Roger said:
Pat Hulse said:
Aside from just being funny, the point isn't that the sorceress looks unrealistic, it's that the parts of her that are unrealistic are the parts that are perceived as appealing to a particular gender/sexuality. A guy might say that they have no problem with the unrealistic male characters, but if there was a male character whose junk was enormous and wobbly, it probably would make you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable.
One might counter by saying that they still wouldn't mind because they could just pick a different character who doesn't have weird junk, but imagine if almost every male character in the industry had weird disproportionate junk and the women didn't. Doesn't that seem a teensy bit alienating? What if this game had three male characters, two of them had enormous balls, and only one of them looked normal? Wouldn't you feel a little bothered that you essentially only have one character choice that didn't make you feel uncomfortable?
Again, this isn't necessarily a condemnation of this particular style. I actually kinda like it in a weird perverse way. But it's not difficult to understand why a lot of women feel alienated by this industry, and it's also not difficult to remedy that. We don't have to get rid of these character designs, but the people who complain about them have a right to be upset and to feel uncomfortable with how their sex is portrayed in general.
That some people think a breast is on par with a penis really shows how puritanical of a culture we live in.
m19 said:
Pat Hulse said:
http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-svhrTpg/0/950x10000/i-svhrTpg-950x10000.jpg
Aside from just being funny, the point isn't that the sorceress looks unrealistic, it's that the parts of her that are unrealistic are the parts that are perceived as appealing to a particular gender/sexuality. A guy might say that they have no problem with the unrealistic male characters, but if there was a male character whose junk was enormous and wobbly, it probably would make you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable.
The problem with that image is it is a false equivalence. The sorceress was made to appeal to men. The guy with a giant member was made to annoy... men. The equivalent would be something made with women as the target.
I'll respond to both of these because they're kind of in the same ballpark of "false equivalence".
Roger, people will find attractive what they find attractive. However, the power of any visual medium is the ability to impart your own vision onto the audience. To illustrate my point, I personally don't find anything inherently sexual about feet, but some people do. That said, I find it really hard to watch a lot of Quentin Tarantino films and not see that he's trying REALLY hard to sexualize a lot of feet. I love those movies, and I don't have a problem with QT's tastes, but I can tell just by how the material is framed that he is portraying these body parts sexually.
When you see the sorceress, it's pretty obvious that the intent is to titillate. Pretending otherwise is silly. Are breasts sexual organs in the same way a scrotum/penis is? No. Do they provoke responses that are inherently sexual in nature when portrayed in this particular manner as much as actual sexual organs would? I'd say yes.
Which brings me to m19's point, which implies that the explicit intent of the fighter's design in the Penny Arcade comic is to annoy men rather than to appeal to women, which makes it a false equivalence.
First of all, I'd imagine that a lot of straight women who first saw designs similar to the sorceress had a moment of "Does anyone actually find this attractive?" And then they quickly found out that quite a few men do, and lost a little bit of faith in humanity. In that light, you'd probably be surprised to learn that this kind of male anatomy would probably be appealing to more women (and probably men) than you'd think. Probably not a LOT, but honestly, not all that many straight men would find the sorceress particularly appealing. Most men would probably not be BOTHERED by it, but it's not like every single straight man would find the sorceress sexy. Many would probably just find it comical. Similarly, I doubt a lot of women would be terribly bothered by the Penny Arcade fighter design and likely just find it humorous.
But still, you're right. Penny Arcade's intent was to make a point by creating a design that explicitly annoyed/discomforted men.
Now... you do realize that a great deal of women find the sorceress' design to be annoying/discomforting, right? Just because it isn't INTENDED to doesn't mean it doesn't. The fact that this was designed with the intent to appeal to the sort of people who find it appealing doesn't really help. If anything, it just says that the desire of some to stare at unearthly breasts outweighs the discomfort of those who find that appearance annoying.
That said, I'm not suggesting that one person's discomfort towards a design is enough reason to discredit someone else's enjoyment of it. However, it's important to acknowledge that this dynamic when it comes to sexualized character design is SERIOUSLY one-sided in western media, particularly in video games. The fact is, there are very few male characters in western media that are sexualized to the point of making straight men uncomfortable.
So what's my point? Just that it's very easy for men to disregard the annoyance/discomfort of women who are bothered by this kind of character design when we don't really have to deal with anything like it ourselves. Even if the Penny Arcade comic and things like the Hawkeye Initiative aren't an exact equivalence, they still provide a certain degree of context to help give men an understanding of what this kind of representation feels like.
It isn't that women are bothered that the sorceress looks ridiculous or that some men find her attractive. It's that the design is just generally unappealing to a lot of women, makes them uncomfortable because of the overt sexualization, stating their discomfort often gets them chewed out by those who like the design, and this sort of design decision is practically inescapable in the medium.