I'm back, briefly! (I'm still tired, though. Give me a few more days.) I couldn't watch this play out any longer without getting involved.
This is a complicated question, from an academic standpoint. Cindy's the best handled without question, because she's a minor character in the game and has the least amount of time for egregious stuff to happen to her. She's a likeable, competent character who maybe could've been treated by the camera a little better, but she's not around all that much. Quiet is an absolute disaster zone and I'm not even going to repost gifs or anything here because frankly they're in atrociously bad taste. From a "what happens onscreen" perspective, she's so many miles into "the absolute worst of the bunch" territory that it's impossible to quantify.
I take the biggest personal issue with Pyra, though, because her entire character and personality is at the core of her game's narrative, she's one of the most prominent and important characters, and I think that a lot of that was lost because even though the camera isn't as bad with her as it can be with other equivalent characters in other games and the anime humor isn't that overly pervasive at her expense, she has the widest gap between the character being portrayed from a writing standpoint and the character being portrayed visually. She is SUCH a good, nuanced character, with such an interesting and emotionally affecting character arc taken in a vacuum, that it's the biggest affront to me to have seen that arc dashed for so many people because the artists and modelers and cinematographers involved just couldn't help themselves.
And now,
Bazztek
I think you probably need to take ten steps back from the canvas and look at the picture you're actually painting here. It would likely be to everyone's benefit if you did so. My impression is that you care a lot about Final Fantasy XV and it not being misrepresented, because people tend to shitpost about it and play up its flaws on the internet. You saw someone doing what you felt was propagating a misconception and you came in to correct it. Somehow you wound up here--you're probably not sure how you wound up here, but you're fighting tooth and nail to get out because now it feels like you're surrounded by enemies insinuating a bunch of horrific shit about you and you're not even sure why.
Am I somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of the mark, here?
Take those steps back, this thread will be here still when you're done, and you're not actually surrounded, we will let you look at the picture from a distance. That is the artist's purview. Just hang out back here with us for a few minutes and check out the whole image.
If you haven't watched the Lindsay Ellis video, I'd suggest you do so, because it's gonna be directly relevant here.
There are a lot of threads on a message board that you can just wade into without full awareness of the context of discussion and post in, to clear up a misconception, to bring something new to the posters' attention and redirect the conversation somewhere different that's also on topic--whatever. It's part of forum culture, it's often a thing one does. This isn't really one of those threads, it has a long, turbulent history.
People are trying to tell you right now that nobody takes issue with Aranea and Cindy as actual (theoretical, they do not exist) human beings. They take issue with the fact that it feels like their character designer (Roberto Ferrari in this case, who seems like a pretty cool dude and is ALSO not under attack here or being called a monster) put them in outfits that don't necessarily fit the characters. Some people, namely many women, take issue with the specific ways in which this was done because it makes them uncomfortable, and is a common trend in media.
You are
welcome to disagree with them, and do so without judgment, but a thread specifically dedicated to women talking about the things in media that bother them in that way is not the place to stage a stand. Attempts to fight that battle here, in this thread, without EXTREME precision and care in your articulation--like, we're talking on the level of a graduate thesis here--are more likely to come off as trying to shout down women or assert that women are not allowed to be uncomfortable with something because you like it.
I do not get the impression that you are trying to shout down women or assert that women are not allowed to be uncomfortable with something because you like it. I think that, much like with the characters of Mikaela or Cindy, there is a framing disconnect that is making you come off a lot worse in what you are saying than what you intend. And much like with Mikaela or Cindy, it doesn't really
matter what you
want to say so long as that framing disconnect exists, because if people can't understand the purpose of what you're trying to get at, what they're going to get is what they
can take out of it, which may be a completely different animal.
I do not think you don't believe women are worthy of criticizing elements of media that make them uncomfortable.
If you want to clarify, say "yeah that rabbit who came out of nowhere is right, this got way out of hand" and either come back in a bit after you've reoriented or just not come back at all with us clear that this entire tangent was a result of a huge and unfortunate misunderstanding, that's fine. Nobody will think less of you.
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