[CERU]

This is a look into two of our leading ladies, and something interesting I noticed about the Japanese versions of the game.

In English, it is pretty easy to discern a softer tone from a stronger tone, more feminine tone from a more masculine tone -just from the way you talk.

It is pretty easy to tell that Claire's speech is softer while Jill's speech is a lot stronger, as in RE3. We can tell this just by listening to them. I think its safe to say that Claire has a more "feminine" tone, and Jill has a more "masculine" tone. As we get further away from the gender stereotypes of old, we have come to idolize strong women.

But in the Japanese versions of the game, the characters have subtitles. Imo, the following is very interesting:

In RE3, Jill's speech is littered with ultra feminized softeners in her speech, especially when her speech is very strong in English. In Japanse, you can feminize and soften speech by adding ending sounds to sentences such as "wa" and end questions in the more feminine "kashira?" as opposed to "ka?" which would be more normally used. So when Jill's strong personality is showing in English, the Japanese subtitles are softening and feminizing it, as if they are toning it down.

But when we look at Claire in RE2, who is closer to the "ideal" gender stereotype of woman of old with her strong maternal instincts and softer speech, her language is not littered with the gender specific speech enders like Jill. I would think that Claire's speech would be littered with ending like "wa" and "kashira," because of the way she speaks in English, but no.

This leads me to believe that Capcom, is indeed, sexist, and very confused. If we look at RE2, Claire is a very strong woman, but also with strong maternal instincts. Jill on the other hand, originally starts off as very clueless and stupid. Despite being a member of STARS, she seems almost helpless and weak, despite, of course, fighting the zombies in the mansion. She needs barry to protect her (Jill sandwich anyone?), while Chris protects Rebecca.

In RE3, however, Jill is very strong. In Code Veronica Claire is made out to be weaker than in RE2, and needs protecting by Steve and her brother, Chris. At the same time she storms a facility by herself and pulls a lot of action stunts.

Capcom seems to want to make its females very strong, and yet at the same time it feels the need to tone them down or present situations in which they need to be protected by strong men. They seem confused to me.