gotta give it to Takaki and Taro they at least face front admit tehy want to make cute/ sexy girls.
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Why women criticise sexualised character designs (READ OP)
- Thread starter Persephone
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In Wonder Woman case, for what I did see of JL (didn't see the movie) the camera between both movies is another example.
WW
JL
it's almost as if the camera plays a huge role in these things in addition to costume, posing, style, and and a billion other things that make it obvious what is catering to males and what isn't. The fact that these people cannot (or will not, if this guy's post history is anything to judge) understand this is why we keep going around in circles.
Camera, camera, camera. Actually look at the scenes with Quiet and the problem is not only the fact that she's wearing a bikini and hot pants (and before you say "breath through the skin", she has the same thing as The End and I don't see him in a two piece), but the fact that so many of her scenes keeps zeroing in on her breasts, to the point that her torture scene is more interested in her breasts then it is in showing her torture.
Yeah sadly I couldn't even make it through Persona 5. It tries to address so many issues but goes about it so wrong.
Well, looks like I missed the explosions again.
Quiet is not just 'sexy', she is overtly sexualized. The camera lingers on her chest and butt, even during scenes where that is utterly inappropriate. When she is in the helicopter she will do poses in the background. She is treated as a sex object. She doesn't even speak for a majority of the game. Sure, that's because of plot reasons, but it still contributes. People criticize the 'breathing through her skin' excuse because it is utterly ludicrous. Clothing isn't air-tight. Breathing through your skin does not prevent you from wearing clothes.
Quiet could still be sexy if the camera didn't sexualize her. She could still be sexy if they removed the gratuitous posing during helicopter rides. She could still be sexy if she wore a proper damn outfit. She could still be sexy without the apparent romantic feelings towards the player character. None of those things were needed.
*very deep sigh*
Quiet is not just 'sexy', she is overtly sexualized. The camera lingers on her chest and butt, even during scenes where that is utterly inappropriate. When she is in the helicopter she will do poses in the background. She is treated as a sex object. She doesn't even speak for a majority of the game. Sure, that's because of plot reasons, but it still contributes. People criticize the 'breathing through her skin' excuse because it is utterly ludicrous. Clothing isn't air-tight. Breathing through your skin does not prevent you from wearing clothes.
Quiet could still be sexy if the camera didn't sexualize her. She could still be sexy if they removed the gratuitous posing during helicopter rides. She could still be sexy if she wore a proper damn outfit. She could still be sexy without the apparent romantic feelings towards the player character. None of those things were needed.
About that attempt at a rape scene "starring" the horribly designed Quiet, don't forget the context: it is both stated (and implied) that she killed a lot of those soldiers' comrades, I see that as they wanting to make her pay in every way they could.
She's ridiculous for the way she's introduced and portrayed in the game, but at least we get a far better outfit, if we care to raise our "bond" with her (the XOF suit).
She's ridiculous for the way she's introduced and portrayed in the game, but at least we get a far better outfit, if we care to raise our "bond" with her (the XOF suit).
I can somewhat understand people complaining about there being no discussion about why men are being portrayed as buff/muscular, handsome dudes that can do anything and everything; how it's usually scoffed at and ridiculed by saying "it's just a power fantasy".
But if you can't see the difference between how women are portrayed compared to the men ( bouncy boobs, skimpy clothing etc. ) you really need to question your own sanity.
But if you can't see the difference between how women are portrayed compared to the men ( bouncy boobs, skimpy clothing etc. ) you really need to question your own sanity.
I know how you feel. I actually asked waaaay earlier in this thread about it.
I want women to feel more comfortable and think there should be less sexualized designs. I think Quiet being dressed like she is was ridiculous.
But I've also still bought Senran Kagura and Monster Musume titles recently.
Yet I still was extremely angry at how a recent game handled its female lead(can't say due to spoilers).
I mean, let's take the BB squad in MGS4. Is it fine for a game to have a league of villains made up purely of sexy women? Sure.
Is it okay to then take those sexy women and spend 20 minutes ogling them as you engage in your own personal Gravure shoot?
Stuff like that, stuff like Quiet's ass being shoved in the camera's face for no reason, stuff like the dancing in the rain...that's why people give Kojima shit. Baseless titillation as a gameplay reward that generally undermines the complexity of otherwise awesome characters is Kojima's MO. Is Quiet a great character? Yes. Would you know that Quiet was a great character if you gave up on her based on how the camera frames her and how Kojima portrays her before she's relevant to the plot? No. Is it a reasonable request to ask someone to sit through multiple hours of fanservice in order to get to the meat and potatoes of a character's story? Hell no.
"Words and Deeds" is stupid, but it's Kojima's mantra. He is not absolved of criticism because he makes good games. There's a pervy streak that runs down the middle of all of his games, and you best believe it's going to be in Death Stranding as well.
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If you're going to debate Kojima.
What are your thoughts on his game Snatcher, where he sexualises a 14 year old girl, forces the player to sneak up on her in the shower, showcases her nude and lets the player smell her panties.
oh please tell me this isn't real? How is that even legal?
It's fine to like fanservice, it's fine to enjoy a little titillation here and there, there's nothing wrong with enjoying a form you find attractive.
The problem here is that so many pieces of media little kneecap themselves in order to bend over backward in order to drown themselves in tittilation. The problem is our defaults when it comes down to how men and women are portrayed in games usually falls upon the ridiculous. Even in cases were ridiculous is the name of the game, a lot of people still decide to press further for reasons that make very little sense other than engaging the superfluously horny. Quiet is a great example of this. Dragon's Crown is also a great example, where you have a cast of characters who are over thet op in every way, but they still felt the need to include hentai stills for loading screens.
It's fine to want things a little sexy here and there, no one is arguing that. But it shouldn't be the default, it shouldn't be the core concept a character is based around and it shouldn't be thrown in the players' face as something they SHOULD want ALL THE TIME and if they don't, being made to feel like there's something wrong with them.
Japan + Kojima.
It's in the Japanese version, it fortunately got localized out for the English release.
I'd like to think Kojima has changed, but I feel like playing Snatcher has instead just made Quiet even more uncomfortable.
But it's the pervasiveness and the one sided nature of the sexualization, that i think lets woman feel excluded from games that they enjoy. I mean take Persona 3 portable for example. For a Persona game it has considerably less sexual pandering than its sequels imo. But still you get a lot more sexy outfits for the female protagonists, than for their male counterparts. I think that this lets females, who play the game, feel they are specifically targeted, because of the one sidedness. It did so for me anyway, and i'm a male. I can't begin to imagine how woman must feel who get this kinda stuff from everywhere in the society.
This feeling of being objectified is something that we males just don't have to deal with, not on the same scale anyway.
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I disagree with this, As other say, is their game, they can do it whatever they want with it (as long as they are able to go and say, YES, I and it like X cause I wanted, not the Skin Breathing thing of Quiet).
After a director/ producer made the game however he wanted, its up to the public to whether buy the game or not. if they side with the guy idea and buy it, good for the producer.
If people decides is tooo much and dont buy it, the game flops, and producer have the option to change his mind in other projects, or see how many more projects he can mess up before getting fired
I'm not a woman, so perhaps I shouldn't chime in about the point at hand given the title of the topic, but personally I tend to make a distinction between fan-service oriented games, like DOA and Senran Kagura, and other titles, like the much discussed FFXV and Phantom Pain. Regarding the former, they pander to a very specific niche, so people who buy those games know what they are getting into. That's not to say that they are not quite tasteless, imo. I think that there are better ways, more artistically fulfilling, if you will, to make fanservice games. A good example of that would be a game like Code: Realize, though very different in nature than those mentioned, being a visual novel.
Regarding the latter, they are much more problematic, for a number of reasons. First is the fact that fanservice doesn't really have much of a place in those kind of games. It is jarring to say the least. Secondly is the discrepancy in the way female and male characters are depicted, of course.
I don't think fanservice is in itself a problem (though it could be argued that it perpetuates certain stereotypes and views that may affect the most impressionable, younger audience, to whom games like DOA of course should not be sold) but rather the fact that, by creeping in places where you wouldn't expect it to be, it's being normalized to the point that people are now confusing it with proper characterization.
Sure okay, but then I don't wanna hear any bullshit about, "You will feel ashamed for your words and deeds" when we call them out on their bullshit.
Because it is bullshit. It is dumb, pandering, lowest common denominator bullshit. I would actually have more respect for Kojima if he just admitted that much because he is fully aware.
Use spoiler tags.
Funny story, I remember when my brother wanted to show me a game called Earth's Dawn, and then I saw the characters and I noticed that something was nooot quite right.
I let you guess why.
(It was an okay game though, reminds me of Vanillaware games like Muramasa)
I let you guess why.
(It was an okay game though, reminds me of Vanillaware games like Muramasa)
This applies to every aspect of a game. So let's pack up this forum guts. We should just buy or not buy. No discussion required.
Let's be honest, MGS games in general has had plenty of male gaze tropes as well. They were usually ignored because you usually had to go out of your way for most of them but, Merryl's ass shots in MGS1, the male gaze on EVA in MGS3, and the Beauty and Beast unit in MGS4 (hey, let's include a photoshoot of extremely hot women after we have effectively killed them) are all examples of this before Quiet. It's just Quiet is just so blatant and so obvious that none of the excuses people made for the previous three examples even made sense in the MGS universe.
In all honesty, there's a lot of games I just can't enjoy cus you can just tell that they were designed for guys, it's little things that take me out of it. Like the Witcher 3, I have heard a lot of people go on about how amazing it is but I just can't enjoy it. For one thing, the Botchling quest reminds me too much of the photos that Anti-Abortion protesters use, I really hate how it's used for shock value. It feels hamfisted to me, yet other people seem to love it, That's really the main example int The Witcher 3, but there's just a billion little things that add up to me not getting into it. The thing is it's not always the big, obvious examples like Quiet, it's more little things that can make you feel really unwelcome in a game.
Some countries do have laws where if it looks like child pornography, it counts as child pornography. You don't actually have to have a real person involved.
You're missing the step where the director/producer only knows what the public liked and didn't like in the game because people complained loudly enough about it, i.e. threads like this.
Again, women make up more than 40% of the console audience.
I think the director, producer, and investors value the financial success of their project over anything else. One example is the public outcry against Confederate and yet HBO is still moving forward.
The problem is just mentioning the game would probably count as a spoiler. It's also not about sexulization but how the character was treated by the game. To be as vague as possible.....
The female lead wound up being much less important then we were lead to believe.
Another issue with sexualization is how companies "deal" with it - especially when it comes to asian games where they just remove some costumes or randomly plaster on textures to cover up as much as possible.
I don't see how that benefits anyone as the characters themselves just end up looking weird in general because they don't ask a designer to figure out some less revealing type of clothing that actually looks decent; but it also gives fuel to the idiots who run around yelling about censorship and how fighting sexualization is basically limiting artistic freedom of expression.
And on the topic of artistic expression, how difficult is it to create a "sexy" character, really? Just draw a big pair of tits, put on a swimsuit and make them skinny and you're basically halfway there if you go by porn standards.
But creating a character that's considered sexy/attractive while not following any set beauty standards and doesn't rely on cheap supermarket pornography - that feels like more of an artistic challenge if anything; isn't the point of an artist to create something new, something that's never been seen before, that evokes feelings on multiple levels?
Can art be considered art if everyone's just drawing the same apple but using different shades of green on it?
( I feel I went places with this text so if I wrote something off, feel free to correct me as english is not my first language )
I don't see how that benefits anyone as the characters themselves just end up looking weird in general because they don't ask a designer to figure out some less revealing type of clothing that actually looks decent; but it also gives fuel to the idiots who run around yelling about censorship and how fighting sexualization is basically limiting artistic freedom of expression.
And on the topic of artistic expression, how difficult is it to create a "sexy" character, really? Just draw a big pair of tits, put on a swimsuit and make them skinny and you're basically halfway there if you go by porn standards.
But creating a character that's considered sexy/attractive while not following any set beauty standards and doesn't rely on cheap supermarket pornography - that feels like more of an artistic challenge if anything; isn't the point of an artist to create something new, something that's never been seen before, that evokes feelings on multiple levels?
Can art be considered art if everyone's just drawing the same apple but using different shades of green on it?
( I feel I went places with this text so if I wrote something off, feel free to correct me as english is not my first language )
Knowing what the public wants not always equals what the dev wants to make at the end.
not straight related to sexism but take Tomonobu Itagaki (Ninja Gainden) on a game difficulty for example:
Just say it. In discussions like this spoilers are fair game no matter how recent.
I personally fall in line with Warren Spector who called it "adolescent approach to sexuality." I think that is the problem not sexuality in itself.
What he said isn't about Kojima directly though. But about gaming overall. And it absolutely applies to Kojima. Spector was talking in the context of game violence and also brought up the sexualization point. Considering Quiet torture scene it's absolutely on point.
yeah, this is mea Culpa, I thought the ratio (not counting mobile or Facebook games) was 7/3
I know what game you're talking about. But it's two separate issues, even if it was a shitty thing to do. It's kind of off topic and doesn't serve any purpose in this thread, particularly.
Spoilered for safety:
Danganronpa V3
Alright but I'm putting everything in spoilers so warning this game is very recent.
Danganronapa V3
Hey you know that female lead were promoting? Yeah just kidding we're going to brutally kill her off at the end of chapter 1 to switch to the real lead, another awkward indecisive male. Also we're going to reveal at the end that she was actually framed and killed for no reason!
Hey you know that female lead were promoting? Yeah just kidding we're going to brutally kill her off at the end of chapter 1 to switch to the real lead, another awkward indecisive male. Also we're going to reveal at the end that she was actually framed and killed for no reason!
@Cream
I don't think there's anything wrong with being critical of the media you consume/enjoy.
It would be hard to completely avoid this content, especially for fans of fighting games or Japanese games.
For how much I hate some of the content in the previously mentioned Snatcher, it's also one of the best games I've played.
Yea, I didn't think much about it when I was younger, but Kojima definitely plants his perviness in all his games.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being critical of the media you consume/enjoy.
It would be hard to completely avoid this content, especially for fans of fighting games or Japanese games.
For how much I hate some of the content in the previously mentioned Snatcher, it's also one of the best games I've played.
Yea, I didn't think much about it when I was younger, but Kojima definitely plants his perviness in all his games.
The recent history of video games is littered with examples of publishers, developers and manufacturers deciding to change things because of public outcry.
Off the top of my head:
- Mass Effect 3's extended ending
- Always online Xbox One
- Battlefront II loot box prices
Pure sales figures are one factor. Bad publicity and the reasoning behind less-than-ideal sales figures are another.
There's a sentiment that comes up sometimes that in recent years, women are starting to be represented better in AAA games (at least non-Japanese ones) and that therefore this topic is redundant. If anything, it just proves that there is value in making this a visible issue by discussing it a lot... or do you think devs decided to do this spontaneously by pure coincidence?
If there's one lesson to take from the state of the industry today, it's that making noise makes a difference.
lol at the spoilers. Typical for the franchise really, why I peaced out after the first game. Aside from an asinine plot that crawled up it's own ass after a while.
Yeah I was more just trying to make a comparison to how divided I feel at times regarding things like this. Sorry to go off topic.
I can't believe people are still debating Quiet.
Even with the ridiculous justification that she can only breathe through her skin, she's still designed terribly because she's wearing ripped leggings that she certainly wouldn't be able to breathe through.
She would breathe much better and be able to move better if she dressed like an MMA fighter, or a sprinter, or even a beach volleyball player.
Even with the ridiculous justification that she can only breathe through her skin, she's still designed terribly because she's wearing ripped leggings that she certainly wouldn't be able to breathe through.
She would breathe much better and be able to move better if she dressed like an MMA fighter, or a sprinter, or even a beach volleyball player.
Yes that is an interesting point you raise. That is a connection i myself would have never made. Just because i don't have to deal with anti abortion protesters in my country. Also i think while The Witche 3 made great progress in including amazing females that aren't sexualized, in contrast to its prequels. Still it has some ways to go. Thinking here specifically about Shani's decolletee, while not as ridiculous as Triss Merigold's decolletee in Witcher 1, it still lets you see pretty deep. I wouldn't have had a problem with it, if she would have worn it just for the wedding.
But like you said it's often the little things, just because they add up.
Was that the first game of that series to have a female lead?
This user was banned for 1 month for this post. We're not going to entertain discussion or defense of content sexualizing under aged children, whether real or fictional.
Let me rephrase then: why should it be illegal?
Child pornography is wrong not because it pleases pedophiles but because children are actually stripped naked and made to pose for a shot or even worse effectively forced in sexual intercourse. Drawings and CG do not have this so the fact that such productions are "creepy" can't be a reason to prohibit them as there is nobody hurt or exploited by this.
While I still find such content particularly fucked up and I'm not interested in little girls still doesn't sit right with me to criminalize any victimless behaviour
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Absolutely. Developers are free to ignore user feedback and create the games they want to create.
...And users are, in turn, free to continue complaining about the games not being to their liking, and developers are free to continue ignoring this.
This is why it's ridiculous to suggest that discussing this topic is akin to censorship. Far from it.
Oh great, now we're getting pedophilia debates as pertaining to anime! This thread surely can't get any better.
I think games that treat women like shit without objectifying them is a whole other can of worms worth discussing. Might make a thread.
In a vacuum I don't even mind those designs (except maybe the high heels specially for characters like Laura, but it gets annoying that it's everywhere
And in Claire's defense at least her main design is actually her uniform where she has actual pants (which is already better than the crossbell guard force uniforms where the girls use mini skirts because of course)
Althogh all those are miles better than whatever the fuck Altina is in Cold Steel 2
CS3 seems to be more of the same except Fie looks fucking ridiculous, Angelica is the only one I know that has a pair of paints but they decided to add some high heels even though she's a martial artist
only if the complaining side is a minority, but if the people that complain and dont buy are a majority, teh game will flop and director will be kicked out.
In the part after the sentence you quoted I indeed said that
EDIT: I see where the misunderstaind might have come from so I slightly reworded the previous post to make mor clear what I meant
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