The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Tag: double standards
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“Hey, this combination of light armor pieces looks really nice on my elementalist! Let’s see how those exact same armor skins look on my mholy fuck why.”
(I love Guild Wars 2 with all my heart, it’s such a beautiful and fun game with many many good styles and pieces and colors to choose from and to mix-and-match freely, but this. this really bugs me.)
What I notice about Guild Wars2 fandom is that they tend to express their adoration for the game, while being completely aware of godawful double standard “armors” that can be found there (the game does have better examples for comparison).
Fans of a certain type, like the ones religiously devoted to whatever Blizzard or Warhammer40k spews out, could learn a thing or two from GW2 players about proper critical attitude towards the thing they like.
One thing that has always pissed me off in Bravely Default are the blatant double standards of job costumes. I could have gone with almost every job, but I chose to illustrate this problem with the Dark Mage one, because it’s an outfit that really striked me. Yeah, so guys like Ringabel have super cool pants, while Dark Mage girls like Edea are forced to battle in short dresses and garterbelt? Fuck that.
It’s not supposed to be an armor, but it has to protect the body, and I don’t see the point of shortening the ladies’skirts since it makes them more vulnerable- oh wait, it’s female empowerment y’all!
So to correct this unfairness, I drew Ringabel with the ladies’costume, and look at how empowered he looks! ^^/
It’s always relative, but I think you managed to avoid the “it’s funny, because he looks so girly” trap of putting a male character in female-coded clothes and/or makeup.
Ringabell looks rightfully empowered, not shamed, for wearing a dress.
How do any of those outfits, including the original male one, communicate a dark magic user, though, is a mystery to me.
i’ve been meaning to do this post for YEARS and i finally managed to dig out all these sketches and put them together.
the sexual dimorphism in WoW has always been sad especially considering blizz had such good ideas at the start but the furious fan feedback always made them redesign these fascinating and monstrous females of the races into much more humanlike. i also remember the uproar of thin male blood elves and the homophobic and sexist slurs that followed which made them beef up the male model considerably.
i tried my best to give a go at redesigning them to make their body types, postures and facial features more aligned.
dwarf, undead, goblin and gnome models on the other hand are great, 5/5.
male gamers like to pretend that male characters designed, draw/rendered and written by men, made hulkishly muscular and hypermasculine by men for a deliberate target audience of men is objectification and hypersexualisation rather than actively appealing to male power fantasy
and it’s somehow women’s fault of course
My favorite example of this is when people try to invoke this guy as their ultimate trump card of “Men are objectified in video games too!”
The ultimate steroid rager who converses primarily by screaming and murdering. A completely selfish man who, since murdering his wife and daughter, seems to only one emotion (anger) and prone to random acts of violence. A man so terrible that he goes out of his way to incorporate murdering random women* into “puzzle solving”.**
People actually point to this character, created by a man (David Jaffe) and try to tell us this is objectification of men in order to pander to women.
Then, presumably, after throwing a tantrum and destroying random objects in their home, then wonder why women aren’t impressed by this and find them undateable.
* The fact that almost the entire female population, including the monsters, goes to great pains to show off their breasts to the player also never seems to factor into their assessment.
** This sequence featured in Tropes vs Women in Video Games – however please be advised that this sequence along with other parts in the video contain extreme depictions of violence against women. (x)
– wincenworks
So, due to some minor events that gave this myth a shot in the arm, it’s probably worth bringing this back this week, particularly since said event related to barbarians and similarly physically powerful warriors.
The notion that “men are objectified too” really doesn’t hold up under the slightest scrutiny – particularly when so much media insists on asking the audience to cheer for super violent male characters who are often amazingly unlikeable.
So i just want to say that, aside from a few small gripes (mainly the seeming assumption that only cishet males promote the objectification of women in games. Feel free to tell me if i misunderstood that.), i love this blog. It does address many of the issues in modern media in regards to women. While there still seems to be a small bias it is easily ignored for the most part as the information provided is useful to designers. Thank you, though, for keeping things as straight forward as possible
Glad we can be of service! I did want to clarify our “assumption that only cishet males promote the objectification of women” because we do see people trying to throw the objectification blame around as if that’s productive. We never meant to imply that only cishet males objectify women, just that design decisions that lead to things like this are usually made to appeal to the cishet male demographic, or even just to their cishet male designer. Anyone can objectify a character, but that doesn’t mean that the character was designed to be consumed in that way by certain demographics. With how many “men only” game ads we see, I think we can agree they aren’t pandering to queer women.
I follow quite a few women / nb people in the anime and games community who are attracted to women (I’m a straight woman), and sometimes I see them enjoying or creating art that is objectifying and makes me uncomfortable. One example is Camilla from FE Fates, and the ‘damaged-clothes’ pictures in FE Heroes. I see women / nb people finding these things sexy. I don’t want to tell LGBTQ people what they should or shouldn’t be attracted to though. Do you have any thoughts on this?
There is no social structure in place that routinely supports male objectification or places queer people in the same position of power over women as it does for cishet (white) men.
That said, we don’t tell anyone, even cis straight men, who and what they should be attracted to. We just want people to be aware and critical of those things and consider the bigger picture of what that attraction means. Especially if that thing comes from mainstream media that inevitably builds the collective image of the world we live in, and not from, say, niche kinky corners of the Internet.
Nikko: Immersion breaking female armor. I refuse to play certain games because it seems just ridiculous to me. Like this:
This makes me so mad, not for the obvious reasons, but because it just breaks any sense of the world being real (which is important to me, follow the rules of your universe however dumb). If it’s a fantasy world where everyone’s skin is made of stone- fine- let ALL of the characters run around in skimpy armor. But when the female armor looks like this compared to the male armor… it breaks any sense of immersion to me. I completely ruined Tera for me along with other games (Nier).
Justin:
Escort quests, yeah. Or..
Like fan service…just why.
But yeah escort quests, fan service, and uhhh shooting games…regardless of genre.
