grassgremlin said:
I'm referring directly to the fighting fuck toy concept.
For all criticism rallied at not only Dead or Alive, Bayonetta, Etc.
This issue has boiled over to the point, I want to make it it's own thread.
I want to speak to the masses directly on this particular subject.
The nature of sexy characters in video games.
I often get the argument that the concept is indeed offensive, especially relating women and very sexist.
I do know it could be due to body images, pandering and sex sales. But how much is too much? And how much weight does this have for creators who just genuinely want to design sexy characters?
Is there no room for that in gaming?
I really feel the need to discuss this referring not to the game themselves but to the creators.
Please refrain from defending characters. We will solely debate the makers themselves and there creative choices. This is a discussion to be had.
My Opinion
I advocate for equal oppurtunity fan service.
I honestly see no evil scenario to a sexy character in a video game. I have often been most
interested playing the most stylish, the most fabulous, the most sexy social butterfly.
I like characters who revel in being a ravishing piece of work while being fun and engaging. However, I who love sexy things am not immune to a feeling of gross, squickiness when it comes to some games.
I hate when gamers express how much they want to fuck a particular character, and how much they want games where they can have characters they want to fuck. The kinds who want tits and ass everywhere and nothing else. The lovers of dead or alive, playing for wank material and demanding devs increase breast size and bounce. The gross moe game that's borderline porn you would never play in public for anyone. Step back, think of your life. You may have just shown porn publically to everyone.
I also deeply despise the sex for award trope and see no reason to indulge in it if I have the choice. It's a whole new level of eww.
And yet, I also like writing and drawing porn and sexiness fan service. I excuse stuff like Kill la Kill and Bayonetta for many admittedly arbitrary reason.
To me, this issue is complicated. I criticize a famous artist who's injecting his wank bait into a product he has no business injecting it into. [https://twitter.com/KenPenders]
It involves 15 year old echidna girl featured prominantly in bikinis when such character had nothing to do with being sexy
Okay, well so much to say here (or re-say here) so I'll start with something I haven't pointed out much on The Escapist. That's simply that women sexually obsess about male characters as much as guys do about female ones, but as a general rule most SJWs tend to ignore it. If you go to sites like "Encyclopedia Dramatica" you'll for example find pages (or used to be able to) dedicated to specific internet personalities that took things too far, one recurring theme was girls being obsessed with male video game characters to crazy degrees, some like "Sepiroth's Slave" were beyond even the waifu thing to the point of claiming that Sepiroth was real and they were married on the astral plane or whatever. Guys tend to be made fun of more as a group, but girls are just as bad, if not worse, and just as numerous. However when you start calling girls out on stuff like this to the same extent that might happen to a guy you tend to be mobbed by SJWs and such, and eventually things like this lead to even ED having to take down or change a lot of content apparently. I simply use this as a reference point because I'm sure a lot of people are aware of EXACTLY the people I'm talking about, but haven't exactly put two and two together. One problem with a lot of internet rallies is that people tend to forget basic knowledge they already have when drawing their conclusions.
As far as the `15 year old in a swimsuit goes, I fail to see the big deal. Teens want to be sexy, and they have sex. It's part of society and growing up, and heck we've been making movies, telling stories, and writing songs about it for a very long time. I mostly have an issue when you have adults having sex with teenagers for a lot of reasons, otherwise I'm all for things like sex education and distributing condoms in schools and such, because to be blunt trying to force abstinence is a losing battle. As a general rule fathers don't want to see their 15 year old daughters being sexy in bikinis and I can't blame them, but the girls see things differently. When it comes to comics sexed up teenagers have been a big thing for a very long time because they have *GASP* teenage readers of both genders, and like it or not those are the kinds of characters girls project onto. Heck even when you look entirely at powder puff fiction, young adult novels and the like, you see some rather sexed up characters and interplay. Back when I was younger Marvel even had artists produce swimsuit issues of their female characters, I think I still have a couple. Kitty Pryde, Boom Boom, and Jubilee all had their moments at jail bait as well. Indeed most notably X-men had an underage romance between Colossus and Kitty which broke up during "Secret Wars" when he fell for an alien healer on Battle World, where previously he was nobly "waiting for her" though the intent of the relationship was hardly platonic. You could probably fill a small library just documenting the various costumes teenage super heroes have worn, and who has hooked up with whom. "Gen 13" built part of it's dynamic around randy teenagers with recurring dynamics about Rainmaker being a Lesbian who really liked Freefall, Freefall really having a thing for Grunge who was randy for all girls except her (later we learn due to hypnosis), Burnout having a thing for Rainmaker and her giving him a sort-of chance due to liking him but not really being into men, you then had Fairchild who was the most outrageously "stacked" of the group but had little romantic interest in anyone and a recurring gag is that whenever she meets someone it goes really, really, bad. Despite being teenagers you've even had bits as I remember where they would hit night spots and all hook up for the night (or not) Rainmaker if I remember tended to score fairly regularly, leaving Burnout and Grunge to discuss if there was some way they could learn to exploit that whole Lesbian thing for their benefit.
The point I'm getting at is, so what? A sexualized 15 year old in comics (of any ethnicity), that's pretty much par for the course. I wouldn't put it past being someone's personal wank material, but that's not neccesarily the case, as it's part of the job, and artists do like to draw/paint young models and it gives an excuse. Even if it is, the term "Jail Bait" exists for a reason the thing is that adults are mature enough not to act on it, and expected to be more careful, especially in a day and age when girls deliberately try and make themselves seem older so they can land dudes in bed. I've seen some really disturbing "how old is this girl" stuff through the years... some hot 20 year old in a nightclub? Nope, she's actually 12... Girls in particular seem to want to grow up fast, and perhaps most disturbingly most of them don't seem to care for guys in their own age category that might be an excusable part of growing up (like with teenagers), a problem given how such relationships are inevitably doomed and do damage on all sides, but that's an entirely different discussion.
That said, when it comes to the rest of this stuff, as I've said before, when women create heroic fantasy characters they are pretty much identical to the ones you see visually depicted in video games and such. Likewise the artwork done by male and female genera artists tends to be fairly interchangeable. The reason why things like "Bayonetta" work is that they appeal to both men AND women, basically girls want to be her, guys want to be with her. There are exceptions of course, but that is the rule, and given that today's gaming industry produces very few games simply aimed at the largest audience it means we get more "Bayonetta" games and none based around more conservative depictions that might appeal to SJWs and the like.
I'll also be brutally honest about something, while very loud, the women who tend to complain about body image issues, sexualization, and other things, tend to largely be ugly women who are jealous. Exceptions exist (they always do) but basically you don't see really hot girls that can pull these kinds of things off complaining about objectification, unless of course they lose their looks and get bitter. Not all women who aren't "super hot" are like this of course, indeed most aren't, but those that are tend to be very vocal and represent well above their numbers. The guys that get involved in this kind of thing as a general rule tend to be ivory tower liberals, your basic fat white nerd on a keyboard in mommy's basement who has had no real dealings with the issues he claims to represent. While again, not universally true, a lot of those guys who represent women's rights online tend to be people who can't score with girls and hope this will bring more feminine attention to them. It's a variation on the whole movie plotline of the sensitive nerd showing some girl how much better he is for her than the macho jerks hot girls usually tend to gravitate towards, and hopes that by this kind of crusading it will pan out the same way.... again exceptions exist, but this is a big part of what your dealing with. It's also why Bayonetta gets a sequel, and Team Ninja keeps making games, and enough money where in all likelihood their key franchises will be around for a while yet. Those complaining about depictions of women in the media, body image issues, and similar things, do not represent the numbers they try and project even if they can be obnoxious, nor do they represent "the everyman" like they claim to. Of course similar definitions can be made of a lot of SJWs nowadays, and that's what part of #gamersgate is about as is an entire front of the ongoing culture war. Your starting to see the repercussions of increasing numbers of people calling a lot of these SJW movements (not just this but across a wide spectrum) on their BS and revealing them as the paper tigers they are at a relatively crucial moment when a lot of important SJW victories seem to be imminant. Things are of course nasty because your looking at an 11th hour battle as opposed to be that has been being fought this belligerently for as long.
At the end of the day female creators will want to keep making their sexy female characters, guys will do the same. SJWs will continue to QQ it's largely about the size of their platform. Certain unattractive girls will continue to be jealous of the ones that are, but at the end of the day most girls will continue to idolize an ideal Barbie, and create Mary Sue characters when they try their hand at creative writing. In a purely video gaming front you will see girls dressing up as characters like Bayonetta at cons and the like as long as such things exis, and I imagine that will fuel the rage of the notties who get all upset that people want to take pictures of the cute girl in the sexy costume and give her the attention she wants while they tend to largely be ignored. Your geekdom focused SJW will keep up his rants hoping it will make the cute Bayonetta cosplayer like him more, but in reality it probably won't as you can guess from the way she flaunts, and ironically he'll remain oblivious to the nottie he doesn't really want either.
Perhaps not the most PC way of putting it, but that's how I see things, and where they are going. Sometime look carefully at the kinds of people making specific arguments when you can ID them, what else they say on other issues, and so on. This is why I say point out things like cosplay and such at cons, and how many cute girls run around and do this kind of thing, make videos, etc... all apparently without being held at gunpoint. If an attractive girl is making some kind of statement here about sexism in geekdom, usually she has an agenda that's promoting her, and getting her power and attention as a result, notice also that such people rarely tend to actually be down in the trenches, they tend to mostly be sitting back acting as a rallying points for very specific kinds of people whose attention as a group they tend to cultivate and thrive off of. Basically if a lot of these sexy female characters were reviled by the majority of women we'd probably be starved of cosplay girls and con photos.... and lets be honest, it's not just support from "The Beautiful People" either plenty of normal girls get in on this stuff too without complaining about it. It's a relatively small group of people, probably those who got picked on by the cheerleaders in high school too much or something.
