Objectification…that term is thrown around a lot. We hear it a lot…especially when it comes to sexism. In particular, I’ve written this as a bit of a precursor to the entire field of anime and the role of female characters. This post is intended to be more of an introduction to the concept and the problems surrounding it more than actually deriving anything unique or specific.
So, what exactly IS objectification? If we do something as simple as a Google search, the definition pretty much reads the conversion and treatment of a human into an object through tone and text. This might be hard to engage as a reader, so I’ll try explaining it below:
Sentence Structure
What an odd place to start you may say. Why do we start here you ask? It’s because I find if we retrace the basic concept of a sentence, it’s easy to relate the structure to the role and term.
So, in a sentence, we have two key nouns: a subject and an object. Simply put, a sentence can be broken down into subjects doing something to an object. For example, in the sentence “I charged the door”, I am the subject, the door is an object, and the action is charging it.
All well and good, but how does this help us understand objectification? One of the biggest aspects of character traits is the concept of agency. Agency is the power for a character to influence the fictional world around them. If they are in trouble, can they help themselves? If they need to convince someone of something, can they? So on and so forth. When we take this back to our sentences, if they can do these actions, they are subjects. They are actively doing something. In the simplest sentence, we can reduce it to a similar structure of the above: The [character] [did something] [to someone else].
Passive Wording and Objects
This is where objectification itself comes in: an object cannot retain the structure above without breaking grammatical conventions. If an object is conducting in action, it creates something called “passive voice”. I should know…most of my sentences become passive voice unless I actively seek to remove it from my work. Let’s use the same door charging example above though. I we decided to keep the same structure but have the object (door) act, we could get “The door was charged by me”. Notice how the object is acting. This creates passive voice. One of the easiest ways to identify passive voice is if you need to specify upon whom the object is acting upon. This isn’t a hard and fast rule but it should catch most of them. In this case, it is “me” who is being acted upon by “the door”.
Stop Dancing Around the Subject Man…How Does This Help?
With that background in mind, we can describe a story in brief sentences like the above. Our hero rescues the captive, our hero defeats the bad guy and so forth. Now let’s take a second here and get something straight: using characters as objects on its own is not a bad thing. In fact, this is pretty much key in this regard. If any interaction occurs between characters, we will almost invariably need to create objects out of characters. Even “I hit Adam” means you’ve turned Adam into an object that you can hit to a very small degree.
Where characters become objectified is when their personality becomes almost exclusively defined by how other characters act on them. They do not exert a will or any agency on the universe but instead are continually subjected to the will of other characters. For example, Peach (fine..Princess Toadstool) would always be treated as an object. If we use the sentence structure I defined, we’ll find she’s always the object of her stories when we describe the original Mario Brothers game. Peach was abducted by Bowser. Peach was moved to another castle (presumably by Bowser again). Peach was rescued by Mario. In each case, she’s the object. It’s unfair to pin this all on the game, sure, since storytelling in video games itself were fairly limited at the time, but we don’t get the sense that Peach did anything.
And is objectification on its own bad? No. The implementation of it an become concerning though in associating groups of individuals with being object.
Group Objectification
This is the only you’ve most likely heard about before. In particular, objectification of female characters in anime sometimes becomes a particularly sticky subject as claims of them being used as purely bait for male characters becomes emphasized. Indeed, I think you could make a point of that by saying that poorly written harem anime exemplifies this at its worst: each female character only exists to appeal to a small part of the viewer profile and do not interact with each other.
But at least you get fields of pretty girls for all your trouble…or something.
And here’s where I’ll declare something fundamental in my opinion: anime is not a medium isolated from the “real” world. Society affects it and it affects society. How much can be debated – god knows people still debate until they’re red in the face how important or influential movies and video games are for children. However, we certainly know that entertainment is not isolated. The way you see the world is changed and altered by what you watch and read. Have you never seen a show or read a book that you feel you should integrate into you system of thought or process? If not, I would imagine you are in the minority. Heck, Extra Credits (again, I love that group) just about had a fit when they were talking about Call of Juarez: The Cartel for this exact reason and it’s one of the few times they ever had to self censor themselves. I’ve posted the link talking about propaganda games (the more important aspect), but I would look that up if you have the chance.
The gritty details themselves may be geared more towards games, but if anybody opens it, I want to make sure you understand that these do not exist alone. What we read and see can influence how we act. And it is through this that designers need to be somewhat careful that they don’t overstep or overemphasize specific material.
I’ll give you a personal example: my ability to write has been drastically altered after playing 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. While this was later altered by my own idiosyncrasies, the methods I go about writing characters and revealing their true character traits have changed dramatically.
So, why all this? Well, I think we need to understand that while objectification of characters themselves is not harmful, tying objective traits to specific groups is. Again, let’s return to the video above. These things aren’t effective when you think of them as such, but when they’re quietly place, you might cause shifts in thought. But if they are subtly and accidentally placed in and we don not think of them as effects that can alter our thought, we can be prone to changing our opinion because of them. And this is where I believe most people feel concern if they think about objectification of characters in anime: too many objectified characters of a specific group can lead to thought of that group being more of an object because they have been engaged as such previously. Again, this heavily comes down from the female character side, but there are other small sections on this.
Really, and I’ll emphasize this as many times as I think it’ll take to get through: objectified characters are not an issue. Objectification itself isn’t an issue. But objectification of groups repeatedly through different shows may influence the viewership if they are not aware of it. I will also repeat that it’s impossible typically to measure the effects of it and should not be taken as an excuse to censor or to alter. But awareness is key. Being aware means being capable of recognizing when objectification is used. By recognizing, it is possible to not be prone to incidental indoctrination as described in the Extra Credits video.
Well, that’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll have something more fun to talk about next time.
Lain's First Law 