I actually have a thing to say about discordant aspects and so on! I'm excited! I'm sorry if I ramble and it's difficult to follow. It's just that a few things fell into place for me. Things clicked.
Okay, no one ever notices.
It's like the Dreamfall Chapters thing, yeah? I don't know how many of you have read the diversity thread, so I'll just cover it again quickly here. In Dreamfall Chapters, one character decided it'd be a lark to fling a bundle of hate-loaded slurs at a character who, in Universe, is acknowledged to be autistic. Lovely.
There was an uproar about this, but the uproar wasn't about what you might think! The attitudes of autistic people can be a little odd, and it's why the strawman lead writer bloke Ragnar lavished the mainstream press with was all the more galling for all of us.
Ragnar's argument: People are horrible in the real world, so for a work of fiction to be authentic to that and mature, people must therefore be horrible in the work of fiction.
The argument we made before he said that: We understand that people are horrible in the real world and he's trying to capture the essence of that for his game. However, our world isn't staffed entirely by terrible people, it'd be quite a dreary, depressing place if it were. No, there are good people who would react to that and have something to say about it in defence of the autistic person. That that didn't happen (at all) in Dreamfall Chapters is the problem. No one busted the bigot's chops for being hateful. It was just water under the bridge and not a soul cared. What this kind of disconnect with reality does is normalise toxic behaviours, encouraging further prejudice. That's the problem we have with it.
Of course, the mainstream news outlets ran with Ragnar's version and ignored our own because autistic people are best not seen and not heard. Frankly, hate crimes against autistic people in my home country are at a point where they're outnumbering those against gay people and persons of colour. It's getting that bad.
We're just sort of used to it, now. We're kind of humanity's punching bag.
Not the point, though!
Here's the point: This is what the problem is with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that leads to this notable disconnect.
You see, you have these sexualised characters that stand out like a sore thumb. Okay. How do people react to this? Nobody notices. And that, right there, is the problem! That's the disconnect. No one notices.
If someone dressed like Pyra were to walk through a town you'd have no end of awfully lewd comments, wolf whistles, people making passes, and so on. You'd even have some people try to hit on her, and be very pushy about it.
Pyra and Rex would then have to deal with that. As would Dahlia. I think the realisation came to me reading what people have recently said, plus a recollection of another disappointing little snippet of XBC2 revolving around Pyra's time as a maid. When Pyra is a maid, you are given reactions to use.
Not one of them is: "Oh, shove off! You despicably pervy little rodent! I mean, really, what the hell even is all this? How about you take this tea and stick it where the sun doesn't shine?"
Ahem.
No, you can only be affirmative or confused, as I recall. That's the thing. No one realises that there might be any problem with this in Universe, and that compounds the actual issue at hand. Pyra has no agency, Pyra is never exposed to how people really are. Nor is Rex. Nor is anyone. Nor can Pyra really react to the few, few moments of mild perversion offered by Tora.
So they stand out like a sore thumb compared to the normal NPCs but no one really notices. It's like everyone has blinkers on. It's the strangest thing and it causes such a bizarre disconnect in the viewer.
Except in some individuals, obviously. But why not? I guess it's because of an innate expectation to see women in sexy outfits that it's been normalised for them and it's actually less normal for them if a woman isn't in a horribly objectifying outfit. And there we have the normalisation of problematic thinking which is hurtful to actual people.
I don't know what else to add really to wrap this up. But how uncomfortable would Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had felt if people actually behaved like people? What if Pyra was being leered at, drooled over, wolf whistled at, and what if she had to deal with very forceful passes at her by drunken men?
How would that feel?
And more importantly why doesn't this happen? If you're just going to objectify women but never show the end result of obectifying women, then how can we teach empathy to those who only have cognitive empathy? They don't learn empathy for this because nothing is teaching it to them.
Which is, really, why my favourite empathy is effective. It's intuitive. It's not hard to figure out how anyone is feeling with it. That's why empaths exist. But not everyone has effective empathy, not everyone is an empath. For some people, all empathy is learned empathy.
So if you have this kind of situation, you're teaching them specifically to be unempathetic as you're saying that this is how the world behaves with objectified women, and this is how women behave in this world.
Does that make any sense?
Edit: You're not showing why women want to be fully armoured, because you're not showing what happens if they're not. With someone who looks like Pyra, you're not showing what happens with an incredibly young-looking, scantily clad girl. What would happen with someone like that in reality?
That's the disconnect, and there's the problem with it! I feel like I've been on the tip of figuring this out for ages and all the pieces finally fell into place.
Edit 2: And that's why I parse it as porn! You have incredibly sexualised and objectified people in situations where you might not, where no one is reacting at all to that. That's a very porn thing to happen.
Oh, this is such a relief. It feels good to finally have all this make sense. I feel like all the different thought agents of my brain (which is a thing, science says so, look it up) have been working unconsciously to try and piece this together. And then... a realisation.
I get it, now. Maybe you do, too.
Edit 3: Sorry! Sorry!
There's even a fetish for this, you know? It's 'sexually-charged world' or something to that effect. I'm rusty in regards to the exact terminologies of fetishes, but that's a thing. And it's a sexual fetish because... that's what it is. Most worlds aren't so sexually charged.
And that's what we're seeing in media. XBC2 is a mainstream media representation of the sexually-charged world! Why is there a sexual fetish so proudly put front and centre in an RPG?
Because, like I said, without the reactions to what's going on? You basically have a sexual fetish world.
Edit 4: Last one, honest!
Okay, so about the toxic behaviours and normalisation thing, yeah? If someone is only capable of learned empathy and they're being exposed to these sexy designs for women that they like (which are hurtful for women who have to live in the real world)?
And if they're never being shown how this actually hurts women? If the reactions are never present? What happens then when you want to take those sexy designs away because it hurts women?
With only learned empathy... You have a situation where they feel something is being taken from them for what they feel is a spiteful reason they don't understand. So they lash out, they get demanding of things being more sexualised. That's how you have instances of groups like the Alt-Right forming, a lack of effective empathy and no avenues to learn empathy being presented to those who operate on cognitive empathy.
So they demand more sexualised designs and they act like women/feminists are out to get them, there's all this stuff thrown around about 'cucked men' because they haven't learned empathy and suddenly so many things make so much more sense.
That's why I think it's the responsibility of game designers to either not have sexualised women or to show the full impact whenever they do. You want your lady character to be sexy? Okay, fine. Now experience all of the horrible things real world women do.
I hope you enjoy people randomly groping your butt.
