Pardon me, I'm going to talk about myself again. You might make the accusation that the only reason I talk about myself and my work as a writer is because it's the only thing in the world that I know anything about. Get off my back. It's bad enough that I'm a hopeless nerd with no chance of ever knowing the love of a woman (or, while we're on the subject, any other human being) without all of you constantly reminding me of it. *sob*
What was I saying? Oh, yes.
Go, Yahtzee. This trend for female characters (not just in games, but also in TV and movies) is something that pisses me off to no end. But you know what pisses me off even more, you basically have to make this kind of character now, or people who call themselves feminists, but are really nothing more than psychotic, self-centered bitches (much like the characters they leap to defend) get on your case.
I wrote a story a while back about a character who, Yahtzee will probably hate this, a power-armored space marine who fights demons. Okay, not the most original premise, but I like to take ideas that have been beaten to death with the generic stick and try to make something different out of them. For starters, I made the character a woman. Secondly, because I was basically writing a mother's day story, I decided that I would make the woman actually want to be a mother, rather than a soldier. Her story was basically that military service was mandatory, so she went in planning on getting it over with before settling down and raising a family. Then there was a war of expansion by the empire and she got drafted into further service, followed by the demonic invasion. She kept getting drawn more and more into combat until she became a career soldier. She became a hero when she volunteered for a suicide mission to stop the Demon King and then managed to survive and destroy the Demon King's base. This cost her dearly though, because she was very badly injured, requiring extensive cybernetic prosthetics. Insult to injury, the Demon King, probing her mind for her dearest desire, cursed her so that she could never bear children (demons are real dicks in that story, and for a thematic reason). Since her first dream was stolen, she decided to bury herself in her soldier career so she could protect the world and allow others to live the the dream she could never have.
Now, she was a badass character. You'd have to be to deal with that kind of a life and not go mad or break down. Furthermore, she was a character with complex motivation, a tragic history and a real personality. I thought this was a winning formula. But when I had the chance to do a reading in public (discovering then that it had serious typos which I had to correct on the fly, and boy was that fun (irony)), I got hounded by some self-proclaimed feminists who said that I was insulting and degrading women by creating a character who wanted to be a mother. I suppose if I had made her a surly, psychotic *****, they'd have enjoyed it more, but would it have made a good story? No.
The problem here is not the industry itself, so much as it is the stupid people who refuse to look any deeper than the surface and are constantly seeking something to make into a platform for their shallow political ideologies.
Also, I'm going to say this: I'm actually really put off by titties and have never seen a situation in movies where it didn't really bug me. Some who have read my work (nobody on this site, probably) will find this funny because my work occasionally features nudity, sex and rape. The problem I have is that whenever I see a gigantic pair of breasts, or a woman who gets out her tits for someone in a movie or a game, it always leaves me feeling like I've been insulted. It's like the writers are saying, "We can get away with any kind of shit we want in this story, because you are a male gamer and this woman flaunts her sex appeal all over you. Dance for me, you greasy, sweaty monkey-puppet!"
If there's going to be this sort of thing, make it thematically significant, don't just throw it in willy-nilly to pander to a sex-crazed society. Respect your audience's intelligence more than that. Sure, they haven't give you reason to, but if you push them, they will rise to the occasion.
I'm going to get down of my soapbox now.
