wildrad submitted:
Hey, look everyone! It’s Fran from Final Fantasy XII! I’ve always had serious issues with this armor; here you have a mysterious, fiercely loyal, totally badass, graceful, intellectual, beautiful, and skilled mechanic and archer… who is rendered into a one-dimensional sex toy due to her Playboy-reminiscent “armor”. Some of the reasoning behind it is just as bad: according to the Final Fantasy wiki, “[it is] because of the way Viera’s feet are structured Fran, like all other Viera, must walk in high heels”. They then go on to say that male Viera’s do exist, but do so independently of the females (huh?) and that only once has a male Viera been depicted in-game (I have yet to learn whether or not said character’s feet were shown). My theory? They aren’t quite as comfortable portraying male characters in stilettos.
Okay, rant over.
Note: Ears are not part of the armor (that would just be silly, right, Square Enix?!), but rather a trait of the Viera race.
But it’s okay, her feet are modeled like that!
So they didn’t even bother try explain her “armor”?But how did a species come to be wholly reliant on artificial footwear for basic ambulatory locomotion? This is some fairly basic world building type stuff. Can they not walk bare-foot or did you just decide that all of these women would be in stilettos and then realized that was more than a little sexist and had to come up with some weird ass contortion of logic to explain why they all wear stilettos as a rule?
My thoughts exactly! (bolded for emphasis by yours truly)
Not only did the designers justify just her stupid footwear, while ignoring rest of her (for the lack of better word) outfit… The explanation they came up with is possibly the most asinine hand wave to why a character needs high heels.
This is not how world building works! Look here to read how I elaborate on why “this race needs high heels” excuse is bullshit.