I don't care if someone doesn't think Aloy is attractive.
But it just sucks to finally have a dedicated* heroic female protagonist in a AAA game that isn't sexualized or a perfect painted supermodel face, only to see so much of the conversation revolve around her beauty or lack thereof, to the point where her physical appearance (not her overall design, mind, just her attractiveness) gets scrutinized to the point where people micro-analyze the size of her chin. And to the point where you see tons of people saying they'd prefer <idealized Disney princess design> instead. I remember a while back, people even criticizing new-Lara's face and seeing some redesigns that made her even more of a perfect doll. Like... what :\
You just know that almost no one ever gives this kind of detailed scrutiny to the physical appearance of male protagonists, especially those who already check the boxes of male beauty standards. Has anyone ever said they wouldn't play Assassin's Creed because Ezio wasn't handsome enough, his eyes are too wide apart, or he wasn't muscular enough? Or "I like the game but Nathan Drake isn't that attractive or handsome, his nose looks weird" or "His eyes are a little beady and his chin sticks out a bit too much, it looks weird and not very attractive. I'll still play Uncharted, but it's kind of off-putting you know?"
You might get something about a protag looking boring or generic (e.g. "bald space marine"), but that's about global design, not nitpicking physical attractiveness. Which is something women have to endure all the time.
* as in, no character creator, not a co-protag or part of an ensemble playable cast
It feels, in part, like a more superficial extension of the whole "Well I don't mind * as long as it's well-executed," discussion that you often hear about minority characters, characters who are gay, and, well, female protagonists . Part of the problem is that
The Female Protagonist is still so damned rare to begin with that they become a novelty worthy of compulsive scrutiny simply for existing. I don't necessarily think it's inherently born of a need for all protagonists to be pretty, even, at its core, although the comments people choose to make are often rooted in more pervasive cultural problems with these kinds of things, of course. Male protagonists don't get the same kind of scrutiny because they're the default so people just kinda gloss over their existence outside of extreme standout situations.
If we just got more variety out there to prevent every * protagonist from being some outlier that everyone feels a compulsion to put a magnifying glass to, I expect a lot of this stuff would stop. Whether they were a complete disaster zone of terrible execution or
not. It's not like every male protagonist is knocked out of the park from a writing and design standpoint, so why would you expect any other demographic to be. Obviously perfect the ideal, but the ones that make some missteps still help to normalize things through sheer volume unless they're extremely egregious misfires.
No idea how you even get to that point, though. It's kinda one of those chicken and egg problems, in a sense. They fall under extreme scrutiny because they're rare, but that extreme scrutiny seems to sometimes make devs (or rather more likely, marketing departments) shy toward the "safe" choice.
It occurs to me, the fact that I even know who Aloy
is and care enough that I could produce commentary on her design despite not having played Horizon--despite the fact that I'll likely
never play it--when that likely wouldn't have been the case had she been yet another 18-35 year old white dude protagonist. That's not to say that serious critique and commentary, positive or negative, should ever be discouraged.
Just that I think the same lightning rod that draws me to even know who anybody's talking about when they say "Aloy" or "Nilin" or any other names of these protagonists of games I've never played and sometimes even have no interest in probably ALSO draws people whose first impulse is to low-effort comment about how her face is too wide or something. They feel a need to say something because it's a novelty and people tend to comment on novelty, even if they have nothing important to say.
