Oh yeah, I'm praying that Morag doesn't get the shaft in characterization later on because that would instantly turn me sour on this game.
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Why women criticise sexualised character designs (READ OP)
- Thread starter Persephone
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Oh yeah, I'm praying that Morag doesn't get the shaft in characterization later on because that would instantly turn me sour on this game.
Another good example is that guy from that mobile Final Fantasy game who got more conservative clothing because male gamers whined too much about how his clothes made no sense.
Lowkey? Yeah definitely. There is no way he drew all of Part 5 and didn't get a boner ONCE. But he does have a wife....perhaps bisexual? I believe it.
Even as a person who loves Jojo, the problem is that Jojo is Jojo. Like, it's not something that's easy to replicate and if we're being honest, a big part of why this garbage keeps happening is because the creators are lazy. Particularly for the softporn games, what we need is a set of tropes that is prolific enough and popular enough to overwrite or minimize the current problems with writing and design.
What makes it even odder is, one would think men would pay close attention to what women find attractive, for entirely selfish reasons if nothing else.
Well "garbage" is a bit of hyperbole but... GTAV, the Batman games had increasingly problematic depictions of its female characters, Ass Creed Unity and South Park Stick of Truth both considered playable female characters too much trouble to make (though they reversed this stance on their sequels), and yeah unlike the other poster's snarky comment suggests there are some issues with Witcher 3. Quite a number of western games still use the tropes of "rescue your helpless female", "your helpless female dies, motivating your journey", "your helpless female is stolen from you, and you've got to get your rightful possession back", and of course the perennial "combat heels", though the combat bikini has faded from fashion outside of japanese games, and mods for western rpgs.
But ya, it's definitely a different kind of problem with representation. Japanese games' issues usually take the form of this pandering pervy objectification (and often depicted as being something the girl is unaware that it is happening to her, or she is sexualised unwillingly) or depictions of women as being weak, stupid, or cowardly, in Western games and media it can take the form of the roles that women are ascribed to play, in what contexts they're seen or not seen, and the attittudes male characters express toward them.
Unfortunately, "washing the dishes" has never caught on for some reason.
Thank fuck they weren't a "thing" back in the good ol' days...
I mean to be fair, Maria's dress is completely ridiculous in FFII's concept art.
What even is that?
Really all you need to do is get a Tumblr account, because a lot of women's accounts are... an education, if you will
I mean to be fair, Maria's dress is completely ridiculous in FFII's concept art.
What even is that?
Iirc he got feedback from his wife (and also daughters?) and decided to have more female characters in his work
I may be wrong, but from what I understand, in Japan most people generally give up video games when they reach adulthood. For a variety of reasons. That's why otaku have such an outsized influence on things, because they're pretty much the only adult market for them.
No lie here. I've been on Tumblr for 7 years, and I've gained a lot of insight from it I otherwise wouldn't have.
I feel like re quoting my post from page 50. Seems relevant again.
Wish Amano would come back as character designer. With how the series has strayed from the traditional Fantasy elements, I still think his designs from his Tatsunoko days would show how well it would work in today's games.
Why is them pandering to their target market a problem, isn't that exactly what they should be doing? Also, Japanese games have no limit to diversity of characterization and tend to have a much larger variety of characters than Western media in my experience.
It's a problem when their target market likes degrading women and little girls.
You seem to think that the people working in the games are particularly different from their target market. Even relatively respected creators like Yoko Taro can simply say "2B and the rest of the female characters were designed how they were designed because I love sexy girls"; that's Japan geek culture in a nutshell. It's far from being something merely decided by the higher ups.
If you ask me, no. I said it in the another thread and I'm going to say this again since it's being the topic but I don't believe that more women in the japanese industry is going to change because we have much more sexualized and fanservice things by women than the contrary. For example, the most criticized rare blade of Xenoblade was made by a woman, a bunch of fanservice manga are made by women, a bunch of doujinshi that uses this type of things are also made by women and we can see much more examples in different industries. So, in the end, it's not a guarantee that because it's a women that she's not going to make sexualized characters or utilizing fanservice.
But this is my take with what happen in women works in general in the media.
I don't know how you came to the conclusion that I think that.
We're literally in a thread whose premise is inclusivity. Sure, if you only ever want to appeal to manchildren and literal children, that's your prerogative. But that is not a good look as a whole, especially when Western adults decide to embody this style that isn't intended for them or their age group. Also, targeting a specific demographic doesn't exempt you from criticism.
Also, yes, Japanese media have a variety of representation, but oftentimes it is not good representation. It's likely that there are more lesbian characters in Japanese games, but they're often presented as harmful stereotypes.
I didn't say it did, though. It's just people making niche products that appeal to people just like them. The point is, what are people supposed to do if the creators aren't interested in changing their ways and they have an audience that supports them?
What I meant to say is, it's an unsolvable problem. Most of these creators see any kind of mainstream appeal that their works could have as a secondary market.
Sure, that would be ideal. How? They have no incentive to do it if they don't believe they're doing anything wrong and the audience does nothing to punish them. If people like their works, they seem to simply be able to put up with it. I mean, you have an avatar from a manga by One, who is perfectly happy treating Fubuki and Tatsumaki as little more than pin-up girls in the Murata adaptation.
You have no idea what you are talking about if you think that lesbian characters in Japanese games are often presented as harmful stereotypes. This could not be further from the truth so I'm curious what makes you say it. Keep in mind one or two examples is not "often." And I don't know what you are looking for in terms of inclusivity. You can find every kind of character and personality imaginable in Japanese games. What have you not found?
Oh wow, that was a really interesting video. Thank you for posting this!
And if they do, they're almost always lolis. :(
Heh. I remember a thread on GAF that discussed some sort of survey where straight women would rate the attractiveness of male body types. They were shown pictures (without the face, to avoid bias and judge only the attractiveness of bodies) of male bodies of all kinds, from hyper-muscular, to lean muscular, to dad bods, etc.
Unsurprisingly to just about every straight female poster, the "lean muscular" body (of which the example pic was Brad Pitt in Fight Club) won handily, beating the hyper-muscular bodies. And some dudes were just shocked and baffled, because they thought, and I kid you not, that since the idealized male body in media was the hyper-muscular one, that it meant women preferred it.
Almost as if we've been saying all along that no, while some women do like hyper-muscular bodies, they are not a majority, and that the roided up look is... guess what... a male power fantasy meant to appeal to male viewers, and not to attract female viewers!
??????????????? what does my avatar have to do with anything
I made it perfectly clear in my post: it means that the international audience of Japanese geek media is willing to put up with the creator's self-indulgences if they like the work enough. And the Japanese audience will definitely not make up any kind of noise about it, just look at One Piece.
It sure would be nice if I could just read OPM without having to look at underage titty every 5 chapters tho
I don't understand your point, whatever it is lol
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I have fond, fond memories of a dude on the old site trying to mansplain to me why Luna was actually a bastion of feminist empowerment and not at all a misogynistically written disaster... fun times.
? I read One Piece, and while I definitely agree that the fanservice went pretty much to 1,000 I'm not seeing the underage sexualization. Now, the fact that every woman got like 3 times larger busts even when it makes zero sense and the fact that Oda can't seem to make a pretty woman evil after the time skip are things I picked up on but not that.
I mean... I know more men who turn off their ears as soon as women start talking about other men than I know men who'd perk up their ears. And many men of the latter type pay attention on a surface level but don't make an effort to dwell deeper because, being men, they naturally assume sexual attraction is a pretty shallow water.
Like I know women who post half-naked musclemen to congratulate each other on their birthdays on Facebook, and it's half serious and half-joking, but a dude may not notice the knowing wink that accompanies all the drooling, even though the men these women fantasize about in private don't always look quite like the hot firefighter with the bulging biceps or the mechanic with the dirt-smeared abs. Whereas with a guy who has pin-ups of blond beachbabes on his wall you can be pretty sure what he dreams about at night.
What percentage of guys really understand what their own wives and girlfriends like about Magic Mike for example?
The case with lesbian fiction in Japan is very particular. As far as i'm aware, fiction involving men having relationships with men are very bad, extremely poor in matters of sexual consent, but with lesbians it's not like that. I read a lot of yuri specifically because it can be extremely well done. There's a lot of coming of age romances, which actually deal with the characters accepting their homosexuality. Adult life stories also deal with that. It's very rarely gratuitous. I understand that there is an issue with lgbt baiting, as there are also some very successful manga, anime and games that motion towards lesbian couples without ever committing to it. There's arguably more non sexual than erotica, which i don't personally read.
I'm going to be completely honest, i'm not a shipper or anything like that, though i enjoy the momentary commentary because i'm... secretly a shipper, but i am consistently amazed by the quantity of quality fan works that ship characters from shows like Idolmaster, or Love Live, or those mahou shoujo but also idols shows whose name i can't recall. Like, there's a ridiculous amount of it and a lot of it is genuinely good queer romance stories.
I'm just saying that these creators have no incentive to change their ways; they can keep pandering to themselves, and the niche audience, with the mainstream barely calling them out on it in any significant way.
You can respect women and create attractive/sexy characters, though. I don't think the writer/artist for Nightwing 2016 disrespects men just because it has plenty of Nightwing fanservice showcasing his ass or abs.
Ah, right, apparently my reading comprehension is gotten so low that I can now longer recognize letters. Apologies.
Which is why I consistently complain about portrayals of women that are degrading to us, and not about female characters who just happen to be attractive.
B-b-but she pushed that gun away in that one cutscene......remember?
I'm guessing Lunafreya from Final Fantasy XV. I could be wrong tho.
I think that this is more a cultural problem than anything. For this to change, Japan itself needs to change. It's not really something happening just in anime/manga/games/LN but something that comes from aspects of their culture in day-to-day life which because of this, we got normalized situations in entertainment media. And what is happening in real life goes from the media and vice-versa, normalizing everything. So, for this to change, Japan needs to change a bunch of things that are normalized for people which is a difficult thing and needs them to recognize the problem, which a find difficult because people in a country don't likes other countries saying things about their own and for the most part don't recognize the problem in their culture.
Pretty sure. A writing disaster is the best thing you can say about Luna.
Ah, yeah, that would be something to say she's a feminist empowerment tool.
To be fair, writing disaster kind of applies to like a good chunk of that game.
There's like, five women in that entire game and half of them suck. You'd think a series like Final Fantasy would do better given it's track record for female characters.
FFXV would have been much improved had they replaced Luna with Luna Lovegood. Or the cat.
...this sounds like a job for the modders...
...this sounds like a job for the modders...
There's also Persona 5 and Ann's costume (which she was clearly uncomfortable with); the design and its debut scene most certainly got criticism, but people were able to ignore because they liked the rest of the game enough.
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