When I wrote this post, I focused on sex, rather than violence. But now I want to talk a bit about violence.
I had a very unusual encounter recently in which I was talking about a video game that I played as a child (Tales of Symphonia (2003) for the Gamecube, eternal classic) with my siblings. I was 10, they were younger. We didn't have very many games, so we played this one into the absolute ground. It's a great game! It's a rare example of a JRPG with 4-person co-op multiplayer, which means it basically works as a shonen anime you can play together. The skill floor is pretty low, but the ceiling's reasonably high, so it's great for a mixed-age group. To this day, if I really needed to keep 3 children entertained for two weeks, it's probably the first place my mind would go.
So anyway, I was talking about how great this game is for kids, and the reaction I got was... horror. I was told, repeatedly, that this game is not appropriate for children on account of its violence and heavy themes. Because this game's story is, in large part, about racism. Specifically it is about how racism is bad and stupid. And in the story of the game, the kinds of things that people do out of racism do occur. People are driven from their homes, used as expendable test subjects, and put in prison camps to work themselves to death, amongst other things. The game isn't afraid to really let those heavy themes sit, either. The characters discuss these things with each other often, and the way that their fucked up world affects their perspective on these events is a big part of each character's journey.
But, like, there's no blood in this game. At all. The graphics look like this:
These character models barely have fingers, let alone intestines.
And this isn't a situation where the cutesy character models are then used for shock horror. All depictions of violence are all either in-engine combat (with people shouting out their shonen battle special attack names left and right) or just, like, a janky animation of someone swinging a sword, a slash noise, and the recipient going 'Argh' and falling over. The engine just can't render it. Discussions of violence within the game are similarly non-explicit. People will talk about, say, the death of a loved one, but it's never and more detailed than 'and so-and-so killed them and I have all these feelings about it'. The focus is squarely on how the characters feel about the violence, not the violence itself.
So, any argument that this game is too violent for, say, an 8-year-old is really an argument that the discussion of violence is too much for an 8-year-old. And that represents a real and troubling change from how we talked about violence and media for children when I was a kid.
The concern with violence on screen when I was a kid was twofold: first, that violence is scary and could give kids nightmares; and second, that seeing too much violence - especially gun violence post-Columbine - would inspire a child to do violence. Both those concerns really only applied to the imagery of violence, though. Violence that happens off-screen isn't a concern. That's the whole point of the Disney Death - if a character falls off a cliff, we don't actually see them die, but we can still talk about their death in the rest of the story. An adult brain can wonder if Mufasa died from the impact of the fall before being brutally crushed by the stampede, but a kid isn't going to worry about that and it's not going to give them nightmares. And I've yet to hear anyone even claim that Mufasa's death would be likely to inspire kids to push their schoolmates off cliffs. People sometimes joke about being 'traumatized' by Mufasa's death, but nobody actually was. We know that, right?
Any concern about the appropriate levels of violence for children that implicates Tales of Symphonia (2003) can't be relying on either of those arguments. None of the imagery onscreen in that game could give anyone nightmares (unless they were unusually frightened of model clipping) and there's none of the glorification of violence that would lead one to have Columbine-y worries. Hell, there aren't even any guns except for one guy with a laser arm cannon.
No, the concern here is not about violent imagery. It's about discussions of violent subject matter. About a story that talks allegorically about racism, death, trauma, and how we come to terms with living in a world where these things exist. And not even in a particularly novel way! Honestly, I think it's a bit both-sides-y about the whole subject but that's a matter for a different day. The only way you can argue that this game's subject matter is inappropriate for 8-10-year-olds is if you argue that 8-10-year-olds shouldn't know that racism exists. That violence exists. That bad stuff happens sometimes.
And I promise you. A lot of children already know all that.
If anything, this is a more concerning cultural shift than the stuff about sex I mentioned earlier. Because the idea that talking about racism and violence at all would be inappropriate for children - that it would somehow compromise their innocence - is genuinely fascistic. There's only one kind of 8-year-old who doesn't know that racist violence exists. And it's one who should know, lest they grow up to participate in it.
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