This, basically.Silentpony said:Bayonetta dresses are her characters choose. Great. Except bullshit. Bayonetta is not a person. She is not real. Someone, most likely a man, WROTE her. They wrote 'Bayonetta kills bosses by ripping her clothes off and sucking on lolipops' ...and that's just cool, because...why?
I guess Bayonetta being written as strong and independent is still better than the alternative of being explicitly written as a reluctant victim of sexualization. But in the present atmosphere of gender portrayals, it's not exactly someting revolutionary or praiseworthy either, It's just the result of someone remembering not to be TOO creepy and at least writing a character who happens to be all right with being sexualized.
I remember reasing these old Jules Verne novels, where one of the characters was the protagonist's freed slave, who kept tagging along with him out of devotion. I'm pretty sure that Verne thought he was being super-progressive for having freed black characters, but in retrospect, they were pretty crude archetypes that were written in a way that their agency-dilled life choice just happened to involve serving a Great White Dude as a slave in all but name.