As a kid I assumed no one knew how old these two were because they were mysterious ninjas, but it turns out Tecmo just redacted their ages in the English translation for obvious reasons. It’s funny they went with this route instead of just bumping both characters up to 18 years old. I guess Tomonobu Itagaki refused to tamper with the sanctity of his precious DOA canon 
spoiler
I’m sad to report the PS2 version of DOA2 seems to be one of those early PS2 games that’s interlaced to hell and back and will look like a jagged mess no matter how much you upscale it in PCSX2 
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There’s literally no reason for this lmao. These two could easily pass for like 25. Why do they insist on giving them canon ages under 18? Theres no story reason for it. Theres no reason for it with how they look? What is going on.
Its a fucking dumb trope and I’m tired of it. Watching kengan asura and the girl who keeps stalking tokito ohma for marriage is underaged. Keeps on saying and doing suggestive shit. Keeps talking about having his babies. There is no fucking reason she should be underaged none at all. Its not funny or cute or any of that shit. It doesn’t add anything to the story.
On the bright side, they mostly stop doing things like that in Kengan Omega
if they do insist on giving them <18 ages, why cant they go full absurdist?
make their canonical age 18months.
NA = not adult
sad thing is those characters don’t act or particularly look like children so that was better than the “she’s totally 18 you guys” lolis that koei added in doa 6 and late doa 5 versions.
on the other hand, soul calibur is honest about talim and amy being children but it hasn’t stopped the perverts. same with other fighters with “little girl” characters.
btw if you want to play doa 2 against people there’s a small community on fightcade since the dreamcast emulator has rollback.
so that was better than the “she’s totally 18 you guys” lolis that koei added in doa 6 and late doa 5 versions.
Is this about Marie Rose? She’s the only character I can think of that could be read like this? Idk if thats the intent or not but Marie Rose just looks like a petite adult woman to me, 18-20. Should could pass for younger but I just… dont process things that way lmao? I’ve never been able to with Japanese media characters people say “look underage” unless they literally look pre or very early pubescent. Just not something that processes in my brain.
Like you mention Talim as well, with Talim I was surprised when I learned her age lmao. I again processed her as a petite adult (though I was myself younger than 15 when I played SC2 lol). Amy I suppose looks her canon age though even though I hadn’t thought of it before.
Same with Street Fighter Lily as well. I’‘ve seen so much "she looks underage’ discourse and I’m just like what? She just looks petite. Adults can be petite? And in her case there’s no canon information otherwise.
Idk maybe I just have something broken in my brain because everyone says this lmao.
This isnt even a “please let me goon to these characters in peace” thing lmao I dont care about that. I just find the common perception around them odd because thats just not how my brain processes them.
I’ve never been able to with Japanese media characters people say “look underage” unless they literally look pre or very early pubescent.
Yeah, it’s always seemed weird to me how characters that are canonically like 18-20 often get drawn in a way that scans as “30 or so” for me, and then characters that look roughly college aged are canonically 14-16. It feels like the animation equivalent of like live action high school dramas where all the actors are at least in their mid twenties.
There does seem to be something in Shonen stuff in particular, where the characters are basically adults in appearance and activity, but because they feel the need to make them relatable to kids somehow, they just say they’re under 18, even though nothing suggests they are. Maybe they shoehorn them being at school a few times, but they don’t do any school stuff ever like go to class or do homework.
I feel like there’s a million different properties that have some kind of military academy setting so they can have a bunch of child soldiers running around
I’m glad I’m not alone on this lmao.
I was just thinking about this some more and how characters are being drawn in what I’m currently reading (ZOM 100), when I reached a great character recap spread at the start of volume 10. For the fun of it, I want everyone to look at this version with the ages and bios censored and try to put an age to each character, weighing both anime tropes and the context of this conversation and how the characters scan in a vacuum:
Hint:
The three guys on the right are all the same age, and the girl on the left is the oldest character out of all of them.
The uncensored image (mild story spoilers):
marie honoka and now (well, 5 years ago?) nico seem 14-16. idk what to tell you. maybe look at the face designs or story movies? science girl is a very tropey child genius, marie acts like a 12 year old, and honoka is explicitly a high school student
all that said, the devs don’t really care about details, honoka is older than ayane by a few months and a discord person said shimbori didn’t realize they had done that by having both be 18. anyway i’m doxed as a doa nerd now thanks OP.
marie honoka and now (well, 5 years ago?) nico seem 14-16.
This is subjective? Yeah I just dont perceive that shit. I wish it was more understood that subjectivity exists and people have different experiences with media. Like “Marie acts like a 12 year old” is just, not coding for me. I dont see it.
Then again I’ve not played the games lmao. I just see screenshots of their still designs and fan art. So maybe it comes across in cutscenes. And yeah I dont see it with Nico either since you mentioned her. Probably even less than the other two actually since she’s dressed as a professional.
The only thing I can get is Ulysses point about them clearly being designed with a certain audience in mind. But thats not going to click for me ever because of the way my brain processes it. The face thing doesnt help because I know plenty of baby faced adults lmao. Some even post on this website and get annoyed when this discourse comes up for that reason!
it’s a lot in the cutscenes and voice direction, yes.
I feel like one of the only “she looks/acts underage regardless of canon” character in fiction where i’ve seen it is Fire Emblem Awakening Nowi who 100% looks and acts 12 to me (and should not have been dressed like that or made marriageable lmao). But even that was largely more because of the appearance than behavior. I swear the “acts like a kid” thing just goes over my head with like genki girl types. Rikku (who is canonically underage, but regardless) is another one like that where people will cite her behavior and I’ll just be like “what? she’s just upbeat?” And yes I was aghast and confused when I found out Rikku’s canon age and still percieve her as college student aged.
Idk I genuinely think my brain is broken these conversations make me feel like an unhinged freak because everyones seeing things I dont see. Like i’ve had private conversations with people who agree with me but public ones always seem to go the other direction lmao. Like I guess I’ll fall back on “subjectivity exists” but it is weird to me and kinda alienating.
As one of those aforementioned baby-faced adults yeah I’m with you. I’ve never played DoA so I assumed it’s something about those two characters you can’t pick up on with just their appearance. Though the sexualization of an 18 year old high school student is still gross to me.
sad thing is those characters don’t act or particularly look like children so that was better than the “she’s totally 18 you guys” lolis that koei added in doa 6 and late doa 5 versions.
Yeah, I was legitimately creeped out by Marie Rose and Honoka when they were added to DOA5. It felt like such an escalation from DOA’s traditional
“woah boobies” sort of horniness to something that was too icky to be funny anymore. From what I understand, they also just immediately skyrocketed in popularity in Japan, instantly eclipsing old series regulars.There’s probably something to be said about how otaku tastes had changed so much from the late 90s and early 2000s into the mid-2010s that DOA’s big-boobed pro wrestlers and ninjas didn’t cut it anymore so Tecmo had to add moeblob children to keep up
on the other hand, soul calibur is honest about talim and amy being children but it hasn’t stopped the perverts. same with other fighters with “little girl” characters.
Soul Calibur and most other fighters don’t sexualise all of their female characters to the same degree. They have their designated sexy characters like Ivy Valentine or Mai Shiranui, but in DOA every female character is blatantly intended to be ogled. Sexy pinups of the female roster in bikinis were a big part of DOA2’s marketing which is probably why they redacted the ages outside of Japan.
btw if you want to play doa 2 against people there’s a small community on fightcade since the dreamcast emulator has rollback.
I sometimes have trouble clearing the arcade ladders on normal difficulty so I would presumably get turned to paste
From what I understand, they also just immediately skyrocketed in popularity in Japan, instantly eclipsing old series regulars.
There’s probably something to be said about how otaku tastes had changed so much from the late 90s and early 2000s into the mid-2010s that DOA’s big-boobed pro wrestlers and ninjas didn’t cut it anymore so Tecmo had to add moeblob children to keep up
What the fuck is going on? Pithy “material conditions” chants typically used to dismiss the content of entertainment under the banner of “let people enjoy things, entertainment has zero meaningful consequences for its consumers” fall flat here.
Other people with very similar economic situations elsewhere in the world seem statistically less likely to wake up every morning fantasizing about violating children. Treat defenders may not like hearing it, and they probably won’t here, but ignoring the consequences of generations of increasingly normalized kiddie creeping in that region of the entertainment industry is ignoring a material condition, particularly the neurochemical consequences of the hedonic treadmill and the diminishing returns on dopamine hits tied to that. Also, neurons that fire together wire together, again a material condition of sorts, and an industry normalizing kiddie creeping as entertainment is facilitating that as well.
I mean like I said in my reply to the parent, I just dont process Marie Rose as a child lmao. I’m always blindsided when I see this discourse.
I strongly believe you are the outlier there; there’s a reason the ages (and in many cases, the appearances and the voices/behavior/personalities) of those characters were made what they were in the first place. It’s for titillation. It was intended to excite the targeted consumers. It sets a pattern and trend of further consumption.
It’s only somewhat related, but the outrage when a Resident Evil remake aged up (and removed some childish traits from) a particular character and removed the creepshot gimmick as well, the usual hogs squealed with outrage about it too.
https://www.thegamer.com/resident-evil-4-remake-idiots-mad-ashley-upskirt/
Yeah I didnt process original Ashley as a child either, and in that case I was right because she was always canonically 20 lmao. I do prefer the remake changes though.
I do agree that theres a trend worth noting I guess, that the coomer stuff was originally characters that looked like Kasumi and now is characters that looke like Marie Rose. I just… wouldnt have noticed it that way because my brain doesnt process her that way. Namco is probably intentionally baiting for that though. I just didnt think of it. So it confuses me. Subjective experiances I guess.
Ashley in particular was an edge case where she wasn’t labeled as a child but was given child-like dialogue lines and mannerisms (and to some extent, appearance), but it was the first one that came to mind where dialing back that particular setting of the dopamine treadmill in the remake was noticed, and caused outrage.
Subjective experiances I guess.
It’s a numbers game for the corporations making these. The specific choices they make are often done with massive teams of marketing data researchers and the like, and what you may like in a character may not even be the intended appeal that they were going for when it came to mass appeal with an increasingly ravenous
demographic.Yeah. Guess I’m losing the macro implications in the jungle of my micro experience with it.
underage on paper characters who look and act older was so kids could relate to the characters, idk what’s behind the loli thing, 4000 year old dragon is a pretty old meme, feedback loops in marketing somewhat explain the proliferation but not the root social causes.
That isn’t always the case.
Fire Emblem had some very questionable “4000 year old dragon” type characters as breeding stock that had child-like dialogue, for example.
but not the root social causes
I wasn’t going there to begin with. I was talking about the proliferation and normalization of those trends and how they interact with the consumers that continue to expect more of them while also getting effectively trained for that expectation. It doesn’t even truly matter anymore how it may have started as much as it matters how it happened, continues to happen, and in the case of kiddie creeping gimmicks in entertainment, how the trends demand more of the same whenever possible to maximize profit from the audience primed for it.
yeah i meant like shonen anime main characters
As far as I know, shonen anime main characters aren’t typically sexually objectified as a primary marketing gimmick.
EDIT: Seems that apparently they often are. I didn’t know; haven’t seen enough of them.
My friend, what are you talking about? Have you seen the main female characters in shonen anime? Almost all of them are significantly sexually objectified. My Hero, Fairy Tale, One Piece, you name it.
Yeah, I was legitimately creeped out by Marie Rose and Honoka when they were added to DOA5.
OK I’ll probably look obsessive by replying to every comment but I cant get over this. I DO NOT get this. People seem fine when its Bridget (at least now, in her current edition) and she’s similarly petite to Marie Rose?
And Honoka? Really? I havent even thought about it with her. I mean I guess now that i look at images of her, she IS in a schoolgirl outfit lmao. But I wouldnt have processed her as any less than 19 based on apperance.
What is going on?
The problem with them is that they exist within the context of Dead or Alive, a series that objectifies its female characters and invites players to ogle them to a degree that exceeds the already horny standards of the fighting game genre. Many people consider the series just outright softcore porn because of it.
Before Marie Rose, every single Dead Or Alive character had basically the same body type, ie bodacious babe. Then Marie Rose comes out and she looks like a middle schooler and acts and talks like a little girl, all the while getting the exact same treatment from the game’s camera and sexy outfits as the rest of the cast. (And naturally, she and Honoka got merch like boob mouse pads, so it is very clear she is intended to be jerked off over)
It’s like slipping an image of a child in the middle of your sexy bikini babe calendar
Then Marie Rose comes out and she looks like a middle schooler and acts and talks like a little girl
The “looks like a middle schooler” is the part that I’m not getting here, because that doesn’t come across to me. I just still see a petite adult woman. If anything, I’m a bit annoyed at the way it seems people think that like, adult women all look like Lara Croft, and there’s no such thing as skinny ones with small boobs and babyfaces. When like, fashion models exist. But I get y’alls argument about how she was clearly designed with that audience in mind. The games having cutscenes where she acts young isnt something Ive totally been exposed to because Ive not played them and what little I have seen that hasnt really come across. But I’ve described elsewhere how the upbeat genki girl archtype never read as “acts like a kid” for me either. So I’m honestly not sure still if thatd come across.
Anyway I agree with your and Ulysses take that theres something going on with Namco adding her and Honoka for horny purposes at the same time, but I have to rely on others with the idea that they read that way to y’all lmao. I would literally never notice on my own.
idk what to tell you, this reads pretty young to me. I’m not saying you can’t have diverse body types in fighting games, I’m saying that this character design and her mannerisms in the context of a DOA game give off
vibesIf they wanted to add a lady with a petite build to make the cast more diverse, they could have easily done so without also making her this child-like
If they wanted to add a lady with a petite build to make the cast more diverse, they could have easily done so without also making her this child-like
Yeah, I dont disagree with this part. They definitely could have done more to do that.
Luckily this weird break in my brain where I dont read that as anything but a petite and youthful adult woman in a costume only applies to animated characters lmao. Otherwise I’d be in need of professional help.
As is though, yeah, looking at her I can at least see where youre coming from. But its still not how she reads for me.
on the other hand, soul calibur is honest about talim and amy being children but it hasn’t stopped the perverts.
Hi, card-carrying wisher for SoulCalibur 7, and in Project Soul’s defense, more than one of Amy’s arcade ladder endings involve her killing the weirdo canonically fixated on her. (I’m still upset that they made my childhood main into such a weirdo too; I had to learn other characters after 3 out of sheer disgust with Raph)
Since the sexualization of girls in Japanese media discourse is back, I’m going to plug "Misora Hibari and the Girl Star in Postwar Japanese Cinema” by Deborah Shamoon to remind everyone that this is not unique to Japanese culture and that it’s current form has roots in the
occupation of Japan.yeah I think it’s low-key racist when people act like that. as if anglo western media isn’t pervaded with sus shit as well.
Removed by mod
“Non applicable”
“Are you sure about that?”
Tbh I support this measure because theres no reason for characters who look like mid twenties to be canonically children.
I gotta say, I’m not really a fan of the idea of deciding characters “look” like adults and therefore shouldn’t be children in the story. Sure, these characters could be 25, or they could also be 15. 15 year olds can look pretty much like adults, and it isn’t their appearance which determines whether they should be treated as such. It’s their maturity and life experience, the invisible development of the brain, which matters.
The way I see it, there’s really no such thing as a character “looking like” an adult. Did you not know any tall bearded kids in high school?
If its story relevant, sure, but it isnt here is the point. Also like I’m sorry but in this case I have never seen a 16 year old that looks like Kasumi in my life.
i went to school with a dude who at 14 looked more like
than any kind of teenager. tbh he looked older and was balding more.it definitely happens
Idk I’ve worked with kids and I’ve seen girls “overdevelop early” and they still look like kids to me? Ive definitely seen girls 15-17 who can pass for adults with like makeup and in posed photos but the game gets given away in how they behave almost always. Maybe like if its a professional child actress around that age playing a part consistently and you never see them out of the role lol. But even then though like, they dont look like THIS
Kasumi to me is a definitively 20+ looking character and cannot pass for younger regardless of her canon age. I have never seen a child that looks like that and again, I’ve worked in childcare a lot.
Boys though yeah I guess. I mean Ive never seen that but I can imagine it I suppose.
To be clear, I obviously agree that real children who pass as older should not be sexualized, thats not in question here. I just think that animated media that creates characters that look fairly definitively 20+ but have canon ages of 15-17 are doing something extremely weird that I don’t understand and seems unnecessary. Especially if the character is sexualized. Unless there’s like a specific story relevance to their age it seems purposeless and uncomfortable.
I just think that animated media that creates characters that look fairly definitively 20+ but have canon ages of 15-17 are doing something extremely weird that I don’t understand and seems unnecessary
Jotaro’s almost too absurd for me to have that reaction too because its just silly lmao.
But even then though like, they dont look like THIS
I’m not really sure what I’m looking at. They don’t look like mid-poly video game models? They don’t look like Asian girls in makeup? I don’t understand what feature you’re trying to point out that marks this character as definitely an adult.
Yeah idk how to communicate this any better. She looks like the polyogonal video game version of an adult woman to me. I really cant be any more specific than that.
I had a huge bushy beard at 15 and a lot of people thought I was mid 20s
I was pretty baby-faced but I had the voice of a 25 year old when I was I was 14 lol
I know that because I’m almost 25 now and I have the same voice (and also people constantly said that online)
Just as a reminder, this is the director for this game:
The Japanese Tommy Wiseau
I want to see a The Room Japanese dub
Even that guy somehow manages to look more menacing than katana and trenchcoat Ben Shapiro.
While you were busy studying the p-word, I studied the blade.
As a card-carrying sword lesbian, i feel confident to say that he comes off as equally clueless about vulvas and blades.
Anime gets really weird about age, and I don’t mean how everyone is always so young I mean how age is a big deal or secret sometimes
In Japan, once you enter work life your life is basically over so they romanticise the fuck out of your teenage years and your early twenties
Any character over 30 is seen as a decrepit old fart. In MGS1 Solid Snake is forced out of retirement for one last job and several characters tell him he’s aged and looks like shit. He’s 33 but they act like he’s pushing 50.
tbf doesn’t Snake age faster because he’s a clone or something?
True, but I’m not sure if Kojima had thought of that plot point at the time he was making MGS1. It’s definitely there in MGS2.
The way Snake is treated is consistent with other Japanese media though
So it is that the map demographic has money, because they don’t go on dates with their target audience, and can realistically only enguage in media? Thus making them a captive audience for media companies to target? I know japan sticks to a more premodern concept of age but I don’t get this.
Ninjas are like dragons apparently
I would generally age a bunch of these characters up to 100 in one of the games. But yeah, certain creepy elements ruin what is one of my favorite fighting games, in terms of mechanics.
