Tag: double standards

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GuardianAssassinPriestWizardBerserker

ihearducksaregoingquackers submitted:

This is from a real video game called “Riders of Icarus” and this is what you see during the character select screen. Viewable on many Riders of Icarus review videos that go through character selection screens. These images were obtained from https://www.tentonhammer.com/guides/riders-of-icarus-choosing-a-class

Not only is the double standard very apparent, it’s also extremely inconsistent as well (and of course, 100% illogical because why would a woman wearing full plate reveal MORE than the assassin class??? On top of the, you know, why reveal anything dilemma).

Also, literal bikini armour. LITERAL bikini armour. I can’t…

(Order of classes from top to bottom in captions:

Guardian,

Assassin, Priest, Wizard, Berserker.)

This is the textbookiest of texbook examples of double standard in armor we’ve seen in ages. Amazingly creative! 

~Ozzie

I remember how Riders of Icarus released it’s trailer it almost looked like it wasn’t going to this nonsense… for a literal minute.

You have to love their commitment to the novel idea of wings combing out of the lower legs… then going with the most generically awful female costumes…. short skirts don’t really seem compatible with dragon riding.

For bonus points, this is the first female character you’ll come across on their site if you scroll down through the promo images from the top:

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– wincenworks

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@the-midnight-doe submitted:

Here we go again… Kojima posted a new concept art on his Twitter (left), which is apparently a female version of Ludens, the character featured in the Kojima Productions logo (right.) Can’t wait to hear about her tragic skin condition that requires her to wear literally half the armor of her male counterpart

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Point and Clickbait totally called it two years ago, and none of us are surprised.

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Given that he’s already over-used (which is to say, he used) the “she breathes through her skin” excuse, and, well, how most of Death Stranding’s promotion has gone thusfar: I’m pretty confident the explanation will 1. make no sense and 2. ensure we receive contradictory responses from his fans trying to defend it.

Of course, the first thing they always tell me is I don’t know enough about Kojima’s work so let’s look at some some of his fans are saying about the deep textual values of this complex piece:

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– wincenworks 

And let’s not forget that the experience of starting to understand Kojima’s genius ideas, including gratuitous definitely justified and not contrived female sexualization, takes only playing the whole game at least two times, preferably with complete familiarity of all his other work. 

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Two years later, @pointandclickbait​ still on point.

~Ozzie 

edit: Since it caused some confusion: we don’t know for sure whether female Ludens is just a “fun” variation on Kojima Productions mascot or a future character concept for Death Standing.
It’s alleged she might be the latter, but either way both her design and the commentary about Kojima belong among topics we discuss on the blog. 

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6 RPG Tropes That Need to Die

Dorkly again parodying some obvious absurdities of bikini armors (like double standards and skimpy high level) in fantasy/RPGs… twice in the same comic 🙂 

We always enjoy when skimpy female armor lands on a list of things that games should get rid of once and for all. 

And, of course, just like in the case of that video list, we recommend steering clear of the comment section, where “Stop complaining about female armors because I like them therefore there’s nothing wrong with them!” dumpster fires are burning.

~Ozzie

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

So it turns out we have The Onion for video games now.  It’s called Point & Clickbait and so far it seems pretty awesome… and worryingly accurate in ways.

– wincenworks

Two years later, Point & Clickbait continues to deliver on-point articles, this time reporting about PUBG’s female models having distinctly-modeled vulvae.

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And although the developers have promised to fix the models, they haven’t explained how the models have ended up in the game in the first place.

-Icy

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2goldensnitches submitted (and Ozzie bingo’d):

Loki from Fire Emblem Heroes. I don’t even know how to describe this. 

Remember that Fire Emblem costume seemingly designed with random lasso tool movements followed by CTRL + X? Yeah, that’s hers. 

Somehow the whole thing is even worse than any individual part of it. And every part is awful. So I figured she might be in a need of a bingo.

Also thanks to other readers who let us know this character’s name. 

~Ozzie

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

doctorsanity:

I think the biggest thing gamers fail to recognize when discussing sexism in video games is presentation. This is the biggest reason why I can never see characters like Zangief even be remotely equivalent to female characters. Disregarding every other difference that sets them apart, when was the last time you saw the camera creepily do a pan across Zangief sensually massaging his breasts and ending on his stuck out ass? His walk cycle isn’t him wildly shaking his hips. None of his animations flaunt his body in the sense that you’re supposed to be attracted to him. And to top it all off I know that, if this actually happened, it would be done as a joke.

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Thank you for this post! It’s a nice concise explanation

on why male power fantasy is not the same as female sexualization.

It’s tedious at this point when we see someone claim that characters like Conan/Kratos/Zangief are equally “empowered” as their boob-flaunting female peers (because bare chests?). Hope this helps.

~Ozzie

more about false equivalence on BABD

Weekly throwback for today: one of the biggest factors of double standard design conveniently ignored by the false equivalence rhetoric: the presentation. 

Even if we somehow agreed that a bare-chested dude in a speedo/loincloth is the direct male counterpart to a lady in a physically impossible non-costume (consult our bingo archive for examples) – which we don’t agree with – it still wouldn’t take into account the differences in body language, camera angles and other factors that frame a character as an object instead of a person. 

~Ozzie

Presentation is also how you get woman characters who may be fully clothed, but are still objectified. Miranda from Mass Effect may not score very high on the bingo, but when her ass is the only part of her in a shot of her talking to Shepard…

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Yeah. 

-Icy