@avatarwill113 submitted:
Have you heard that Shelob will be in Shadow of War (Shadow of Mordor sequel)?
Ah, Shelob the terrifying giant spider. I wonder what they’ll do with her…
Oh. They’ll give her the ability to turn into a generic sexy women. I can only assume they wanted name recognition, but they also wanted “Sex Appeal” so here we are. Why they couldn’t make up their own generic sexy women, I don’t know.
Of course we’re at the stage in popculture when even a giant arachnid has to appear as a “sexy” human woman, even though it certainly wouldn’t go that way if the character was male…
Since she was unambiguously a spider in the LotR books and movies, we look forward to seeing what random human character they plan to turn into a spider in the next game. That’s only fair.
Took the liberty of joining this submission with the new Jimquisition episode that discusses Shelob’s sexy humanization (and the compulsory sexualization of female characters in general) in detail.
Jim’s video makes some welcome references to related topics we discussed on the blog, too:
- The inequality of generically handsome male game characters to generically hot female characters
- His old episode where the only interesting, unconventional female game protagonist turns out to be a monstrous reptile goddess
- The Alien Girl statue
- Why having a narrative justification for a sexy lady in a story doesn’t legitimize the shameless pandering
- How sexyfying anything even remotely female in your design is the exact opposite of creativity
I’ll leave you with that quote from the episode:
“The way Monolith is doing Shelob has been done to death, basically. Even ignoring anything social justice-y, it’s creatively so very, very done. There loads of engaging and interesting things you could do with a massive sentient spider – shexy Shelob isn’t one of them.”
~Ozzie
Personally I’m not sure what’s funnier, that not only is Shelob apparently going to fill in the narrative role of Morrigan (a sexy woman who can turn into a spider) but also like they saw the introduction for other famous video game spider lady, Queelag of Dark Souls:
Then decided that perhaps the combination of horror and titilation would be too confusing for their intended audience and decided to go full sexy (and boring).
– wincenworks