Saké, Satire, and Butt Floss
No, this isn’t one of those stories. This one happened while I was at the Art Institute International San Francisco, earning my degree in Video Game Art and Design. It was my first year at the school, and I had a Character Design class. This wasn’t just writing down ideas — we had to model and texture the character, as well as create a document detailing their personality, abilities, and the game setting they were from.
I could easily have played it straight. Character design is something I find easy. But me being me, I wanted to show off my knowledge of industry tropes and my wit, by subverting the idea. So I created a character that was intended to satirize a particularly common trope character in Japanese games: the Sexy Ninja. Do a Google search for “sexy video game ninja” and you’ll get the idea. “Kunoichi” also works, if you prefer the alternate trope name.
My character’s name was Saké, like the Japanese rice wine. I don’t have any surviving renders of the character, so I’ll simply describe her. She had the semi-standard female ninja high ponytail, a half mask covering the lower part of her face, a black halter top, an unfeasibly large chest, a tiny waist, wide hips, transparent “ninja” pants, and high-heeled tabi boots. Yep, that was all on purpose. However, I also included some unusual features: she had more defined muscles than was usual at the time (female characters almost never actually looked strong or athletic, even ninja), and I modeled her wearing something closer to booty shorts than the usual bikini bottoms or a thong. Not much of a difference, but it wasn’t butt floss, and I was proud of myself.
On top of the visual design, her design details were subverted as well. While she was definitely a stealth-type character in a modern Tenchu-style game, Saké was actually aware of how she looked, and did it on purpose. Her reasoning was that, breaking into various fortresses and compounds around the world as part of her job, most of her opponents would be soldiers and guards, and most of them would be male. Men being what they were, a significant percentage of them would hesitate for a few seconds if suddenly presented with a sexy woman showing a lot of skin… and in those few seconds, a highly-trained martial artist using a superhuman style of ninjutsu could take them down before they could react. Thus, the outfit. As in similar games, Saké would have “stealth kill” abilities, a number of which would involve Distracted by the Sexy elements. I even went so far as to give Saké a dirty old man sensei, who would also comment that men are easily distracted by skin — he would know, after all. The game would, of course, have a number of “distraction” mechanics. I also played with the trope by having Saké not actually be Japanese. She was ethnically Ainu, the equivalent of Native Americans in Japan, which was quite a controversial choice at the time.
(Of course, it bears mentioning that this was in 2003. At the time, what I’d come up with was actually subversive; Anita Sarkeesian wouldn’t launch her first web site for another six years, and arguably the “best” depictions of women in games to that point were merely less sexist. It’s also worth mentioning that satire changes over time, and 2003 had yet to hit the post-irony phase. These days, my design isn’t so much subversive as trite.)
(I’ve gotten better at satire, too.)
As the class progressed, the students would sometimes show each other their work. While I had to explain an awful lot of Saké to my fellow students, they mostly appreciated the subversions I was working with. Some thought I was being ham-fisted, but in a way, that was my intent. I was pretty proud of myself, as can be expected, given how my mind worked at the time.
All that changed on Finals day. The Character Design class didn’t have a final test. Instead, we submitted our final versions of the character we’d been working on all semester. We also split up the students, and half of us went around to the computers of the other half, who would explain their designs and answer questions. Sounds good so far, right?
Well… good old AISF was an international school, which meant we had students from countries other than America in our classes. As it turned out, one of them was a young woman from Japan. I hadn’t really noticed her before then; she was quiet, didn’t seem to know English very well, and sat on the other side of the computer lab from me.
So that was how I ended up having to explain a deliberately over-the-top caricature of the Japanese video game “sexy ninja” to a young Japanese woman who didn’t seem to know English very well. I’m emphasizing the young woman’s command of English because satire, like sarcasm, does not translate between languages well, especially if the listening party doesn’t understand the language of the speaking party with sufficient fluency.
The language issue was strike one. I had to explain a lot more of my design than I expected, more than once having to adjust my vocabulary to be understood. It wasn’t that the young woman was stupid. It was that I kept using English words she wasn’t familiar with. I have a tendency to get more… florid in my language when I’m nervous. I was nervous because the young woman in question didn’t smile, or frown, or display any facial expressions I could read. I have a tendency to interpret that as, “Oh, god, one of those guys. I’ll just wait until he shuts up.”
Strike two was that I had designed a deliberately sexy female character, and was showing it to a young woman. True, I was making fun of the trope, but to do so, I had to create a believable sexy kunoichi design — the actual satire was all in her design details. However, as I’ve stated above, I had no simple way of knowing if the satire was communicating as intended. For all I knew, the satire had been entirely lost in translation, which meant I was just showing her a sexy ninja. More than enough of those already.
Strike three was that I was quite literally making fun of aspects of a culture to the face of someone who was from that culture. I’m not saying everyone gets offended by that sort of thing. Not even most people have that problem. But it’d also be understandable if a student went to a foreign country to study, and while there, got annoyed because someone from that country made fun of the student’s culture to their face. Even I might be annoyed by something like that, though it’d take a much more mean-spirited style than I’d like to think I employed for Saké. Either way, I left the whole Ainu thing out of my prepared speech. Cowardice, perhaps, but it seemed a bit much.
So that was how I was left with a little extra time to fill at the end of my Show and Tell of Saké. I ended up gabbling more than a little, which was how I managed to jam my foot into my mouth up to the knee. With my infinite wisdom, I went and pointed out Saké’s shorts, and with my superhuman tact, pointed out that despite the trope, I had not given Saké butt floss.
Yep. I straight up said butt floss. To a young woman who didn’t speak my language well. Open mouth, insert foot.
I’m don’t know exactly what I expected right then. Outrage, maybe. Disgust. Possibly a sexual harassment complaint. Any of those would be understandable. Instead, I got a very polite query as to what butt floss meant. I was pretty much stuck, so I explained as best I could that butt floss was a slang term for the thong style of women’s underwear.
I wasn’t sure if the young woman understood, or if she was mad, or what was going on. She looked at me with a completely blank face, then looked at the render of Saké on my computer screen. Then she looked back at me, and in an entirely serious voice, told me I should give Saké butt floss.
I was way too relieved to ask questions. I still don’t know if she meant it, or if she was messing with me on a level I didn’t get until much later, or what.
But it’s a funny story.
