PathRoutes || CLOSED COMMISSIONS

@NAITOTokihiro And that's completely fine! Just don't brazenly insult us and tell us to die for you for something we have no control over. I've already had enough of the Japanese just call us thieves and dismiss our situation and arguments, even calling us defenders of piracy when we do not.

なんだか言葉の壁の次に法律の壁が出来てる気がするなあ。自分の国の常識を、相手の国の人にぶつけるのはどうかと思うよ。あなたの国ではそうなんだと思うだけのことがなぜ出来ないのか。自分の国のことを語ると、違う国からそれは違うと言われるのは、それこそ違うとしか言えません。

What the weather in Southeast Asia feels rn:

I don't think the Japanese lack the concept of "unjust law". I think they believe it's better to follow the law still and then change it later. In other words, it's better to maintain order than to cause a ruckus. While I agree with this for the most part, if a law violates my inalienable rights, then I am morally correct to disobey it.

@Tereta_Orcmon We hate it as well! It just slowly creeped in like a frog being slowly boiled. But the moment we noticed it, their masks went off.

海賊版の話とは変わるけど、ここまで日本の作品を好きでいてくれたなら、ポリコレ文化を日本に押し付けたり、そちらの国でもポリコレに敗北しないで欲しかったよ いやホントに

@tsukadon1979 @Tereta_Orcmon That's not solely it. Most of the VA in America wants to be part of Hollywood and sees Anime voice acting as beneath them. There was a quote from one of the localizers saying "The fun of localizing is to see what you can get away."

@Tereta_Orcmon ff外より失礼します。私見です 西洋エンタメがポリコレに飲み込まれたのは海賊版の影響があったのではと思います。海賊版擁護派は企業への憎悪が酷く対価を支払う意思がありません。西洋エンタメは富裕層をターゲットにしてセレブが喜ぶ物を取り入れたのではと思います。つまらない作品ばかりですが。

@RepGesAuto_NieR A real missed opportunity. XDDD

マジでバズる前にXPremium加入しとけばよかった。

I think we are slowly coming to locate who are the "woke" people in the Japanese space. And by "woke" i don't mean the social causes the western wokes pursue, but rather someone who only wants to virtue signal and have the moral high ground. They just have different topics they virtue signal about, in this case the piracy topic. The first days i saw only Japanese people hating on "pirates" but now that my algorithm is almost entirely about the piracy topic i can see those people may be even a minority and the discusion is more nuanced There are people who agree with westerners, or at least call the double standards in their own people. Then there are people who try to understand where we come from, even if they disagree. There are people against piracy who give arguments against it but understand there are cultural differences making the two positions hard to comprehend for the other side, and argue about specific details. But then there's this type of Japanese who just charges at you and completely ignores anything you say. These types will call you a thief and a rapist for things like reviving a dead game, and will constantly insist that you're not supporting the creator no matter how much you explain that you're buying the products of the creator. I've had a ton of conversations this week in which i constantly repeat that we want to buy the product and we do buy whatever we can that's available and then they proceed to ignore everything i said and come back to say that i'm not buying anything and then attack me for things i've never said. This is the same behavior as the "woke". In fact i have felt a lot of similarities with the early years of the western cultural war when we still didn't know how the wokes operated and i still tried to have a conversation with them, only to receive insane strawmans. I believe many on this latest camp are not really that legitimately worried about piracy; and many other Japanese people have pointed out that these people probably pirated things too, just on a different way; but rather they just have found a group of people to lash out at safely, without fear of repercussions or ostracism, and present as self righteous. Essentially, their "woke" people

@RepGesAuto_NieR Ahhh... no, they're a manchild who thinks that hurling insults will solve a problem. It's the opposite of macho. I could say the same to the JP as well.

@PathRoutes あー、そうじゃなくて暴言を放った人個人の振る舞いについてマッチョと表現したんだ。 力で相手をねじ伏せようと思ってるんだよ、彼ら

日本人からは定期的に怒られが発生してるんだけど、外人に対してはそんなに気分を害すこと言ってないつもりなんだが……

nice explainer from claude In English, "art" does heavy rhetorical lifting. When English speakers call something "art," they're not just describing its medium — they're making a status claim. Art is something that has inherent cultural value, deserves to be preserved, belongs to human heritage, and transcends its commercial origins. There's a whole lineage behind this: "film is art" was a battle fought in the mid-20th century specifically so that films would be taken seriously, archived, studied, and protected from being destroyed by studios who saw them as disposable products. "Games are art" is fighting the same fight. So when preservation advocates say "games are art," the unspoken second half of that sentence is "...and therefore they deserve the same protections and respect we give to paintings, films, and literature." The word carries a built-in moral argument. "Entertainment" in English, by contrast, carries an implicit concession. It suggests something that's merely fun — enjoyable but disposable, commercial, consumed and forgotten. Calling a game "entertainment rather than art" in an English-language debate is almost always a move to lower its status, to say it doesn't deserve the institutional protections we afford to art. It's dismissive. In Japanese, the landscape is quite different. The relevant terms carve up the space in ways that don't map neatly onto the English art/entertainment binary. 芸術 (geijutsu) is the closest equivalent to "art" in the high-culture, fine-art sense — painting, sculpture, classical music, literary fiction. It's a very elevated category. Most Japanese speakers would not naturally apply 芸術 to a mobile gacha game, and honestly, most English speakers wouldn't call a mobile gacha game "fine art" either. The difference is that English has a broader, fuzzier use of "art" that sits below "fine art" but still carries preservation-weight. Japanese doesn't really have that middle register with the same rhetorical power. 娯楽 (goraku) means entertainment, amusement, recreation. This is where games comfortably sit in most Japanese discourse. But here's what gets lost in translation: 娯楽 is not a pejorative in Japanese the way "mere entertainment" can be in English. It doesn't mean "worthless" or "disposable." Plenty of things Japanese culture deeply values and takes seriously — manga, anime, games — live under the 娯楽 umbrella without anyone feeling that diminishes them. You can pour love into 娯楽. You can respect 娯楽. It just doesn't automatically activate the "therefore it must be preserved for posterity" framework that "art" does in English. 作品 (sakuhin) is perhaps the most important term here, and it has no clean English equivalent. It means "work" or "piece" — as in a creative work. Japanese speakers absolutely call games 作品, and doing so conveys respect for the craft, the creators' effort, and the quality of the experience. It acknowledges creative labor and value. But 作品 doesn't carry the same institutional preservation mandate that "art" does in English. A 作品 can be deeply beloved and still be understood as something with a natural lifecycle that ends. So here's where the miscommunication happens. When a Japanese user says "games are 娯楽, not 芸術" and this gets translated or paraphrased as "games aren't art, they're just entertainment," it sounds in English like they're saying games are worthless trash that nobody should care about. That's not what they're saying. They're saying games belong to a category that is valued, enjoyed, and respected — but that doesn't come with an automatic expectation of permanent institutional preservation against the wishes of the rights holder. Meanwhile, when English-speaking preservation advocates say "games are art," Japanese listeners may hear them reaching for 芸術 status for a mobile gacha game, which sounds absurdly grandiose — like claiming a fun phone game belongs in a museum next to Hokusai. Both sides are essentially talking past each other because the English word "art" bundles together "this has creative value" and "this must be preserved forever" into a single concept, while Japanese vocabulary keeps those ideas more separate. A Japanese fan can simultaneously believe a game is a wonderful 作品 that they love deeply and that it's 娯楽 whose lifecycle is the company's decision to make — without feeling any contradiction. In English, that combination sounds incoherent because "it's art" and "it's okay to let it die" feel like they can't coexist. There's also a deeper cultural layer: the concept of impermanence (無常, mujō) runs through a lot of Japanese aesthetics. The idea that beautiful things end — and that their ending is part of what makes them beautiful — is deeply embedded in the culture, from cherry blossoms to tea ceremony. This doesn't mean Japanese fans don't grieve when a game shuts down; they absolutely do. But the grief and the acceptance can coexist in a way that feels more natural in Japanese cultural framing than in a Western one, where the instinct is more often to fight the impermanence, to insist that valuable things should be saved. Ironically, NieR as a franchise is deeply invested in exactly these themes — cycles of loss, the futility and beauty of fighting against inevitable endings. The whole debate is almost a meta-commentary the series could have written itself.

@RepGesAuto_NieR No, not macho-ism, but more like distrust to companies due to decades of mishandling, mismanagement, and sheer antagonization of the customer. I saw a post from a JP side on what they almost got right, but flew over their head. Can't post it here though due to the post limit.

@PathRoutes いやぜんぜん！君たちの大部分はいい人だよ！本当に！一部の声のデカいキチガイが悪い あんまり国籍で差別したくはないんだけど、事実として今まで暴言を吐いてきたのはロシア人とアメリカ人だったな……思考がマッチョイズムなのだろうか

それは大変もっともなご指摘でいらっしゃいます。私は消費者の権利を強く支持しており、企業に対して過度に忠誠を示す風潮には、やや違和感を覚えております。

@nonuple9 I have a feeling that the rise of AI stories is the result of the Japanese view on works of fiction as solely just a product and not counting it as art as well.

素朴な疑問なんだけど、人間が書いたかAIが書いたか区別がつかないのに、なんでAIの小説を読みたくないのだろう。 だって読んでも区別つけられないんでしょ？

> 海賊版を肯定する理由にはなり得ない… 別に肯定してはいないですよ。 ただ「日本人も色々な議論や失敗を経て今がある。それなのに幾ばくか整備が遅れていだけの外国人に倫理感でマウントとるのは傲慢だ」って話。

これまで沢山の海外の日本漫画ファンと関わってきましたが、彼らの中には、安価で使い勝手の良い海賊版が身近にある環境にいながらも 「好きな作品の作者に正当に還元したい」 と言って、正規版に強くこだわり、単行本一冊に日本人の何倍もの金額を支払っている方もいます。 一方で日本では、公然と海賊版を利用していると語る人は多くないものの、著作権意識の低さが垣間見える場面は少なくありません。 典型例が「漫画村」の件で、問題が騒がれ始めた当時は 「宣伝になるのだから無料で読めて当然」 「気に入ったら後で買うから問題ない」 といった擁護がSNS上で広く見られました。 さらに近年の生成AIをめぐる議論でも、作者が二次創作を明確に拒否しているにもかかわらず 「手描きでもやってるので問題ない」 「著作権は手描きの特権なので不要」 といった理屈で権利侵害を正当化する動きが見受けられます。 「外国人だから」というレッテルで片付ければ、この問題の本質は見えなくなります。

@excalipermx The Japanese aren't even realizing this, the dam has been broken down and their river is flowing into the lake, well, sea more accurately. They're no longer in their territory, they flowed into the English territory.

逆ｩー！ ガラパゴス感覚で世界に売りに行ったら「俺達の所で商売するなら、俺達の流儀に合わせろよ」と突き付けられたんですよ。 つまり普段日本人が言ってる『郷に入っては郷に従え』を言われてる立場なので、今度はこちらが合わせる必要があります。

What's funny is that it's no longer the Japanese's territory. The dam that's keeping the water has been taken down as the river flows into the lake.

"In Japan, the creators keep rights to their creations no matter who the copyright holder is so there is no reason to distrust the corps" *looks inside* *sees animators salaries who are on convenience store level pay while the work itself makes millions of profit* Uhm, sure

aí cai a barreira do idioma, a gente sai correndo de braços abertos dizendo "olá, amigos japoneses" e descobre que um bando deles é assim:

@belmonteir0o @VideosYan Os caras idolatram qualquer tipo de proteção de IP lá. Sempre achei essa parte da cultura zoada, mas talvez o conceito de "nem tudo que é legal, é moral; e nem tudo que é moral, é legal" não aparece com freqüência lá. A lei é o correto, foda-se todas as outras considerações.