[ddarko]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronriii

What I do love about Kaine being a hermaphrodite is that it's actually treated seriously as part of her backstory as an outcast and serves to inform her coarse/rough personality. Yoko Taro purposely created Kaine as a way to humanize those who are treated as an other in society with that mindset carrying over to Emil's character.

Beyond that, I like that in-game she's treated as a woman through and through, in which her wearing skimpy clothes/lingerie is also her way of owning her femininity. I do hope they go far in expanding the line and hopefully make the rest of the cast from the original Nier.

I get what you mean. But personally, I feel that Japanese content tend to go way off the mark in trying to make such points. For an example, to tackle the problem of being a social outcast, they did not need to go to the extreme of making the person a hermaphrodite. That is just a weird choice, not to mention the unnecessary complications it results when tackling the relationships aspect.

Of course, all of this is still fine if the content producers actually tackle these things objectively and kept it realistic. But most often, you find these sort of content merely appeal to emotions to nudge you toward feeling some sort of "complexity" in the situation. To make matters worse, the situations that lead to these dilemmas do not actually exist in the real world (eg. there are no hermaphrodite human beings in real life).

It is also most often the case that the authors of the content are folks who are far from being experts in ethics or philosophy. Of course, one could argue that the emotionalism fits with the "over the top" exaggerated nature of Japanese content, and that is indeed its charm. But it is tiring and quickly becomes hard to relate to unless one abandons all desire for objective analysis.

So in regards to this particular character, is it odd that human beings feel a rather oddness about her state of affairs? YES! But, there is actually nothing wrong with feeling that oddness because things are not as they should be for a human being. Once one realizes that, the plot point of making Kaine a hermaphrodite starts to become pointless. Why? Because no one in their right mind should suddenly start feeling that Kaine is in a normal situation. It would have been far more effective to draw attention to the issue of ostracizing by taking some other realistic attribute.