This achievement fucking sucks. That's it.
What I am feeling weird about here is this impossible debate of how and why an artist decided to create something a certain way, assuming one way or the other and then applying judgements about both the artist's character AND the quality of the fictional character to that assumption.
Playing Nier back in 2010 I never felt like Kaine was a character intended for me to lust after. I feel like you have to laregly ignore the actual game and the way this character is presented there to come away with the assumption that that is the point of her character or her design.
No one (as far as I remember? It's been a few years since I last played through it) treats her like a sex object, she and her outfit isn't really presented as incredibly sexy or "hot" (except if you think that merely seeing her outfit and revealed body parts on screen is, by itself, sexy and hot which...I just don't really agree with.) Look at how Kaine is being presented in Nier and compared that to Quiet in MGS V and it should be VERY obvious that both have nothing in common. Just imagining Kaine being superimposed into
Quiet's scenes makes me want to laugh my ass off, so ill-fitting and completely in contrast it would be with her character and the way she gets presented.
This threads and many reactions to Kaine border on simplying "Unrealisticly or weirdly revealing outfit = bad", completely ignoring any and all nuance it can have. I know after Quiet it's really easy to dunk on that point but there is a character motivated reason for this outfit (and, again, it's
actually integral to her character and the way she is being presented, not a pseudo-scientific excuse that has otherwise
nothing to do with the character or her arc as in MGS V). The very first thing anyone ever says to Kaine in this game is "That's quite the outfit, huh?". Even in the world of Nier it's not just brushed away or ignored as it would be in 99% of all other games with scandily clad women, where that's just kind of the norm and an obvious concession to audience expectations, completely ignoring if and how it breaks with the established universe and its norms.
And this bewilderment is so important because it's exactly what I felt looking at Kaine. I didn't see her and think "OMG THAT'S HAWT THOUGH", I saw her and thought "Holy shit, what the fuck is that outfit". And then it turned out that that was exactly the reaction the characters in the game had, too. And THEN it turned out that Kaine was aware that that was the reaction others had to her outfit and that that bewilderment was kind of the point. Comparing her to the complete failure of a character that is Quiet seems so reductive and ill-advised to me because it ignores quite literally everything about the character except the outfit. Which is why it's so hard to argue with. If the outfit itself is ALWAYS going to be judged without context of the text it is presented in and, because of that, brushed away as creatively unnecessary or distracting titillation for horny boys, then there isn't really much to discuss. Because then the point really is just "Ridiculous Outfits are bad!", which, most people here would probably agree, is ridiculously reductive.
The way the marketing in the following years then used Kaine to prop her up as this weird sex symbol stands equally in contrast with the game. Including this achievement, which goes completely against the game it is attached to, which fucking sucks. The statues and drawings of her posing remind me most of these godawful Neon Genesis Evangelion figures of traumatized teenage girls in sexy poses and skintight clothes. I can't really hold those against the show itself though since I struggle to see how anyone could watch NGE to the end come away with the thought "Man, those underage girls really were hot, huh?", even though they are presented in a leering and stereotypical way, especially in the earlier episodes. How marketing and later recontextualization of a text changes the interpretation of the text that preceeded all of this is a whole different discussion, of course. Especially because there is still a nuanced difference between NGE and Nier since, well, Kaine presenting herself in a stereotypically sexualized way does make sense for her character but really not as a piece of marketing outside of the game itself. It's complicated! Because:
There are 3869879 ways to "emphasize one's femininity" without ... dressing in lingerie outside your own house
Well, because of this. It's weird and way too much and there are so many better ways to do it and ALL of that is part of the point. At no point does the game argue that this outfit is an incredibly clever metaphor. The game makes it a point to say pretty much exactly what you are saying. And it uses that to make Kaine a more interesting, more nuanced character because it actually spends time confronting both her as a fictional character and you as a player with those arguments and asks you to ask what the fuck the point of that outfit even is. And that, in turn, helps build her character further.
