As an aside, I wish this type of male body is more common in games. It seems like any time there's a muscular man, they either have a full pack of abs or a pot belly, no in-between. Realistically, you don't get defined abs from just doing stuff like fighting or punching monsters or whatever we do in games, you have to specifically work towards it.
Sorry for diverging from the main topic, this picture just reminded me of that.
Right, you get abs from being in a calorie deficit long enough to lower your body fat to the point that they show. When you see professional bodybuilders on show day they are literally at their weakest because they have been running in the negative for energy for months. I'm definitely much stronger at 200lbs and 20% body fat than I am at 175lbs with visible abs.
Anyway, I do agree with Laiza (unsurprisingly) that it's a separate issue from the lack of representation and visual depictions of physically strong female characters. So often we are just told that women are strong or shown it through their feats while they still look like muscle-less twigs or porn stars. Having the hard work a character goes through to become strong reflected in their physique goes a long way in characterization.
On a somewhat related note, for all of their other design problems, my girlfriend was actually quite surprised by the amount of muscle definition on the new Viera models in FFXIV. She recently race changed to one after being an Au Ra for a long time. She noticed it when she was asking me to help her decide on a hairstyle and saw her character's delts/triceps:
They also have some core/abdominal definition, all of which her Au Ra completely lacked. I don't play FFXIV myself, and from what I've seen it has a lot of other issues (if I played with her I'd love to be a male Viera, but we know how that went), but it was something we found pretty interesting.
Monster Hunter World does a good job with depicting realistically strong looking men and women from a physique standpoint, though the armor designs can still be pretty sketchy. My girlfriend and I had an extensive discussion about it when she came across some mods that change the female character model to have slimmer legs and a larger bust.
