Well you'd need to find a video game with a female protagonist with a romance in it and there aren't a lot of those. I'm not sure what you mean by "male's fairy tale fantasy of a waifu". It just seems like a common love story to me, of course you want the male and female leads to be compatible personality wise. It's what makes it believable for the audience to invest in a world where people live on giant titans and swing around giant anime swords.
Because they share personality traits? I generally find romances between similar people more believable than ones between dissimilar people. Although they're usually not as interesting.
I honestly think that these games would be better if they allowed their characters to be more open about sex. There'd be less dancing around the subject, and perhaps sexuality could be addressed in a constructive manner. Sure, that'd work against virginal waifuism, but that's not exactly a negative.
In isolation, one or two of this character archetype isn't that bad. The problem is that they're extremely common, and in large volume, it becomes problematic because it ends up normalizing this scenario. It's like the damsel in distress trope; what harm it causes is through volume and repetition.
Well, it's how it's executed as well. And I'm also not sure what character archetype you think Pyra fits into? I don't think kind, female love interest is particularly problematic even if it is common.
Yeah, in the context of the game, I'm sure all master / slave relationships are great.
Rex and Pyra are not a master/ slave relationship in Xenoblade 2. It is not similar to the normal Driver - Blade relationship. To say so indicates lack of comprehension of basic facets of the story...
You're missing the forest for the trees...
*sigh*
That's okay, I genuinely don't mind people thinking like this, but don't pretend you intended to have a discussion about it, lol.
There's nothing wrong with a kind female love interest. But it gets problematic when she's virginal and shy, yet she still dresses to show off her sexual availability at all times.
Well if I were to illustrate the discussion I would *like* to have, it would be under the impression that it seems like this thread goes really far and wide to make every single design of a female character that crosses in to sexy or attractive territory as sexist or misogynist, and I disagree with that. However, since this thread has basically become the hub for bemoaning all qualifying female character design, a discussion would likely both be fruitless and I would just be dogpiled for not thinking X character design is bad and no argument I could devise would make anyone think otherwise. Especially over a topic that's subjective (to a large degree).
You have to understand the context of this discussion, though. When "absurd porn parody slutty Halloween costume" is the norm, people will groan at designs that they wouldn't mind if there was any semblance of balance. But these characters are walking tropes and some people would like to see more than one design philosophy (see: sexy, half naked). And the truth is male characters enjoy a much, MUCH wider range of design philosophies.
What I love about Pyra is that even though she doesn't wear heels, she's constantly posed to look as if she was!
There are plenty of good examples of sexy, attractive characters in this thread, but the nature of the thread/OP is about criticism of an aspect often handled poorly with examples to match. To choose another visual aspect of games, if I entered a thread described 'why people criticise the depiction of race in games' I'd expect to find far more examples of that aspect handled poorly being discussed than in a thread titled 'games are getting better at handling this, post examples!'.
Heh, I think I'd rather have a female fighter just foolishly wearing a dress and a cape while swinging a sword on the battlefield than wearing Fire Emblem's patented bizarre mix of plate armour, high heels, g-string and thighs exposed :D
This is sort of a personal pet peeve, but I always find the fact that so many of the armored characters all somehow managed to get custom fitted armor for themselves, to be extremely annoying. Almost no one could afford armor made like that (hell, that's not even how armor is made now), unless of course everyone in your party is a noble (though if they're a noble, why are they directly taking part in a war in the first place?).
To be fair, 'warrior-nobles and band of trusted retainers on the run' is a recurring theme in Fire Emblem, but yeah, I'd like to a little more thematic design run through the armour of troops of each faction, becoming a little more ornate with rank, rather than everyone looking like an individual, although the Hoshido gang get away with it through the Samurai look. I do wonder why Nohr, a country where black is always fashionable, has Effie and Arthur in pink and red respectively though! It was originally to give them each a colour so they stand out as a pixelated sprite, but it really doesn't make much sense for all of your mid-ranking troops to look like they buy their armour in different countries, and perhaps even in different centuries :D
The power relationship between a blade and its driver is never one of equals. This is an inherent problem endemic to the plot and characters of the game. Given that such a relationship is enforced regardless of whether or not the parties involved are outwardly treated as such, there can be no real discussion before that power imbalance is corrected. Which is to say, you can be as nice as you want to someone who doesn't have the same power you do, but being nice to them doesn't mean they have an equal relationship with you. Again, the story could have been told any number of ways, but the creators decided that an extraordinary imbalance of power should exist between the two main characters. As such, they are reinforcing problems hundreds, or thousands of years old, because it suits them, not because it is in any way necessary.
Yeah, pretty much every FE starts off pretty similarly. Theming in general has always been pretty weak in the Fire Emblem series. It seems like it started out as generic fantasy but even after growing beyond that, all of its designs retain that flavor (and unfortunately it's continued to go down the road of something closer to pop fantasy or otaku fantasy).
If Rex dies, Pyra dies. Am I wrong? Her life is literally contingent on him being alive.
I'll admit I haven't finished the game, but I played to the part you spoiled and I never felt like it was establishing an equal partnership. Pyra is technically independent but functionally dependent. Her actions in the scene you mention are all requests, despite her seemingly being in a position of power. And if she has such a strong desire to go to Elysium, the partnership she establishes seems equally strange (like, if you have the power to go there under your own volition, you don't need Rex, but if you need the strength to go somewhere as far off as Elysium theoretically is, a person who was easily killed seems like a bad choice - maybe Pyra's just a glutton for punishment though).
Man, I wish. Video games are incredibly immature about sex, especially Japanese ones. The only time a female character is allowed to be open about sex is when she's a villain/evil, and even then, it's less "being open about sexuality" and more "letting the presumed straight male player stare at her body".
Not to mention that in Pyra's case, she's hundreds of years old, while Rex is a teenager not old enough to drink.
My original response was honestly one of snark, given the problems inherent in the blade driver relationship, and relating to how Pyra, in spite of not being tied to those rules, basically decides to follow or weirdly internalizes those rules anyway.
Sexuality and sexual relationships are normal parts of life, and they should be dealt with in a mature manner. We shouldn't have to dance around the bush and make it both highly desirable, while simultaneously treating it as a dirty subject that only people with evil thoughts indulge in. Just look at all those "this sympathetic character is perverted; get him!" jokes out there. And, yeah it's especially bad when it comes to Japanese entertainment.
In general, yeah it's pretty misogynistic. This particular picture isn't too bad though as both characters are treated about the same (leaving aside that male and female sexual overtones don't mean the same thing). Still, you can see that the male figure is in a more active pose whereas the female one is more neutral. It's way more apparent in most of their other works, and from artists like Frank Frazetta as well.
For the most part, yeah it's sexist. This particular artwork is actually not too bad, though. The outfit is silly, but it actually looks... wearable (lol, as in, not metal directly on skin and shit like that) and the woman isn't posing in a sexually suggestive way, she's standing similar to the man, ready for the action. So it's pretty equal! And wow she's wearing normal boots instead of heels, how about that. XDI guess this is as good as any a place to ask even though it's not directly about gaming depiction of women specifically.
I've always wondered if the art style of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell is considered to be sexist or misogynistic? I'm asking because I've always been a big fan of this type of fantasy art and settings, the somewhat gritty sword and sandals style fantasy. There aren't very many games out there that really evoke this artsyle, the most recent one I can think of is Dragons Crown which I know many look down on because of the female art.
Stuff like this
In this situation I've seen many say that stuff like this is still considered to be misogynistic because the dude isn't designed to be sexy to women even if some would find the male character attractive, but this is a topic that I'm still attempting to educate myself on in a way that I can understand so some of the nuances are lost on me at times.
That is actually a really good point - in all honesty I was distracted by the number of excuses people were coming up with to bully other people - specially the excuses that include "we're actually helping them".
