Baresark said:
hentropy said:
Baresark said:
And the gender war continues. Stuff like this is ridiculous to be honest. Any publisher wants to have a say in elements of a game they are paying to put into the world. If I had to bet money, I would put it on they wanted to change more than just the gender of the character, but that is all we are presented with.
Would it be surprising if they did, and that was the only issue? Publishers and stuffed shirt types in creative realms are known for doing this, basically saying "we like it but if you could just change this one little thing we could really get on board!" and that one little thing is usually a fairly substantial change. The fact is, the person(s) that wrote the game thought it would be best to make the protagonist a female, and yes that is a big enough aspect to make a publisher pull away.
Sticking to your guns is awesome, but I haven't seen any proof they aren't writing a male character with boobs, as of yet. If they are writing a female character with female traits, I can't wait to play this game. If they are writing a male character with boobs, I'm already pissed they are making a big deal out of this.
This is the problem with the thinking, I think. What, to you, would make a believable female character? Sure, there's shitty writing occasionally for female characters that make them seem unrealistic, but the idea that if they're masculine they're just a "guy with boobs" is a little problematic. All female characters have to be dainty and emotional? All female characters have to fill support or damsel roles? If they take charge, if they're a leader, if they are strong and courageous, if they're not obsessed with relationships, then they are "a guy with boobs"? This is the kind of thinking that spawned Samus in the Other M, someone who's a "protagonist" but still filled to the brim with negative feminine stereotypes.
To address the first part: I would be surprised if they didn't want more creative input than just the character gender...
Well at that point we're just trying to speculate about things no one but the people involved could know about. Assuming that they had more problems than just gender is just that, an assumption. All I know is that it's not uncommon for publishers to feel that way about just one thing. The point here isn't that they denied the character because they thought she wasn't written well enough, but that she was dismissed because "female leads don't sell as much as male ones". That is ultimately what they care about, not the quality of the characters themselves. Just "how well can we sell this character?" It's not a sexist attitude but it is quite shallow and self-fulfilling, of course there aren't many high-selling games with exclusively female leads because publishers won't greenlight them because they don't sell well. Catch-22 at its finest.
To address the second part: Men and women are more than just physically different. The problem with Other M was that Samus was never a man with boobs.
That is precisely what I said. In an attempt to make a female character, the men who wrote her made her into one of the worst stereotypes of a woman. The stereotypes you seem to want to perpetuate, that females have different "motivations", like they won't do something unless it's to get a cute guy. And that brings us to the other point:
A person can have strong traits and be a strong character without gender getting into it. There are ways that men and women are strong that is the same.
True.
But the other part is that men and women have different goals usually, in a given situation. Some of that is going to be defined by their gender.
Aaaaand we're going into pants-on-head retarded territory. People's motivations are usually defined by their personal experiences and circumstances, and how they choose to react to those circumstances and how it develops and shapes their views over time. Gender can play a role in this, but only one part that overall experience, not the driving force behind it. Men and women can have the exact same motivations for their behavior. I don't know anything about FFXIII, so I'll reference Jack from Mass Effect 2/3 instead. She went through utter hell as a child, but was also granted with a massive amount of power as a result of that abuse, and when given freedom she's actively hostile to everyone she meets, even to people who try to help her, at least at first. This is because people have been horrible to her and there's no reason why she should act any different in her perspective. She's a bit annoying and juvenile and not that likable, but that's how I would expect anyone with her experiences to act, male or female.
According to your assessment, however, because she's a woman she should be more docile and have different motivations. The Jack in the game is just a guy with boobs, apparently, because she deviates from the mold set out by academics.
In the end, you're using sociological measures, which is the study of the group as a whole. Sociologists work in generalities, they have no other choice. But just as they study general trends in groups, their findings can only be applied to that group, not to any of the individuals in the group. Just because women generally act a certain way according to your "plethora of books" (binders full of women, anyone?), doesn't mean an individual character has to conform to those standards to be considered a proper female character. Psychology is the opposite, the evaluation of the individual and their behavior based on their own motivations, which tend to be very unique from person to person.
In fact it's the opposite, fictional characters as well as great real-life stories of real people are usually interesting because they deviate wildly from the norm. However, a well-written and believable character is one that has proper motivation for their actions, and often times this has nothing to do with gender. Bad female characters are ones like Samus in the Other M where ALL of her motivation has to do with her swooning over some guy, it's dependent solely on her gender as if that is the only thing that defines someone's motivations, which is a sexist viewpoint. And that is why this is also sexist:
It's just a fact that women usually have motivations that are different from men, even if the actions are the same. And you MUST adhere to some kind of female stereotype to distinguish them as different from men, just like you MUST adhere to some male stereotype in order to define a male truly male character. That means that you will have to represent how a women perceives a situation to be that would be different than a male interpretation, in order to distinguish them as different, in order to write a female character correctly.
Because you're saying men and women HAVE to have completely different motivations because of what is between their legs, when often times men and women do the same exact things for the same exact reasons. Sometimes they do have different motivations, but that's true of anyone regardless of gender. Saying that a woman HAS to conform to an assigned generality in order to 'be a woman' is absurd, and it sounds like medieval/Qunari logic.
