How would I respond?
I remember nearly two years ago, someone tried to tell us that women didn’t like Samus until got those (aesthetically awful) high heels and well it seems that that person was wrong. Very wrong. Profanity outburst inducingly wrong. It’s also more or less got it’s own Rhetoric Bingo square:
Consider:
- We’ve set up a Steam Group with a Curator section for people looking for games where female characters get decent characters.
- Posted about how there’s a plethora of mods that improve mainstream games that have failed to provide suitable outfits.
- Routinely get a lot of support for our positive examples, many of these examples are submitted to us by women who are really excited about the gender equitable designs
- There has been no end of popular parodies and serious commentary about this for years, some even featured by Blizzard (who still didn’t fix anything or make any real progress in the nine years since)
- It is a fact that everyone loves and/or wants to be just like Cassandra Pentaghast. No seriously, everyone loves her.
While it is certainly true that some women greatly enjoy some heavily sexualised female characters (and we’re totally okay with that), the notion that somehow there isn’t a demand for different types of female characters and different armor options in games and other media is just absurd.
A three volume anthology of stories to provide “characters with feminist overtones” (many, many of them seem to be armored very much like men…) was fully funded! Over a quarter of a million dollars has been pledged to the project – that doesn’t happen unless there is massive demand.
There are plenty of women out there who want big, hulking suits of armor and the ones who don’t are hardly going to get mad at a game that respects the notion of gender equality.
– wincenworks