Are we allowed to use profanity in the names and support conversations of our Fire Emblem romhacks?

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:coffee:

Honest opinion, it ain’t about whether or not profanity is legal and to what extent. It’s about the fact that probably there’s three rom hackers in the world that can use it well without it growing stale or giving second-hand embarrassment and they chose not to do so.

Profanity while keeping a serious tone is a very difficult task, and one that tries at that is probably going to take a long time at perfecting the skill of not making it look bad.

And even then, if you simply spam it around, it’ll lose its value. Profanity itself is a means of grounding a character down - humanizing it, rather. Would you expect the ruler king, the 27th dragon god, or so on to suddenly say “fuck”?

No, right? That’s what gives value to profanity.

If you name your hack “Fuck Damnblem, Shitting Blade”, and half of the dialogue is the word ‘Fuck’, then, well, suit yourself.

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Unless like every cast member uses them to some extend, it becomes kinda jarring. Like if only 1 character does it over and over you’re like huh? yknow, occasional can work tho, maybe for the more unrestrained cast member, but again reading it is different than having a VA say those lines

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You can see that some people agreed with me as they liked my reply and nobody did yours. You should stop trolling before it gets you banned.

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This is peak FEU. Give this guy an award.

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Thing is, I’m not entirely convinced he’s trolling.

Hell, I’ve had problems in the past where some people couldn’t tell I was dead serious on a topic they thought was a joke.

Especially since I sorta understand what he ment, even if he said it the most backhanded way possible.

I mean, “annoying” is subjective.

Like OP has, strangely, made several threads to this point that always seem to bubble into vitriol somehow.

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You could always pull a Barret from FF7 and just replace profanity with @#%#^. Fun part is you can just add those and make the player try ahd find out what word you were using

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My thoughts (If it really matter)?

There’s a time and place. “Modern” swear words would feel weird in this sort of medival fantasy world (other than “darn,” it seems based on previous FE games). They either feel immersion breaking for a moment or, what some have done, is just have a character swear for giggles.

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What the Anima Lock Revenant Pegasus is wrong with you?

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Perfect!

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It ultimately doesn’t really matter whether someone’s a troll or a fool. Either way we give them the benefit of the doubt and gently remind them of the community guidelines over and over again. Then after wearing down enough people’s patience users are warned before eventually being banned. Sure it sucks for the rare well-intentioned user that gets banned, but they’re always given plenty of chances before it comes to that.

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For me personally, I’ve seen some projects use swear words in thier stories to exantuate scenes and a sorta weight to them.

So as long as you properly label that you’re project has swear words, you should be good.

As for using them in supports, I’d say just try using swear sparingly in general so you can use them in other stuff. Not to say swear words shouldn’t be used in supports, but rather they could be used more effectively in the project somehwere else like the story.

2 good examples I’ve seen would be Drums of War and Bells of Beyelen respectively.

Drums of War using swear words to illustrate a previously allied unit now apart of the enemy team due to bad circumstance and the bad hand he was dealt. He says some rather insulting things, calling one of main characters a whore.

While this is a very negative word to describe someone, it does convey a sense of unbridled anger about being left behind to die. Yes, while other words could be used to convey that message, it may not come off as strongly.

For Bells of Beyelen using swear words, their comes a time when the characters confront a immortal who has used there immortality to rule across the land savagely and without remorse for others.

When questioned on why, she says that it’s just natural to use such a thing as immortality to build, cultivate and oppress others under your foot since you have the time and all that.

However, she is viciously called out by one of the main characters, stating that she’s no different from any other power hungry fool that they have known and is just using her explanation as a excuse.

They end off the sentence by saying “Kill this bitch”

Using bitch here is effective since it’s pointing out the obvious hole in the Immortal’s explanation.

Where so many individuals are so hungry for power and use that power to opress others, the immortal being the exact same, yet she should’ve had way more time to think about it, but intsead is stuck with that mindset, foolishly thinking that it’s the only mindset to have as a immortal.

So all in all, don’t use swear words too much if you want them to mean anything impactful, or just make a ton of swear words in your projects since I’m not the boss of you

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Just ask yourself, what would Kaga do?

image

… Huh

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Buddy. Pal. At the risk of being too cavalier about the topic at hand in my language,

Vesly’s fucking with you.

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One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread is that when using profanity to consider the tone, genre and the character you are writing for.

Generally Mainline FE is very unfit for heavy cursing, being a lighthearted fantasy series with damn and bastard usually being the higher limits, this is important to keep in mind, you wouldn’t expect a character from my little pony to blert out bitch as such using “replacement swears” like blowhard work in that context, cutting a character off before they say the swear also works, matching tone and genre norms will make your work better regardless of other factors.

To illustrate what I mean by considering character in the game 999 9 persons 9 hours 9 doors profanity is used much, often, and with intensity, this matches the tone of the game with it being a mature visual novel about a group of nine people to escape a death trap in nine hours. yet in 999 profanity is also used to reflect character, for example the young, hotheaded, jerk Santa uses fuck and shit often in his dialogue from the moment he appears to the end of the game, this exemplifies his rash overly casual speech and nature while highlighting some disregard for social standards, however the amount and intensity varies depending on his mood and who he talks to.
While Snake a calm blind man that carries a regal aura never uses those hard swears even in the worst situation.
This is also true of the rest of the cast the panicked protagonist Junpei and the ruff and gruff seven also use hard swears, while the youngest Clover and, Junpei’s childhood friend June never use hard swears [I think June NEVER swears], and Ace and Lotus use hard swears only in intense moments.
All this verity in swearing reinforces each character’s personality in a subtle but noticeable way to the reader.

All of this is important to nail regardless of if you use swears, use only light swears or use replacement swears consider if it fits your tone and genre norms, if writing an edgy comedy hard swearing is fits tonally and in the genre, if writing a political drama more reserved use of swears would be appropriate, while a light hearted beat the evil cult plot would probably like a more muted use of swears like damn, crap, or bastard at most. and a very g rated plot use no real swears.

however regardless of if you use swears or not, you must further consider WHO swears, if you have a refined pompous noble having them swear [or use a replacement] in regular conversation is likely not going to be a good idea, as it goes against the very idea of the character, however if you have an angry or jerk type character use hard swear in casual conversation it will feel much more fitting, same for a character who is very casual however in this case instead of displaying an outward annoyance at those around them it displays an easy going attitude as such a casual character should also use lighter swears like damn in a work that uses hard swears.

TL;DR make sure if you use swears it matches your tone, genre, and is in character for who is swearing

Also this goes without saying but you should almost NEVER use real world bigoted slurs, unless you 1001% know what you are doing. [Also it breaks site rules to use slurs].

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He is?

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Also Storch coming in with the precision f strike in Vision Quest as an example of this

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Shout out to the zero escape saga. Great series

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For further context, Kaga does use "奴（やつ）” here, which would typically be thought of as a kind of swear/profanity/pejorative, but how you translate that is really contextual as it’s typically a way to just degradingly refer to someone you usually view as inferior, in addition to being a gender neutral word, contrary to what its literal translation (guy) may imply. It’s probably why Cirosan’s translation used wench instead, since it comes across as less crude. Alternatively, a certain word popular in Australia would probably work too.

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