@fallingoutsidemoralconstraints submitted:
Blizzard is Blizzard when it comes to the portrayal of women in general, but I think the Queen of Blades from Starcraft takes the cake (spoilers for Starcraft and Starcraft II further down):
This is her human form – pretty standard awful female armour (?)
This is a typical Zerg. Looks like something out of H R Giger, eh? At one point in game Kerrigan is abducted by the Zergs (which come in a great variety of shapes, most of them not very humanoid) and mutated into one of them. So how come that from fusing a human and a bloody xenomorph, you get this:
Where do you even begin with that? And the high heels – how and why an evolutionary (supposedly) process would create those? WHAT ARE THOSE? Why boobs? Why boney boobplate? Why non – functioning wings? Why in general? It’s a typical female armour, except looking more biologically.
BUT WAIT. It gets getter – later, in the very epilogue of the game, to defeat and ancient and powerful enemy, Kerrigan has to fuse with a Xel’Naga, the creators of life, incredibly advanced and powerful beings that traverse the multiverse, seeding it with life. They looks like this:
And can you guess what Kerrigan looks like after that? It’s pretty predictable, really:
How do you fuse with an interdimensional prawn god and become no different except made of fire? And of course, more powerful and even less clothing (none at all really). I should add that every man in the game gets to wear really huge powered armour.
I’ve always found Starcraft kind of amazing in that it started as a space fantasy adaption of Warcraft – with aliens instead of fantasy races. Seventeen years later it’s mostly taken on a life of it’s own, but still is unmistakably a Blizzard production.
The Xel’Naga for instance, look like they’d fit perfectly into Diablo. I don’t mean a future release or a Diablo 3 DLC – I mean they would have fitted perfectly in the original 1997 game.
For all the claims about how Blizzard is improving, or Blizzard is going to improve, etc. They’re still basically using all the same imagery and values they were before, just with different mechanics and better graphics.
Only… the monsters/aliens are getting bigger and more Lovecraftian.
(image from @marmorealgame)
– wincenworks
