I think it’s been long enough but if you find yourself getting ready to type up a comment related to Mass Effect: Andromeda’s animations please consider watching this educational video from Extra Credits and not commenting here instead. This post is going to be a clarification of what we mean when we say Creepy Marketing Guy, and since the first post on this topic featured Samara, it’s only fair that Cora be the star of the clarification.
First, let’s start with what we do not mean when we refer to Creepy Marketing Guy. It does not refer to:
Using distinctly porny ads to promote products (be they porn or not porn), particularly if they’re generic images from a clickbait ad company
What we instead refer to is a product where you can see the development team’s intentions are to create something where every element is involved in telling a specific story – and then someone (usually marketing) steps in and makes the change specific parts of them with the assumption that the cishet male demographic needs the sexual availability of at least one female character broadcast to them in order to be interested in the unrelated aspects.
In this case, they pick Cora Harper, who is an ultra-professional soldier (one of the most battle hardened in the team), introduced as being calm in a crisis, the second in command on the mission, and seems to use “male” set of animations for her running, etc (instead of the elbows-in butt wiggle run generally assigned to female characters, including fem!Ryder).
Then you see in the outfit in the top of the post before launching into the tutorial mission, during which she appears in cut scenes like this:
Pretty much every other female character in the establishing chapters of the game has pragmatic, non-gendered attire on and off the battlefield. But, since Cora is a romance option for bro!Ryder, she apparently needs to wear a fetish outfit sculpted around her boobs and butt, while on the battlefield. The other female member of the away team who is a romance option also similarly needs to broadcast she’s got a sexy side (she also only owns one set of clothes).
All other traits other than romance option to bro!Ryder are considered secondary – to the extent now Cora looks not just contradictory to her character but out of place in the game about exploring a new galaxy, finding wondrous alien technology and shaping humanity’s future.
(This does not seem to apply to the male romance options, examples 1 & 2)
Ironically this now means she is so out of place cannot be included in marketing material without making the game look a ridiculous parody of a dramatic adventure exploring alien worlds in a new galaxy. It’s almost like they should have just given her one of the dozens of pragmatic outfits I am sure the concept artists designed for Cora before being told to sex it up.
– wincenworks
What is it with the “above boobs and under boobs belts” design feature that’s become so popular lately? Also, I thought Ashley’s outfit in Mass Effect 3 was insulting; the new BioWare studio really took it up a notch, though. … Good job?
I’ve read none of the promotional material for ME:A before it came out, so when I watched part of a Let’s Play of it out of curiosity, I couldn’t believe that Cora was this battle-hardened badass soldier type; I thought she was just another human on the ship. Her design makes me think of EDI before anything else. Those really sad attempts at actual armor pieces (like the baby plates on her shoulders) somehow make it worse, like Creepy Marketing Guy begrudgingly allowed it.
Also, send help, that butt window is staring into my soul.
This throwback is as the reminder that the problem of ridiculous female armor design is a wide spread enough probably that even studios known for being progressive end up falling prey to it.
That and well I recently acquired the Mass Effect Adult Coloring Book, which features Cora in it, but she’s clearly more inspired by the costume design than the writing in the game…
So much good work can be lost by pandering to an unappreciative demographic.
Proper layer-by-layer female* armor designalways deserves more love and exposure. For many reasons, including non–boob-shaped breastplate and the inclusion of gambeson padding. Always ready to be looked up in our reference and resource tags!
Time to bring back this awesome article, its amusingly ignorant backlash and A+
responses
to detractors from @garrettauthor (the OP), as the saga of snark continues… This time against some dude who “doesn’t care” about sexuality of fantasy book characters. Who indeed cares so little that he needs to openly inform a publisher how they shouldn’t advertise their books for having LGBTQ+ themes.
[more context and excepts from that Facebook thread under this link]
Also, if you’re interested in getting the first novel in Garret Robinson’s Underrealm series as a free e-book, here’s the link!
It’s funny that when a video game or video has an attractive female that guys gush over, it’s oppression but if there’s a video game or video with an attractive male that girls gush over, it’s just fan-girling. For example- Guys gushing over Bayonetta= Oppression!! MEN ARE SO DISGUSTING! AUGH! They only want BOOBs n crap! Girls gushing over a freaking cartoon skeleton man in a single video and making an entire fan-base because his hair overnight = Just having fun. I propose that both of those situations are just people having fun.
Ok, but ONE of those types of fun involves sexual objectification that makes many women uncomfortable.
The other involves a skeleton with cool hair who is not being sexually objectified.
There’s a difference.
Also skeletons are not frequently objectified and devalued in the real world. Skeletons are not the victims of violent crimes, sexual or otherwise, due to the dehumanization of that objectification.
While objectification by itself is a problem, its informed by its real world existence; no media exists in a vacuum, and the real world treatment of women is largely what makes objectification through media such a touchy subject.
Agreed. When skeletons with cool hair are routinely subjected to institutional discrimination, maybe we’ll care more about “girls gushing over them” on the internet.
Meanwhile, the sexual objectification of women has been tied to real world issues facing real actual women.
“Tumblr hipocrisy”? OP, you keep using that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Bolding mine.
~Ozzie
After I read this I went desperately searching for this awesome skeleton with cool hair that women were apparently gushing over. I looked and looked. I asked friends… nobody seems to know about Skelonetta.
Now I have to live the rest of my life knowing that somewhere out there there’s video of a skeleton that has hair so cool that’s it’s apparently comparable to the super spectacle that is Bayonetta… and I may never see it.
Thanks OP.
– wincenworks
Edit: So I’ve been told by many of our beloved followers and one of my loveable geek friends that they know who the Skeleton with cool hair is. Brace yourselves for the pandering-on-par-with-Bayonetta:
So, as we close on the first third of the year and the insistence continues that people who would like something other than the same “hot chick with ….” design are just too easily upset/offended/whatever – it’s worth reminding people that the opposition includes people who are upset by a skeleton with spectral hair.
This is, of course, ridiculous since now more than ever there is plenty of media to go around. There really is no reason for everything to be about appeasing one demographic who are already drowned in choices.
It’s funny that when a video game or video has an attractive female that guys gush over, it’s oppression but if there’s a video game or video with an attractive male that girls gush over, it’s just fan-girling. For example- Guys gushing over Bayonetta= Oppression!! MEN ARE SO DISGUSTING! AUGH! They only want BOOBs n crap! Girls gushing over a freaking cartoon skeleton man in a single video and making an entire fan-base because his hair overnight = Just having fun. I propose that both of those situations are just people having fun.
Ok, but ONE of those types of fun involves sexual objectification that makes many women uncomfortable.
The other involves a skeleton with cool hair who is not being sexually objectified.
There’s a difference.
Also skeletons are not frequently objectified and devalued in the real world. Skeletons are not the victims of violent crimes, sexual or otherwise, due to the dehumanization of that objectification.
While objectification by itself is a problem, its informed by its real world existence; no media exists in a vacuum, and the real world treatment of women is largely what makes objectification through media such a touchy subject.
Agreed. When skeletons with cool hair are routinely subjected to institutional discrimination, maybe we’ll care more about “girls gushing over them” on the internet.
Meanwhile, the sexual objectification of women has been tied to real world issues facing real actual women.
“Tumblr hipocrisy”? OP, you keep using that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Bolding mine.
~Ozzie
After I read this I went desperately searching for this awesome skeleton with cool hair that women were apparently gushing over. I looked and looked. I asked friends… nobody seems to know about Skelonetta.
Now I have to live the rest of my life knowing that somewhere out there there’s video of a skeleton that has hair so cool that’s it’s apparently comparable to the super spectacle that is Bayonetta… and I may never see it.
Thanks OP.
– wincenworks
Edit: So I’ve been told by many of our beloved followers and one of my loveable geek friends that they know who the Skeleton with cool hair is. Brace yourselves for the pandering-on-par-with-Bayonetta:
So, as we close on the first third of the year and the insistence continues that people who would like something other than the same “hot chick with ….” design are just too easily upset/offended/whatever – it’s worth reminding people that the opposition includes people who are upset by a skeleton with spectral hair.
This is, of course, ridiculous since now more than ever there is plenty of media to go around. There really is no reason for everything to be about appeasing one demographic who are already drowned in choices.
Apparently, according to all the people who were upset that we dared to call out Hideo Kojima and implied that his use of Quietin promotional materials was objectification and pandering, you can also act like it’s totally subversive by writing a long back story for the character.
It doesn’t have to be, or really their own back story, or one that the majority of players will even experience – just so long as there’s something there to claim that you “totally humanized and made worthwhile” the character who’s boobs appear in every promo post.
Then it becomes a deep commentary of the “reality of women in these situations”… there being so many women who run around in bikinis on battlefields in reality.
– wincenworks
Since “weaponized femininity” got namedropped in that post we reblogged this weekend, let’s maybe bring it back today. And wonder once again how exactly does displaying a conventionally attractive heroine’s
tits and supermodel strut equally as much as her
weapons and battle prowess count automatically as female empowerment and not thinly-veiled pandering to cishet men.
And also let’s remember another, more evocative name which Miss Represenation documentary gave to this Totally Subversive™
Apparently, according to all the people who were upset that we dared to call out Hideo Kojima and implied that his use of Quietin promotional materials was objectification and pandering, you can also act like it’s totally subversive by writing a long back story for the character.
It doesn’t have to be, or really their own back story, or one that the majority of players will even experience – just so long as there’s something there to claim that you “totally humanized and made worthwhile” the character who’s boobs appear in every promo post.
Then it becomes a deep commentary of the “reality of women in these situations”… there being so many women who run around in bikinis on battlefields in reality.
– wincenworks
Since “weaponized femininity” got namedropped in that post we reblogged this weekend, let’s maybe bring it back today. And wonder once again how exactly does displaying a conventionally attractive heroine’s
tits and supermodel strut equally as much as her
weapons and battle prowess count automatically as female empowerment and not thinly-veiled pandering to cishet men.
And also let’s remember another, more evocative name which Miss Represenation documentary gave to this Totally Subversive™
