erttheking said:
Because if it doesn't fit the tone of the story, if it's a female character who is scantily clad soldier in the middle of a modern war zone, I'm gonna call it what it is. Bad and lazy writing. All I want is consistent tone in my stories.
And for the love of Christ, when I criticize female characters like this I am not criticizing the people who enjoy them. No one is saying you're a bad person for enjoying it. Chill. Out.
Well it amounts to the same thing because if people didn't enjoy them they wouldn't exist.
The thing though is that people need to understand this whole "hypersexualized character" thing is not gender specific and appeals to both genders. Typically Sarkeesian-type feminists need to argue that the overdone guys represent a male power fantasy so they don't count as the same thing, when they actually do, because the girls looking that way represents a power fantasy as well. You'll notice when women create fantasy characters they are typically extremely hot, and tend to dress just as outrageously. Arguably when it comes to girls writing for a female audience they tend to be worse than guys are which is where the whole "Mary Sue" thing comes from. What's more when it comes to sexual content I'll say girls are far more into that than guys are, and tend to be nastier about it as well. One of the ironic things about these whole discussions is that for the most part they stem from women pushing to be included in everything AND to have romantic and emotional subplots added into everything to appeal to them... and yes women gravitate heavily towards romance and such, as you can tell by the sheer number of books churned out on those topics, which they are hardly being held at gunpoint to produce by some kind of militant patriarchy. See the odd thing is that dudes tend to be a lot simpler and can be quite content with stories about brotherly bonding, a few guys against the environment, or whatever else. Society has gotten to the point where this is viewed as being wrong, and it means female characters need to be tacked in everywhere, and of course simply treating them like another guy who just happens to not be a guy is a no-no. Take say "Lord Of The Rings" for example, that's almost a complete bro-fest, but for the movies they greatly extended the roles of a lot of female characters and even created new ones (Tauriel) adding in more feminine and emotive subplots other than "WAR! DEFEAT THE DARKNESS, BROHOOD WILL SAVE THE WORLD!".
The point here is that there is not an issue unless people want to make one, and really a lot of problems tend to come about as a result of people trying to force changes and make people to conform to specific political ideals. By definition the creative process is not something that is ever going to be politically correct or socially balanced, and nor should it be.
At any rate, more on the subject, the thing about skimpy costumes in unlikely situations is because it looks cool, and it adds to the badassitude of a character when they can apparently get away with dressing like that despite the absurdity of it. It also applies to both genders, for example guys run around with these huge beefcake arms, showing off unlikely amounts of muscle definition (and let's be honest, that appeals to most girls, the dudes pumping iron at the beach to get and maintain arms like that usually don't have any shortage of female admirers), I mean heck even if they had the potential for that kind of muscle definition it's not likely sweat would consistently fall to show it off perfectly, or say Marcus Fenix is going to sit around using Body Oil before he goes into combat. Likewise leaving your arms and legs uncovered is actually worse than a lack of torso protection due to shrapnel, splinters, running through brush, sliding across pavement, and the like. Some girl say running around in a bikini showing off her perfect body is similar, and like the above has a certain "I do it because I can" component. What's more if your dealing with fantasy and say bullets bounce off you, or your personal force field, why not flaunt what you have? People say complain about power girl showing her cleavage in DC comics for example, but notice real girls built anything like that tend to do the same thing when they can, the ones that complain are mostly girls who can't pull it off. What's more you can't say it makes no sense for what she does because really she doesn't need armor, attacks (including field artillery) against her fail because she's a Kryptonian and thus invulnerable to almost everything, so as a result she can dress like that if she wants to, and it makes a certain arrogant statement which actually fits the character, and it's also something a lot of girls IRL might do if they were that powerful. You'll also notice when girls create heroic characters they tend to behave very similarly. While not as super heroic pay attention sometime to what Rachael or Ivy wear in The Hollows books and even some of the jokes made about it (Rachael dressing like a streetwalker half the time comes up more than once), of course both characters are loaded with so much magic it doesn't much matter, especially later when Rachael really starts to explode on the power spectrum.
A big part of the equasion is how realistic your trying to be. If say the point of the game is that your female character is on a battlefield because she can literally do the fantastic stuff from a video game (dodge bullets, heal at a crazy rate, shoot with pinpoint accuracy, have a slowing mechanic of some sort) she can pretty much justify dressing however she wants to. The point is sort of to stand out because your at least a minor super hero, and half the point is supposed to be how crazy this is that one person is going to go running out there and change the entire course of a battle. In a purely realistic game that's different of course, but the really realistic games don't tend to be the ones complain about being obnoxious. Basically you don't see characters in "Call Of Duty" running around dressed like super models on a bikini runway unless your setting it up intentionally for lulz (it's not a game default). People rather tend to complain about characters like Bayonetta, where yeah... most women given that level of power and the looks she has would probably do something similar, and it's oddly exactly the kind of character a lot of women create. People talk about the crotch shots, dancing, and similar things, but understand that guys do that kind of thing as well, perhaps it's too modern for some people to really "get it" when it comes to girls "looking at the whole OMG Twerking responses IRL" but let's be blunt, Elvis was making money off of his Pelvis long before Bayonetta was a glimmer in the mind's eye, and you've seen guys doing sassy things in dance moves and even certain action scenes ever since, even if it's died out a bit except when a character is really Flamboyant. Zack from "Dead Or Alive" does a victory dance (male version) including Pelvic action at the end of DoA3 for example. I'm actually kind of surprised nobody drew the comparison between some of the "crotch action" in Bayonetta 2 and what was going on IRL with youth icons like Miley Cyrus (love her or hate her, she is one) basically it's less "female objectification" than a product of it's time, welcome to the 21st century. Also remember that while Miley got attention for this kind of thing, her daddy (Billy Ray) did the same stuff first and got the same kind of attention by shaking his hunky butt and package in front of women in too tight jeans and even getting right in their face or on their lap at times. It's pretty co-ed even if some people think it's outrageous, and frankly if anything I think Billy Ray went further proportionatly than Miley has because to my knowledge Miley has never done anything with random people in the audience.
