandom.com/wiki/Jun_Guevaru
Holy shit was that che
Ooo I actually know the answer to this one.
So, originally this wasn’t a thing. Back in the day almost every anime had a “childhood friend” of the family who was extremely close to the protagonist’s family. So much so that they would come and go at the house as they pleased, they behaved like siblings. This character was usually filled the “love interest that deserves to win but always loses” role, and the protagonist was oblivious to their love. A recent show called Blue Box actually brought back this archetype with a twist in that they actually physically live together.
Anyway as this childhood friend archetype phased out, writers still wanted a “love interest that perpetually loses” character in their stories. And since this character was pretty close to being a sibling in terms of writing to begin with, they just straight up made it into the sister, the character who harbours a secret love interest for her brother, but it’s taboo, and her brother will go and date [real love interest] anyway.
It was Oreimu that popularised this and spun off hundreds of imitators. Some others did it first but it was after Oreimu’s popularity that it became completely pervasive.
To explain why writers use this so much and put this another way - it’s a love triangle trope where the female love interest is on the inside and has more access to the protagonist than the other female love interest. The way this evolved into the sister of the male protag is actually pretty obvious when explained this way.
And the more it’s depicted, the less the topic becomes unusual to see in anime, so the more likely it is to just be acceptable and normalised in the medium, so you have other incest shit being depicted outside the love triangle / loser-love-interest trope now as well.
You forgot the part where Francis York Morgan sees visions from a stereotypical voodoo practitioner and does Nick Mullen black guy voice when recalling what the character said.
I noticed that every character is almost always doing a bad impression when quoting another character so it’s probably just incredibly misguided voice direction. It’s absolutely incredible no one in the production pointed out how offensive it would come across in a 2019 title. Maybe they tried but Swery or whomever was directing them insisted they do it his way
You’d expect shit like this from a game from the 90s or early 2000s that was recorded in Japan with voice actors that were just the first five gaijins they could grab off the street, directed by a Japanese dude that speaks no English
Predator 2 had something like that but with gangs
I think incest porn is a sign of social alienation. We no longer relate to other people so the fantasies have to be projected onto the few people still contractually obligated to be in our lives. Family are some of the few people we still have in our lives.
Japan does still have some pre-liberal instinct that you are supposed to marry thr girl next door. I dunno how much of that is boomer nostalgia enshrined in media or what. I am not am expert enough on thr subject to know the root of that element.
its crazy to me that this game came out a year after the missing. like did swery just make that game good by accident?
From what I’ve seen the prevailing sentiment seems to be that he actually did consult someone when writing that game. I remember Swery being friends with a bunch of LGBT indie game devs at the time
okay that makes sense
still weird as hell though
The misgendering issues might largely be due to a language barrier, but it’s odd no one pointed that or any of the other problematic shit out while translating the script. Actually, at one point York refers to James Cameron’s Aliens as “Alien 2” which is what the movie is actually called in Japan. Maybe the game was translated by native Japanese speakers
The part where she sleeps in your hotel room was fucking crazy. Thankfully nothing happens but it was such a weird thing to do. The entire time I was like “please nothing weird happen.” Haven’t finished the game yet but I think I’m near where you are.
I thought it was really funny when he lectures the black cop to not be transphobic to one of the characters. I can’t tell if that was written in earnest, but it’s really funny if you view it as like some dipshit lecturing people on things he barely understands like he does with Arnold S. movies, criminal profiling, etc. I don’t think you’re supposed to uncritically agree with everything York says, but it’s hard to tell.
I do think Swery basically only uses movies for reference points when writing and that’s where a lot of the bad shit is coming from.
In the scene with Patricia in front of Lena’s house York is meant to have an epiphany when he realises the entire town has been shunning Lena the entire time and he’s so deeply offended by their close mindedness that he says something to the effect of “FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE I HATE THE COUNTRYSIDE”
Forcing the idealistic York to confront the darker aspects of close-knit small rural communities could be interesting but if that was Swery was going for it just falls flat on its face. The town consists of silly one-dimensional cartoon characters that barely interact with each other and don’t feel like a cohesive community at all and the overall tone is just too light to make that kind of thing work. I feel like if Swery wanted to make a point about the town being transphobic he could’ve written the town pastor/doctor to be a bigoted, bible-thumping piece of shit but he wouldn’t do that because he likes priests being a Buddhist priest in real life and tends to write priest characters in his games as minor self-inserts which is why the pastor wears an owl feather. He did the same thing in The Good Life too with the alcoholic town vicar
Also speaking of movies I think Swery completely overdid the movie loving aspect of York’s personality. He’s constantly going on long tangents about his obsession with hyperrealism in random 80s movies in every conversation when in the first game he mostly reminisced about old movies during long car rides
I don’t really know how to analyze this phenomenon. Somehow I’ve ran into a lot of people who were into it and people often share TMI with me idk why, maybe I’m like a human can opener, but one thing I’ve noticed is all of them have been insecure about it when I question them and they talked more about how it’s actually bad and problematic, they’re “Only into the fiction.” So it could be like a “Don’t thread on me!” type of thing maybe? If we had an Ancap president they’d very likely be accompanied by their family member instead of spouse.
The Interest isn’t then romance, not the kind you’d expect from a romantic relationship, but more like a rejection of norms and a thing on power dynamics. It’s also why I would guess a lot of them that happen end up being abusive relationships (from what I have been told I haven’t spend a lot of time researching this topic), even if you ignore the incestuous part. Anyways I’ve spent too many time talking to all sorts of people and this is my analysis from that.
I used to watch an embarrassing amount of anime when I was still in highschool, and the ONLY anime where the protag has a little sister and there’s no incest plot is OreGairu. This anime also has the only sibling relationship depiction that I was able to relate to (despite being the only child in my family, weirdly enough)
