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Why women criticise sexualised character designs (READ OP)
- Thread starter Persephone
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Story is as anime as it can be, but hell if its not enjoyable
But Morag doesn't even look that much like a man. Her figure and her costume design still communicate "woman" reasonably effectively, or at least a sort of androgynous look. She's only easily and consistently mistaken for a man in a world/story where the reference point for "woman" is designs like, well, Pyra
Oh, how so? Bravely Second flanderized the heck out of Edea but the banishment of Ringabel from the party allows the game to take on a lot of extra baggage and still not outweigh the cringe of Bravely Default.
Yeah, it says a lot when people seem to confuse her for a man because she doesn't wear girly clothing. At least she doesn't get a sexy upgrade like so many other characters in this game.
It's worth noting that she's only "easily and consistently mistaken for a man" by a 13 year old shut-in geek who's routinely and actively called out for his misogyny , which is occasionally doubled up on by the party's resident troll just to get a rise out of her (which is played almost entirely for comedy and obviously that isn't great).
She's immediately and obviously identifiable as a woman by anyone in the setting who isn't an otaku stereotype shaped punching bag or, well, Zeke being an ass. More importantly she's immediately and obviously identifiable as herself, which tends to prompt impromptu saluting or running in terror, depending on what your political affiliations are.
That said, she definitely has a thing for androgyny, going by her banter with Floren (who answers to both pronouns).
Only saying that to provide proper context. The game deserves a lot of major criticism, but it gives enough ammo as-is.
It slightly more nuanced than sharing toys. They way the characters ( yes, all of them . Even the male ones) behave in these games are designed with a sense of achieving this virtual relationship without the mess/intricacies of real ones. They are 'ideal' relationships without any baggage or conflict ( both with the males and females). To alter them ( by making them more representative of how real women behave ) is breaking the illusion for (some of) these people and taking away what they probably use as a comfort zone /safety vest.
To you and me , these virtual characters are nothing. We did not invest time in them the same way some of the other people may have. We also did not use them as surrogate friends / relationships when the real world was a bit too tough. So its easy to see the knee jerk reaction as juvenile.
Its really hard to come out of this comfort shell where nothing can go wrong and then go talk to real people and make real relationships which come with all the mess and baggage that these things come with.
What's wrong with bravely second btw?
I stopped bravely default after that part.
You know the part.
Not really even in game, as i said so far the only time I have seen that "are you not a man" is the joke on the bath house, and even Zeke mentions that maybe is cause Tora is a Noppon and how they are told men and women apart for how (noppon) dress
So, back to the start, I might find some more later but so far only 1 instance of that confusion
They don't seem to have any problem coming out of their comfort zone to abuse and harass people who want to change their games.
Tokyo Xanadu relationships of the main protagonist never go beyond being a friend who just wants to help. Compared to say Persona, they are very tame. Only difference is the protagonist childhood friend. She was seriously injured in an earthquake while they were kids and he is very protective of her. He is also felt ashamed when he slept in her lap accidentaly. But when a student proposes her he accepts it that things should move on.
His indifference towards forming a relationship with any character is what saves the game but also makes him a very dull but realistic protagonist. He isnt even interested in peeking in the hot bath episode either.
He is also teased by his female employee and is worked to death.
I haven't played the games yet but the clear shift is very strange. Especially considering the fact that the CS moves to what seems like a more socially conservative part of the continent.
The kid seems to be losing his toys though.
Why you lumping people together?
Nah he just doesn't get to play with them as often as before.
It was heman222 that was explaining people who hit back against criticism of certain female character design as people who just enjoy their comfort zone and don't wanna leave it. Snowflakes, if you will. I thought the implication there was that he was referring to the same people who complain about 'censorship' and 'them damn SJWs', if he's talking about an entirely different set of people then fair enough.
I think a more proper analogy would be a kid that keeps hoarding all the toys and doesn't share them with other kids.
That's quite the Spoiler pal you should already have edited it. And yeah I know it's not as bad as with Pyra though.
To be fair he got a lot of new toys while other people lost them, and now the kid doesn't want to give some of the toys back.
Franchises and overall genres (looking at you, fighting games) have ramped up the fanservice through the years, of course that was not a problem for them, but going back a little on how it was before it is.
While it's lead female character design is questionable, I thought the diversity amidst the supporting female cast in Ys VIII was great. You get a badass elderly female gladiator, a practical female blacksmith (hey, FFXV! This is what a woman who works with her hands in a workshop might dress like!), a tailor in a nice dress, etc etc.
I think what I'm getting at is that it's a microcosm of a believable community in its variety of ages (from newborn up to practically retired) rather than an obsession with people of worth being very young and it's measure being their mastery of close-quarters-combat, magic etc. Even the ship captain was great, showing a leadership ability in prioritising where to camp and finding people and resources, rather than running around in a billowing long navy coat with a sabre which is what some games might choose.
That sense of a supporting cast that isn't just an increasing list of pretty young people with increasingly outlandish combat abilities made that world and that cast and their problems feel much more interesting than Cold Steel to me, where yet another martial arts master is just waiting to appear at any given moment. That kind of depiction of variety, rather than laser-focused on young people, sex appeal and combat, helps eventually lead towards better character design and stories for everyone, I think, which is perhaps a roundabout or minor point to make in this discussion, but I'd argue it's relevant to character design.
When I'm pushing 40 and have a young family of my own, I like seeing healthy depictions of the swathe of human relationships that don't just revolve around which adolescent is attracted to which other adolescent and which teenager with a stick can beat up which other slightly grumpier teen with a stick.
It's even not that I'm growing out of games at at younger people- there are plenty of games aimed at a younger audience that I love, particularly Monster Hunter Stories this year.
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for better or worst, if companies are doing it is cause it sells. easy to market, etc etc etc. devs / publishers overall are adopting any idea that its easy to implement to increase sales while taking less risk given how much lately AA-AAA games cost to make
Isn't adol literally the ridiculously good young swordsman who can appear at any momentous occasion. :P
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Only when shipwrecked, that's like totally different :D
But sure, happy to concede that, he is the lead character though- if I wanted young pretty swordsmen and women out of JRPGs in their entirety, I think I'd be making my argument from a pretty lonely island :-)
This is problematic for a lot of reasons, not least of which revolves around the fact that one of the few competent characters in the game is allowed to be so only because of (or in service to?) her purported masculinity.
God I love Hidari. I wish studios would stop hiring them to do art for games in the middle of a series-wide backslide in quality of character writing. Their designs for the last Atelier trilogy and Echoes are among my favorite design work in the JRPG genre, ever. I don't quite understand why uniformly well written games are too much to ask for one of the best character artists currently working in Japan. :(
Lovely example, yep! I do quite like the art style in Echoes.
I actually really liked the heart-to-heart where Morag gives Pandoria advice on cosmetics and skin care products, if that's the one you're referring to. It's a running theme with her character throughout the game that she's low-key super concerned about maintaining her aesthetic--it comes up in some post battle banter too. I thought it was one of the most interesting elements of her character, that being as badass and kept-up as she is is something that she actually works at and concerns herself pretty heavily with, but that she's also extremely conscious of hiding the fact that she has that superficial side to her because it's so counter to the aesthetic itself. It was a nice extra layer to a character that could've very easily gone down the more explicit "raised to be a man, hates femininity" path. (I'm not sure how much of it was loc, but Niall never actually says she was "raised to be a man," either.)
I enjoyed the character interactions a lot across the board, really. As much as they get a little iffy sometimes and a lot of the roasting and trolling got pretty vicious, the party read well as a group that genuinely cared about one another.
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The one I remember, at least, was about Pandoria angsting about Pyra/Brighid's looks, and asking Morag's advice because of her manliness...or something. And that she was focused specifically on Pyra/Brighid gave the whole thing this predictable "real women have big tits" subtext...
Looked it up. Those are the same heart to heart. A few of them actually branch, but the vast majority have a "goes off the rails, feet enter mouths, and the group winds up pissed at each other" option and a "genuine character interaction and higher affinity bonus" option. Ironically, the more innocuous sounding option there is the goes off the rails one. :P
A lot of the worst content in the game comes from the "goes off the rails" options in Heart to Hearts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tLh71-yU80
Unless you can speak for each and every single one of them, that is generalizing every person who likes these games. I feel like your mind is already made up about this issue and I don't think I have the ability to change that.
You can add me to the list of people who skipped XC2 because of its gross objectification, and keep hearing about things that made me realise I made the right choice.
Man I just saw the new Star Wars movie and the story was as film as it could be. Did you see the latest GoT? It was hella TV.
It's good that people are skipping it, and you should let Nintendo know that's the reason why so they actually apply pressure to their creative directors to not have this crap in it.
With that said, I don't see it being wildly out of line with JRPGs. It's ~100 hour RPG, and I don't think any game of that scale completely avoid objectionable treatment of female characters, and usually the male characters also have their own share of how their relationships are portrayed at that length. The character designs may be substantially worse in XC2, but the worst of the worst is all optional stuff at the mercy of RNG, and the relationships around the women are generally better treated than they were in Persona 5 / Cold Steel (just using those two as other, very large, very recent JRPGs).
Big picture, I think the game's largest problem remains that the female Blades have vastly more sexualized designs than their male counterparts. Like, there's a bunch of conceivable pairs of Blades (by Driver, by plot, or by artist) where the male is man is wearing normal clothes and the female is wearing almost nothing.
Pyra/Malos?
Pyra/BirdGuy?
Brighid/Aegeon?
There's a few pairs of blades that are actually well-done, I think (Aegeon/Agate, Dagas/Azami), but they are the exception rather than the rule. Blades themselves have about a 50-50 split between Male/Female through most of the game and setting, but the (slightly) upgraded "Rare Blades" that can replace the Commons at some low frequency are most of the truly awful designs.
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Think about it a little harder. I was pointing out the absurdity of your statement by applying it to other mediums.
It speaks to the importance of visual design, if anything.
As I noted last night there hasn't been a JRPG in at least five years that didn't leave me with at least one or two minor critiques to make (I mean, it's a pervasive Japanese societal problem...)--and I brought some friends into the circle when I realized I really couldn't think of anything that met all the criteria cleanly because it genuinely surprised me. Like, seriously, if anybody can think of one please let me know.
Xenoblade is probably above average as far as the actual level of writing of its women goes for a JRPG (It's somewhere in the vicinity of Trails of Cold Steel, which is the lowest game on the Kiseki scale when it comes to this stuff) but even with at least one of the cutscene directors going out of their way to try to avoid the low hanging skeeve-shot fruit, their designs are such a constant, pervasive slap in the face that it's hard to ignore. Most games have bad writing, so it's a lot easier to just sort of stay numb to that compared to...well, Pyra. Doesn't matter how nuanced a character she may or may not be at that point.
I get your point here, but it's pretty much an accepted colloquial shorthand for "This is indicative of genre trends for both storytelling and visual presentation common in the lowest creativity subset of shonen manga and anime aimed at a demographic of teenage boys with a secondary subdemographic of 18-35 year old male otaku" which is a hell of a lot longer to type and requires a lot more medium and demographic knowledge that people don't have.
It's unfortunate that most people don't realize what a broad medium anime actually is, but everybody knows what it means at this point. It's slang.
For the record I call shit "light novel as hell" too, and Spice & Wolf is one of my favorite works of genre fiction of all time and not at all indicative of what I mean when I say that despite being a light novel. Like, they're useful shorthand.
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I am 45 and this is the single biggest reason that I have slowly moved away from JRPG's. It's also the main reason I loved the version of Nier that they release in the West.
What's happening is that the developers who are aware of this as an issue have been ramping down the fanservice, and any ramping up is coming from the ones who aren't aware. That's why most of the egregious examples in this thread are coming from Japanese developers. They both don't understand what the issue is, and they're beholden to otaku spending habits, so it's just going to continue. On the other hand, gender representation has markedly improved in Western AAA games so it's not all bad.
The problem here is that this definition of "anime" only really applies to people that do understand that definition - I've never heard it used as a pejorative outside of places like this. To everyone else, "anime" means Studio Ghibli or Cowboy Bebop or Death Note, and saying something is "anime as fuck" translates to "it's from Japan", "big eyes" and, possibly, "It's not for kids".
to me it reads you didnt have any proper counter argument and instead attempted to be funny/ snarky..
There is no counter argument, I said exactly what you said. There's nothing to argue.
This is a fair point, Era's cultural zeitgeist is pretty unique in the way it feels about and refers to anime in some ways, and the use of "anime" as a pejorative without understanding of the specific above context is certainly also propagated by use of that particular slang definition. It's probably not the best choice of words in the world as a pejorative or shorthand compliment, since it both indirectly encourages the idea that an entire medium's output is either inherently bad (or good) because it's "exotic" in a homogenious, simplified, stereotypical way in groups that don't understand the definition, who can pick it up from those who use it knowingly.
I'll concede.
Hello, friend.
I feel your frustration. I cohost a podcast about anime, and people using it as a pejorative or blanket term really pisses me off, sometimes. By using the term this way, people are often dismissing the entire medium as one not worthy of digging into because the surface level stuff is so gross or just not their cup of tea. Anime is hugely broad and has a ton of variety that maybe 90% of the people I have this discussion with still dismiss, because it has such a reputation.
I get it.
But at the same time, you know what people mean when they use it this way. And is this really the place to make a stand?
In the context of this thread, is it really so important? We're talking about whiny babies who can't get over the fact that their digital boobs are actively harmful. Sexual objectification is very often just surface level stuff, btu it's enough to turn people off of otherwise good games, because it's so gross and offputting.
So, there's a time and place, and a method, for making this argument. I'm not sure that's here.
EDIT: And to respond to the above a bit, I definitely see it used as a pejorative elsewhere on the internet. And in real life. In both the sense that something is fanservicey as hell, or that it's shounen as hell. It's usually obvious from context whether it's one, the other, or both. It drives me nuts. The difference is, I can call people out for it in smaller communities where my opinion has more weight than here, where I'm just another jellyfish in the ocean.
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The difference being that Persona 5 didn't shove any of those things in your face during marketing, so of course more people will be willing to give it a try. Yeah, I had issues with Persona 5 for several reasons, a few that impeded my enjoyment of the narrative. XC2, however, is happy to flaunt its horrible objectification of female characters, so I'll just save myself the discomfort.
I can attest to this. I used to work at Gamestop and outside of people who wore t-shirts with anime or ponies on them, customers tended to look upon the anime games with a sneer. Most of these customers were male and could be any age.
One of the big problems with the treatment of female characters is that many or most positive aspects about them are typically connected in some way to males or traits classically proposed as being masculine. Toughness, being emotionally closed, etc. - not actual traits that really relate to being masculine so much as cultural carryovers for what masculinity means. And these typically prop up during backstories. They're tough because they were "trained to be male", or because their brother or father or some other male figure desired it. But toughness isn't... you know, associated with being male or female, and it's really odd to see so many stories propose this, because other than via cultural implanting there's nothing inherent about a personality trait being masculine or feminine.
It's interesting how XB2 is called out far more than P5, which is getting onto a fair few GOTY lists despite some serious narrative flaws, problematic portrayals and overused clichés - especially with the increasing awareness of certain issues. Did no one play past the first dungeon, or did they just not notice/care for the hypocritical way the game treats Ann, or the way it frames gay men?
Most likely the latter. I imagine most people that play games couldn't care less about women and minorities.
I'm 37 and find the Nier costumes and characterdesign more offending than Pyra (Xenoblade 2) to be honest. Yoko Taro didn't make it better with his butt fanart collecting. But the game got through with it while the outrage over Xenoblade 2 is going on like crazy.
Or the way that none of the party members really have meaningful relationships with each other, because everyone needs to be available for the main character to date? There's a lot less interplay between the cast than there were in 3 and 4, and I'm hard pressed to think of how the characters think of eachother, except for regarding Ryuji as an idiot or Yosuke as a weirdo.
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