Cyberpunk 2077 Review thread - Umm....
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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I don't think all (or even most) of the hate for Abby comes from her design aesthetic. It's a character design that a lot of people find displeasing, with a character whose attitude, characterization and choices people also find displeasing.
It's a combination of people thinking she looks ugly while also having an ugly personality and I don't think she'd get as much hate if her personality had been more likeable, and if she didn't kill off the previous game's main character at her introduction.
You know the problem with trying to move the goalposts that hard and that fast? They might swing all the way around and smack you square in the face.
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Are you quite done making a complete, ignorant, ass of yourself yet?
Definitely true
I'm 100% certain that if these people liked Abby, this wouldn't be a conversation.
Hey, you're the one who said she should be dead of a heart attack.
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Right, but you're simply wrong.
The average woman in the US is nearly 40, weighs 170 pounds and has a dress size of 16. You cited a study whose participants were almost exclusively 18-23 year old college students with an average weight of around 120 pounds, and which was actually presenting an argument that, even among that very young, very skinny sample, there is more diversity in women's body shapes than was previously acknowledged. Again, I think you need to read your links more carefully.
What is the definition of those things?
I mean, let's take a really good example of that line being transgressed. Quiet from MGS5 is a "realistically" designed character. She has a shape which could hypothetically be possessed by a small number of real women (even if her animations are pure jiggle physics nonsense). However, there's more to a character's design than the basic shape of their body. Quiet is a character who makes absolutely no sense in any kind of realistic universe. Even if we accept the bizarre thermian argument that she breathes through her skin, her outfit is completely impractical even by those standards. She's literally wearing a swimsuit on land. A real woman with that shape wearing that outfit would not be able to run around or do anything strenuous because it would be painful and probably humiliating.
But we're not idiots. We know what's going on here. We know what the thought process was, and it had nothing to do with realism or real women's bodies. And again, I need to stress, there is nothing wrong with being horny. But there is something wrong with mistaking your bizarre horny fantasies for realism, or assuming they are just something you're entitled to to the exclusion of everyone else's bizarre horny fantasies.
Let's be real. Most women aren't into body builders. There are a significant number who are, but body building on the whole is not something people do in order to be sexually attractive to women, it's something people do in order to be admired by other men, or to soothe anxieties about one's own fitness or masculinity. There was a famous study into body building subculture in the 90s which found that male body builders were often men who had been ill as children, and who used body building as a way to assert their exaggerated ideals of strength and health. Playing a huge, burly male protagonist is a male power fantasy because it's a fantasy about being this big, powerful man who other men look up to.
And yes, there are real world consequences to that, . But it's still a fantasy that men choose for themselves, not a fantasy that women impose on them and aggressively seek to act out in their interactions with real men. That's sufficiently different to warrant its own discussion.
It's not unique to video games.
I think the main factor contributing to this perception that these discussions are unique to video games is actually how unimportant video games are within the wider culture. There's very little academic discussion of representational practices in video games, for example, certainly compared to more established media like film. The discussion around video games is mostly being driven by people who play video games, because noone else cares.
How is that different from what you are doing?
You've found a single piece of research that confirms your beliefs (I haven't bothered to go fact check it, so I'll assume it does that) and have latched onto it as the final word, despite the fact that even if true it doesn't really mean very much. Do you think there's some credit in the fact that your preferred form of media hasn't made you exceptionally sexist by the standards of a society that is saturated with sexist media?
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Why is this in the Cyberpunk thread ? While Cyberpunk uses a couple of quite different body shapes, it is still not a huge selection nor are all of them available for the player character. It is a pretty average game in that regard. Neither particularly good nor particularly bad.
In my several decades of tabletop RPGs, only a minority of male PCs were big and burly. And when i visit some MMO with proper body type selection, it is not actually full of muscular burly dudes. Most of them are prettty average (though rarely obese) and for every muscular guy i can find at least two bishis.
The male beauty ideal are as artificial and removed from actual desires and taste than the female ones.
Is this really a popular fantasy with men ? Would men choose these bodies if they could do otherwise ?
In my several decades of tabletop RPGs, only a minority of male PCs were big and burly. And when i visit some MMO with proper body type selection, it is not actually full of muscular burly dudes. Most of them are prettty average (though rarely obese) and for every muscular guy i can find at least two bishis.
The male beauty ideal are as artificial and removed from actual desires and taste than the female ones.
You forgot that this is The Escapist forum. There are several people who are like derailing threads that have nothing to do with anything. it's why I set up guidelines whenever I make a thread or try not to make it get too off topic for a reason.
Actually yes. BodyBuilding is a very very dangerous "sport". It leads to a shit load of health problems for many many many of the people who do it. Go look up Ronnie Collman and what happened to him after bodybuilding. Arnold himself had several heart surgeries because his heart had given up on him in his late 40's.
Bodybuilding will fuck you up for real.
I agree, as a DnD DM myself, most of my players do tend to pick male bodies that might be slim, but definitely almost never action hero burly. Unless they are playing a Barbarian and sometimes not even always then.
However one thing is consistent, most players will still decided that their characters are "attractive" because generally people want to play attractive characters even when they exist only in their mind. It's rare that a player will play something deliberately hideous.
That is what has an highly increased chance of happening when one deliberately imbalances their electrolytes to shed a disproportionate amount of water weight in a very short time span, yes. And that's how real-life athletes get to look like Abby does in the day-to-day, because Naughty Dog was dumb enough to use professional shoot, on-season, and peak-day images as the sources for her texturing and rendering.
I mean, that you want to grouch about this being completely incognizant of this fact, then turn around and say "well what about men?" is rather shocking. Because of the two of us, I'm not the one that is defending a game that had supposed realism and inclusivity as a major marketing point, made by supposed "body-positive" creators, and turning around and attacking stylized design. Which is kind of the point here, the reality of Abby's design does not match the rhetoric surrounding her creation, and the rhetoric surrounding her creation due to having supposedly been grounded in reality is what I'm criticizing.
I'm judging Naughty Dog, and its defenders, by their own standards. They half-assed it and made their half-assing it a selling point of the game.
Oh, for crying out loud. Body phenotype is a function of genetics, metabolism, and skeleture, and in women sparing health conditions that impact hormone levels, like PCOS or diabetes, influences body fat distribution. Phenotyping, sparing intervening conditions, tends to remain constant throughout life; an 18-year old woman who weighs 120 pounds and has a triangle phenotype, is still going to have a triangle phenotype when she's 40 and weighs 170.
I'm not wrong about the study, you just don't know as much about the human body as you think you do.
You're right, there is. And Kojima's big on using dress and nudity to make symbolic and subtextual statements about characterization.
Because the MGS universe is neither a realistic universe nor intended to be accepted as one, but rather a vehicle for Kojima to deliver political and social commentary.
Oh man, you're almost there with Quiet. In a game in which the central themes are cyclical violence, language and communication, and more centrally how those are weaponized for the sake of power...the character is a mostly-mute assassin who failed in her mission then defects from the villains' faction to fight alongside the protagonist. Who, when she does speak the player's language, expresses shame for past misdeeds and gratitude for the main character's mercy.
Meanwhile, one might say Kojima has a tendency to equate undress with vulnerability and powerlessness. Not limited to the MGS series mind, see the various nude scenes in Death Stranding and the contexts in which they occur. Almost as much of a tendency to manipulate the metagame for the sake of social commentary, something for which the entire ending to MGS2 should stand as testament.
It's a character whose defining traits are being victim to a cycle of revenge, and contrition. She's mute in a game about language, and designed to be nearly nude in a game made by a man who uses nudity as symbolism for vulnerability. One might almost think there's an implicit statement about objectification in there, that was missed by a whole lotta people who were too busy complaining about her tits to actually think about it.
Do we?
And yet, this never seems to be the beginning nor end of the conversation, and never voluntarily broached by those who would criticize toxic body stereotypes in the media. And in fact, when brought up, the conversation immediately and decisively moved away from it by any and all means necessary.
Funny how that's a conversation that's never allowed to happen.
Not in and of itself, no. Except for that video games are misrepresented as an exceptionally sexist medium.
This is a game that ignited a months-long defamation campaign for having the temerity to suggest that in a dystopic setting in which all aspects of human life and identity are commodified by corporations, trans women would be sexually objectified for bizarre and nonsensical advertising campaigns. And that lone instance of objectification is just a drop in a tidal wave of hyper-capitalized white noise typified at every twist and turn by the very toxic stereotypes we're discussing.
Pretty much. Says a lot about the difference between fans and fanatics, while also showing how easily a game’s themes about hate can be mirrored through merely witnessing something unpleasant. But ultimately the purpose was to gain some greater understanding than that by the end.
Anyways, the takeaway to keep in mind would be that the game is a work of fiction, with characters that look like this, or even like this. So, complaining that a character looks like this or even this is pretty preposterous in the grand scheme of things.
Thing is Abby did not have an ugly personality, she just became twisted by the same hate that befell Ellie. In many of her interactions it is obvious she is a good person but she could never get over the murder of her dad. That layering is what I really like about the game. In reality very few people are either good or bad but the circumstances shape them a certain way. That also ties into the design. In a ravaged, dog eat dog world it's about strength and survival skills not beauty standards.
That people find Abby or Abby's design 'displeasing' is mostly because it proves that the stereotype of the typical 'gamer' demographic is still true; those whose cultural taste ascends no further than cheetos, superhero movies and big titted anime girls.
"If my urine does not please your palate, then you are simply too unsophisticated to appreciate it. Go back to your Pepsi and hot dogs, you uncultured swine!"
Nobody is ever going to buy that, and shame on you for even having the audacity to try.
Unlike Cyberpunk 2077, amirite!
The fact that those who can't shut up about it are only the usual suspects proves my point.
Getting straight back into the swing of things and on topic: Cyberpunk 2077 got its first big patch update. 17 gigs.....damn...
The game still has issues too.
The game still has issues too.
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Abby is far from “peak” condition, as in having a competition-ready physique. That would be something more like this -
Or for a more extreme example of a different person -
ND’s only goal with the character here was having a chic with muscles, and examining it beyond that is a waste of time.
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