Instead I'm going to post what was originally going to be a follow-up to my VN Talk series for Piofiore. It has mild spoilers and is a bit of a personal bugbear so I knew it wasn't something I could discuss in either the Overview or Yang posts because it would take up too much space I needed to talk about the actual story rather than venting my frustrations about how the Chinese characters are handled.
When I started the game I was predisposed to dislike Yang, partially because I knew ahead of time that his characterization mostly consisted of being a terrible person, but also because I (unfortunately) dislike a lot of Chinese characters in Japanese media, for being exoticized and a general sense of most writers not knowing what they're doing. Chinese characters are not the exclusive target of this. Anyone who's watched a decent amount of anime has likely seen some strange American and/or European characters that look like they stepped out of a clearing house for stereotypes.
When your primary representation comes in the form of women with hair buns and both genders running around in qipao and changshan (which are not actually traditional Chinese clothing as they come from the Manchu minority) it gets a little tiring after a while. Admittedly this might be less of an issue (like how the funny Americans in anime never bother me) if I had access to more Chinese media, but I haven't found enough in translation that really clicks with me. A native Chinese speaker might look at Piofiore and be completely unbothered.
Yang is one of those exoticized characters; immediately rendered as "different" not just for being a foreigner, but because he doesn't behave like the other mafia bosses and disobeys the city's unwritten rules when the mood suits him. His full name sounds close to the word for "sheep wool," which is probably not what you want for your conniving and mercurial mobster. Alternatively, it sounds like "sheep cat," as if the writer was confused about which animal motif to go with.
(The problem is that he tells Lili his personal name, but it's blocked out in the dialogue box so you only hear that phonetically it's "Mao." Given that the VO is being done by a Japanese person, we don't have the tone either, leaving his name up to interpretation since Chinese has a lot of homonyms.)
On top of that, Yang, like most of his crew, have single character personal names with only Lee Hsi-shan having the much more common two character name. (Family names traditionally come first.) I get that names like Fei and Lan are much shorter and thus easier for non-Chinese players to remember, but having the bulk of the Chinese cast have the rare one syllable names is weird. And it's not like adding another character would make it that much longer.
Then there's Yang's mafia group, the Lao-Shu, which I can't confirm without the original Japanese text but I'm told is literally the characters for "old" and "rat" put next to each other. They are even referred to as "old rats" at one point in the official translation where the translator apparently took the name as a description and not a proper name (but you can hear "Lao-Shu" in the spoken audio). That might not be a bad sounding gang name to the English speaking ear, but game developer /u/Set_of_Dogs describes it on Reddit as:
Think of it as a Western organization wanting to use worms to evoke fear, like a supervillain group. You could see them being called "The Corrupt Worm", which is a creepy name, but if the supervillain group is literally called "Earthworms" you're going to laugh. This is what "lao shu" sounds like in Chinese.
And the thing is, Piofiore normally likes to show it did its homework. Every delectable dish Liliana makes is given its own glossary entry, including where in Italy it originated from. Italian flavored greetings and mafia ranks are given definitions. But clearly not all research is equal.
The game is happy to give glossary entries for all the Italian food, but even though Liliana ends up eating a lot of regional Chinese food and drinking very specific teas during her stay with the Lao-Shu, the game doesn't dignify them with glossary entries, which is weird since the game otherwise keeps up the same level foodie narration the happens on the other routes and Lily's yum cha routine happens almost everyday.
Aside from that, Yang and his crew of Chinese mafia thugs are oddly rolling around Italy dressed in changshan and qipao, instead of blending in with the locals to, you know, maybe not draw attention to themselves? Hilariously, there's one route where a character suspects Liliana was kidnapped by the Lao-Shu because of how the men are dressed and not because they look Chinese.
While the Manchu outfits are likely to make it easy to distinguish the Chinese characters from the Italian ones given the art style, I have to wonder if the artist would have done the same if it had been a yakuza group that set up shop in Burlone. Would they have been running around in hakama, or would that be considered too old-fashioned?
Manchu dress was worn by Chinese men in the 1920s, but western fashion was increasingly popular in China at the time, much like it was in Japan, and I imagine the rank and file Lao-Shu would have adapted to their Italian surroundings in order to be taken as equals and be less easily identified. (I have less of an issue with Yang dressing out of place since he's rarely seen in public and in his case he probably would enjoy flaunting the fact he is an outsider.)
In any case, the wording of that line of dialogue was so ridiculous that I had to start picturing other scenarios in my head. What if the Visconti wanted to pin a crime on the Lao-Shu? Could they just find some Manchu clothing and that would literally be enough for a misidentification?
And the thing I dislike the most is that the Lao-Shu are unambiguously portrayed as the scummiest of the three crime organizations in Burlone. It would be fine if they were portrayed that way when playing from a Falzone or Visconti POV because it's only natural they'd think less of the foreigners carving up a piece of their city for themselves, but it doesn't get better from the Lao-Shu POV either. They're the only gang that deals in drugs and human trafficking, selling drugged up Italian girls to buyers in Asia (because of course they do).
That Yang is an awful person isn't by itself a problem. It's that his entire crew is portrayed much the same way. Yang's rank and file are the only mafia soldiers in the entire game who leer at Liliana and commit rape on what appears to be a regular basis. The twins Lan and Fei are kill happy teenagers and Lee is the only person who the game manages to make more awful than Yang so Yang can look like the better man in his own route. (Though oddly I like Lee on routes that aren't Yang's because he comes off as the only sane man in the entire gang.)
I don't like devoting so much blog space just to calling out one character and his organization, but the thing is, I don't get much Chinese rep in Japanese media and I consume a lot of it. It sucks when it feels like the writers are being lazy, and that's why I appreciated that My Vow to My Liege was done by a Chinese team. They may have taken liberties with the history, but it didn't feel like someone had grabbed a few odd-sized curtains for some window dressing.
If the Lao-Shu were on equal footing to the Italian crime families, both in how scummy they are and how much the writers want us to learn about their culture, then I would have been fine. And the thing is, sometimes I feel like someone on the writing team (there are three credited) knew what they were doing. The characters are Cantonese from Kowloon Walled City, so having yum cha (more commonly referred to as dim sum in the US) would definitely be a thing for them, and even though the ever popular steamed bun (bao) shows up, they also have sesame balls, which I love but generally would not expect to see in non-Chinese media.
I don't hate Piofiore, and by the end of the game I stopped caring so much what people were wearing, but I think if the really awful mafia family had been one of the Italian ones rather than the Chinese immigrants I would have been a lot happier.
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