So I'm a woman who has been playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 pretty religiously. It's one of my most favorite games of all time, and I've put hundreds of hours into it. I know there's fanservice / sexualized character designs in the game but honestly, I don't even notice it. I'm far too engaged with the story and the world to pay attention.
I guess for me there's a difference between stories that exist primarily to show it.....and stories where it occurs, but the story doesn't focus around it.
In general I loathe fanservice-laden harem Anime with paper-thin characters and cookie-cutter plots. I also really dislike games like Dead or Alive that exist solely for fanservice. But when the story is really compelling? I don't really notice it, and it genuinely doesn't bother me. I suppose it would be more appropriate if the characters weren't as sexualized, but it's not really an issue in my mind.
Along those lines, I don't think it's fair to vilify people who like fanservice, or people who are nonchalant about it. You aren't a bad person if you don't care about Pyra's sexualization.
On the flipside, there are a lot of people who DO have real problems with this sort of sexualization, and we can't just dismiss their opinions. Everyone's opinion needs to be respected, even if in the end we agree to disagree. There should be a greater industry-wide dialogue about these sorts of issues, that's for sure. But if some stories continue to feature fanservice, that doesn't automatically invalidate them.
We exist on a startlingly similar but also kind of exact opposite plane with this, you and I. Xenoblade 2 is a shoe-in for my GOTY to a surprisingly heavy degree in a year with so many fabulous releases, despite the issues I take with its visual design.
For my part, I take absolutely no issue with the existence of and even frequently enjoy trashy anime, fully understand the appeal of Dead or Alive though I'm not a fighting game fan, and have no issues with people who consume such media--hell, I do
myself. I've been pretty open about that in this thread (and
way too active in the thread, too) and haven't
once been called a creep or degenerate or bad person by even the most outspoken of posters here. And I mean, we have some pretty outspoken posters in here, I'm not gonna lie. If someone in here thought I was a piece of garbage because of my choices in media consumption they'd probably have told me by now.
What people bristle super heavily at, as a general rule, is people coming in to drive-by about how anyone with concerns about sexualization in media is a prudish puritan who has the active power to enact legislation and take the things they like away and
wants to do so. That is a thing that still periodically happens, with clear indication that the poster hasn't even read the OP. This thread was created by a woman as a space to explain to the large and often unaware audience here why she and many other women take issues with sexualization in video games and the way that it affects her. She was immediately met with people attempting to tell her why she was wrong to be so bothered by it, when all she was looking for was (at worst) a nod and an "I disagree, but I can respect where you're coming from."
Mind you, it'd be disingenuous to say there haven't been a few misfires here and there because things can get
prrrrrrreeeeeetty heated sometimes, but by and large any posters who disagree and
don't drive-by have come out mostly unscathed
and with their accounts intact.
Now, personally, I take almost
exclusive issue with characters who are otherwise competently written, clearly respected by their writers, and have not an ounce of "present for fanservice" in their nature outside of their visual design, who are then treated like a piece of meat to have sexual fantasies about exclusively by visual components of the story they're present in. Pyra is one of the most immediately apparent examples of such a character I've ever seen in all my time, well, engaging works of fiction. That bothers me
a lot, on a pretty deep level.
It's totally cool that you're in the opposite space, and I can even understand reasoning for being there. I mean, Pyra's an incredibly well realized character, so if you were scoring her using a binary grading system she'd come out as a hell of a lot better of a representation of a woman than a character in a mindlessly rote work of softcore pornography. I don't use such a metric, but I can appreciate that others might and would find her less offensive than the casts of Dead or Alive or Senran Kagura or what have you. There's a hell of a discussion there, really, about which is theoretically worse.
But yeah, I don't think anyone who actually posts actively here has ever made any particular claims that works that contain fanservice have no worth, or that people who enjoy them are bad people, as much as people can be pretty outspoken about their personal dislike for a piece of media. There's an important distinction between vitriolic dislike of a work and the active belief that it shouldn't exist or that the people who do like it are bad people.
Basically, I don't think anyone here disagrees with you.
EDIT: Made some alterations for better coherence. Also typos/forgotten words.