Solving sexism in games: Fat/ugly human female characters

[GirlGamer55]

Getting back on topic...

While I can't think of any fat/ugly female characters other then that woman from Borderlands someone all ready pointed out...I can think of some attractive women that have strong roles in games that arn't just fapping fodder.

Like Alyx Vance from HL2, or Lara Croft (ok she's really hot and lots of guys fap to her but she's still a strong woman and when I was a young girl she was a role model to me), Samus and even Jill Valentine...sort of.

I mean I will admit that a lot of games are focused on men and don't even give the option to choose to play as a female (and even the ones that do...somehow they always seem to make the females weak..). There needs to be less Princess Peaches in video games and more kick ass women playing the role. You don't have to make them fat and ugly...it would be nice to have a plumper female role but I mean will that really happen? We might get a female role but we won't get fat/ugly female roles for a LONG time. Unless its an indi game.

[Gunstar Green]

Semantics are always the most sure fire way to crash a discussion .

Dude, the smiley goes after the period.

...and isn't it "sure-fire", not "sure fire"?
...and while I'm at it, there must be something wrong with "always", "the most" and "sure-fire" in the same sentence.

I said semantics not grammar.

Though I don't remember anything about the correct placement of emoticons in college. The language needs to evolve before it's left behind.

[dsheinem]

I said semantics not grammar.

+1

[marurun]

I'd say anything that makes a good, interesting character period probably applies to a good female character.

This. THIS is the best solution to whatever-ism in video games. But it isn't the only one...

The problem isn't necessarily with fit, attractive female characters, and the solution isn't to make all female characters pudgy. It is often with what they wear, especially in-context. There are a great many role-playing or fantasy style games where all the male characters are so loaded up with armor they look like tanks without treads. No exposed skin except the face. All the corresponding female characters have massive cleavage exposure, bare arms, and simply huge shoulder plates or something stupid like that. Now, I don't think devs should remove the option to play a female character like that, but they need to offer alternatives, too. If the male needs armor all over to be protected, why doesn't the female? Basically, if all the female outfits are skin-tight and revealing and all the male outfits are full-coverage, that's a problem. Skin-tightness and revealing-ness aren't the problem, but the difference between the genders with those standards is. Both male and female characters need to come in a variety of presentations. There need to be scantily clad male characters and fully clothed female characters IN ADDITION to the existing tropes.

[pierrot]

Your post made me think of a discussion I overread somewhere recently, marurun: There were some people discussing League of Legends, and the differences in design between the male and female characters. Apparently the designer had, at some point, been called out on all the male characters being decked in armor, while the female characters kept wildly unrealistic proportions. (I'm not that familiar with LoL, so I'm not sure how accurate my descriptions are, from memory of the conversation.) The designer responded by saying that the dramatic proportions of the female characters were used in order to make the characters decipherable based on their genders. I think that's an incredibly lazy basis for character creation, but i suppose it is a reason.

[MrPopo]

Your post made me think of a discussion I overread somewhere recently, marurun: There were some people discussing League of Legends, and the differences in design between the male and female characters. Apparently the designer had, at some point, been called out on all the male characters being decked in armor, while the female characters kept wildly unrealistic proportions. (I'm not that familiar with LoL, so I'm not sure how accurate my descriptions are, from memory of the conversation.) The designer responded by saying that the dramatic proportions of the female characters were used in order to make the characters decipherable based on their genders. I think that's an incredibly lazy basis for character creation, but i suppose it is a reason.

League of Legends is an interesting case because of the camera angle. If you look at the models in a model viewer everyone has really weird proportions in order to have interesting visuals when zoomed out from a near-overhead perspective. That said, the quote you mention was an older stance; these days Riot determines how clothed or unclothed a character is based on the fantasy they fulfill. They recently reworked a character to be more fitting for her fantasy. Previously Sejuani was a bikini clad warrior riding a boar hailing from the frozen north. Now she's fully armored and her outfit includes things that look like furs; the fantasy she fulfills is the armored knight, and it gets style points for being a boar. Before she was all over the place. By contrast, the character Ahri is a seductress fox-girl who sustains herself on the life essences of males; her costume reflects that. So there's a lot less "omgbewbs" in the character designs these days, though many older heroes still have a component of that while they await a rework.

[pierrot]

That's kind of nice that they seem to have at least realized pandering to the male libido is passe. Although I can in some small way understand the impetus behind accentuating certain features of a gender to highlight their character, in the context of LoL's scale and camera, what's to say the male characters shouldn't have huge, pendulous testicles, and giant, protruding codpieces. I think one of the arguments was also that there wasn't necessarily a reason that the official designs of the characters needed to follow suit with the ingame character models.

[Erik_Twice]

in the context of LoL's scale and camera, what's to say the male characters shouldn't have huge, pendulous testicles, and giant, protruding codpieces.

Do you really want to argue that the best way to reflect masculinity in isometric view is to have "huge, pendulous testicles"?

Surely you can make a better complain.

[dtrack]

havent read all the bullshit but i can come up with silly females.
There is a character in Quake 3 called Lucy she has some weight problems and Mileena in Mortal Kombat with some serious dental issue.
I love them both btw.

[pierrot]

in the context of LoL's scale and camera, what's to say the male characters shouldn't have huge, pendulous testicles, and giant, protruding codpieces.

Do you really want to argue that the best way to reflect masculinity in isometric view is to have "huge, pendulous testicles"?

Surely you can make a better complain.

It wasn't a complaint, nor an argument that the developers should incorporate something so stupid. It was an attempt at equivalence in absurdity of using gigantic breasts to signify femininity. It seems you've demonstrated my point that exaggerating female sexual anatomy is seen as normal, while exaggerating male sexual anatomy would be ridiculous.