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> I agree thought that my original post was poorly worded and not specific enough about my perceived reception of female characters in video games. I was trying to incorporate "female main character" and "unattractive female characters" into one point and failed.

Fair enough, thanks for acknowledging as much. :)

> You are absolutely right that there are beloved female main characters, but they are almost always shown and viewed in a sexualized manner rather than as a human being. And yes, there are definitely 'sexualized' men (God of War) but they never seem to be explicitly in there as sexual objects rather than as part of the story. Like, if you took Lara Croft out and replaced her with a red square, would that game be regarded as the same? Probably not.

Even still, Lara Croft seems like every bit as much a "human being" as the average male main character? And I don't buy your "red square" example--it's not like you could replace any of the ripped shirtless dudes in various video games with a red square and have the same experience either.

I actually believe that female characters are probably sexualized a bit more often than male characters, and male characters are regarded as objects of violence quite a lot more than female characters. But if there is a loser here, it's not obvious to me that it's the female gender.

What is wrong with sexualized characters anyway? It's escapist entertainment. Are men now forbidden from enjoying attractive women in media? Absolutely don't harass people or discriminate, but this posture against sexualized characters is weirdly puritanical, especially considering the long history in games of non-sexualized, empowered female protagonists.

> What is wrong with sexualized characters anyway?

The answer probably heavily depends if you ask an US American or a Frenchmen. Same with bro culture, that I don't see intrinsic in tech and much more a product of other influences.

> My point is that there is any controversy when there is a game where the female main character is not explicitly sexualized

Samus Aran?

https://images.nintendolife.com/7ec23ee6efba1/zero-suit-samu...

Yeah totally unsexualized

Edit: yes, this is an image from Smash, but she gets a bikini picture in Fusion as a "reward"

There's also an infamous (at the time, anyway) shot of her in Other M. Of course, if you're familiar with the story it's obvious that there's nothing like sexual objectification involved. It makes perfect sense that she's on the floor unconscious in the Zero Suit with her ass pointed directly at the camera, because she was just attacked without warning by a man who she's uncharacteristically submissive toward.

Uh, wait. That came out wrong. Can I start over?

Your reward for beating Metroid faster is Samus wearing progressively less clothing at the end.

People also got mad about Tifa's bust size apparently being reduced to a more realistic level in FF7R. It's nuts that we just kind of accept this as a culture.

We also accept a whole lot of impossibly jacked shirtless dudes but there's barely any public outcry against this. Even worse, video games are extraordinarily violent (I play lots of FPS games, so I'm not criticizing fans of violent games per se) and anyone concerned about the effects of violence on society is lambasted as a pearl-clutching conservative parent from the 1980s.

Both absolutely true. However, regarding overly jacked dudes, there is no history of women in gaming culture harassing developers for putting a beer gut on the male protagonist of a video game, nor any talk about "bulge physics" or whatever the equivalent of "jiggle physics" would be.

I think that speaks to the relative paucity of women in "gaming culture" rather than the purity of women. Were there a concentrated community of female gamers, I wouldn't be surprised if they levied such complaints (consider for example any of the commentary on male Olympic divers in predominantly female circles).

> nor any talk about "bulge physics"

https://old.reddit.com/r/GirlGamers/comments/adbb5b/devil_ma...

I was thinking about that after walking away for a bit.

I don't _hate_ sexualization of characters. Like, totally. Let's make sexy characters that we all adore, but let's not make it a default where female characters _have_ to be sexy.

I am all for the ridiculous boob sliders or boob physics or whatever, I think it is just that there is an expectation in video games that a female character has to either be sexy or not exist.

If there was a widely accepted place for female characters that are just another character, just a human being existing, just like male characters are, then we could have a space where you have those like hyper-attractive female characters just like games currently have the Adonis-attractive male characters.

Yeah, I agree with that. Tifa had a huge rack, but she was also a fully fleshed out character and not really sexualized outside of being a nebulously romantic interest of Cloud's. Her bust size was reduced in the remake because, and I'm guessing here, they were going for a more realistic look than the superdeformed look of the original and it would have been out of place [0].

The problem is that the backlash was entirely in the form of man-children making this out to be some woke appeasement move because they can't ogle quite as much volume of virtual knockers. And even worse is that, as a culture, we just kind of shake our heads at this and ignore it.

[0] Barret is still ripped as fuck, but his proportions are much better. The Rock actually looks like that.

Try and replace attractive men and woman in movies with average people and see how quickly movie sales will drop. Men and woman enjoy watching attractive men/woman doing interesting stuff.

If 1% of a fanbase of 10 million gets mad then you have 100k angry people. And of those a percent or so will be insane people who likely will murder someone in real life at some point, its just statistics. And those one thousand insane people will create a lot of ruckus, but that doesn't mean their views are shared with the community in general.