Idolmaster

The whole “idol” industry is a peculiar phenomenon in Japan. They take teenage boys and girls, and turn them into what essentially are mascots. The fans fetishize them. There are companies that churn them out. Interestingly, they take the dehumanizing aspect of this whole business for granted; that is, there are no pretenses by any parties involved. It’s not about what’s “inside”; it’s purely about the surface values. In this sense, it makes sense that they would create video games like this below. The whole point is to see these girls and boys as fetishes, so you might as well forget the real humans and use computer generated characters.

Years ago, I bought a game similar to this for Playstation 2 (Japanese console), but after playing it for an hour or so, I couldn’t see the point of the game; so I never played it again. I thought the idea was interesting, but I think you have to be really into this sort of thing to get into it. My guess is that the joy comes from owning and controlling the girl (the players are mostly boys). If you need to fetishize a person, I think a video game character is a better way to go. According to this Wikipedia article, it made “Japan’s ratio of Xbox Live sign-ups to the number consoles sold the highest in the world.”

By the way, this video clip includes what is presumably an “accident” or a glitch where the girl’s underwear gets exposed. Now, that’s VERY Japanese.