Or a chest hair. I can’t tell for sure, but I bet these guys haven’t waxed their torsos.
Why is it that every time people have this argument, some dude comes along and starts telling women what they find attractive? Usually with some inane argument from “evolution”, as though steroid-popping bodybuilders are something that ever existed in nature.
Look, I happen to know a lot of nerdy women and, let me tell you, they’re not writing steamy fanfiction about these grotesque musclebound hulks.
The arguments to “realism”, although well-meaning, don’t really hold water. Videogames are almost universally set in fantasy worlds, even the ones set in the “real world”. Characters look the way they do almost entirely because the Creative Director, Art Supervisor and Head of Marketing agreed on what looked coolest. There’s always some handy fiction invented after the fact for why the dude needs that particular helmet or why the gal needs that particular zapper but it’s all make-believe.
And that’s fine! But that means when a game reverts to standard comic book tropes of hulk-like men soldiers and stripper-like women, it’s being lazy and boring. It’s transparently pandering to a particular audience.
I’d like to rant about it being the fault of the marketing department but I’ve heard enough people say “dark and gritty” with complete sincerity that I have to conclude it’s cultural. My rant about “nerd culture” will have to wait for another day tho.
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Oh joy, the Lumberjacks. That doesn’t reduce the value of my point in the slightest. I posted a picture of actual, real life, attractive to women (used to sell a calendar to women while they are enlisted) marines. Just because a guy Is a marine, he is not required to look like the picture you posted. Actually the truth is the opposite. The guys in your pic got in trouble for the way they looked.
http://www.tacticalfanboy.com/2011/10/27/lumberjack-commandos/
“It was actually 1RCR in Kosovo in 2000. When the pictures hit the media, the hammer came down about grooming standards in all of the Pioneer Plattons and we had to trim our beards. The beginning of the end……. It was only a few years later that they disbanded the pioneer platoons in our infantry battalions.”
This is what a real female marine looks like on deployment.
No makeup, wispy bangs or ponytails, no spandex (or neoprene) and plenty of armor. I bet the girls in my picture may even have hairy legs. The horror.
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Raynor does not always wear armor. He doesn’t on the ship. I gave you a link to GIS. He’s in shirt and jeans. You can see his pecs and biceps. No, you can’t see his tits. You can’t see his dick either. Because those are not secondary male sexual characteristics. Female tits are.
And again, Ghost are not marines! How many times do I have to write this, before you stop comparing them to female marines of today? The same goes for the Starcraft marines, they are also not really comparable to those of today. Yes Ficus has a belly. Who cares when your robotic armor does the walking and lifting? Most of todays drone pilots would also never be selected to fly a combat airplane. ^^
It’s also interesting that no one responded to the picture of the female medics, who also wear heavy armor, while male Ghosts are also wearing “spandex”.
Also there is an actual video sequence how that battle armor is fitted to the marine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaXss09JDjQ
As you can see, their fingers don’t match those of the armor, instead using controls from deeper inside the arm for them. Same goes for the legs/feet.
And by the way, it’s not like super-tight armor isn’t something we haven’t seen on males in video games: Crysis nano suite And this is a battle armor with a lot of protection, besides all the strength and agility enhancing. Now remove that and add the much higher technology level in Starcraft and the Ghost suit doesn’t seem so wrong.
I don’t deny, that there is certainly some optimization towards sexyness in the design, but that doesn’t make it impractical.
I haven’t played the game, so maybe there’s a back story to this too. Why is he so muscular anyway? I’m pretty sure that having a more athletic, smaller figure would be MUCH more practical for his purposes. I get why he’s got a gut though - he’s basically doing a desk job and the exoskeleton is doing all the physical work for him. Maybe he just has a lot of downtime and likes bodybuilding or something.
[Yawn stretch] OK, last post to you from me. Feel free to respond, but this topic’s closing soon.
I haven’t once - really, go back and check - made any claim at all, (not one, none whatsoever) that Ghosts are marines. They’re actually psy black ops trained from childhood - have you been trying to imply somehow that they aren’t militarily trained? Because they actually have MORE training than marines. Anyway, you just keep making that statement when as far as I know, nobody other than you has actually said that phrase. When people on this topic have been posting images of female marines it ISN’T in relationship to that concept. It has to do with other topics completely. This is a broader subject than just Kerrigan.
For example: You’re not keeping up with conversations. I posted a picture of actual British marines. In response, another person posted an image of what marines (supposedly, but not really all that often) look like when they actually go out to battle. (Because he wanted to show me “real” men.) It was solely in response to that picture (that’s why I was directly replying to that person) that I posted both a link showing that his own picture was of guys who were reprimanded for how they looked, and a real picture of women in the field. I posted the some not show him an accurate picture of women trained for combat - not necessarily a Ghost.
It was actually Brainspore who first brought up the concept of women as Space Marines - not as Ghosts - but in the movie Aliens. Brainspore was just showing that there’s no reason to not realistically depict females as fighters when they are put into the same combat situations as men. After all, it’s been done before. I continued on to discuss Ripley (who was not battle military, she was an engineer and pilot). I talked about her in part because even when she was put into revealing outfits the nature of those outfits made sense, it was appropriate to story.
As I already wrote (and as a person who has taught graphics, I can assure you, that I’ve got the measurements down on the human figure) there is no possible way that Ficus’ gut would actually fit into his suit. It wouldn’t. I provided the side-by-side just to show the logical problems with his physique.
Here’s why I didn’t comment on your male Ghost pic earlier - it doesn’t help your argument: If you’ll look at your own male Ghost link, their crotches are benefitted by the coverage of an armor codpiece. Safety first for guys! They also get a helmet, heavy boots, and gloves. Besides that, the body type is yet again “male power fantasy” not thin and lithe, like Kerrigan. If they also are Psy fighters, why then are they built like tanks? (How is this not a question you’re asking?)
We weren’t talking about the cheat explanation presented in the vid when we were talking about the suit fit. If you actually watch the cutscene (not just what you think is happening - but what is actually shown) you’ll see you’re not shown anything but a series of closeups meant to fake your eyes. His arms supposedly end at about the wrist of the suit, but we weren’t talking about that. We were talking about the magic reduction in volume that occurs when his body is placed into the suit. It’s physically impossible. He simply can’t fit into it that way. The girth of his torso, arms, and legs won’t allow it. His shoulders would have to be dislocated and stretched to be able to fit to the arms.
I do realize that different games have different styles of armor. This game just happens to be one of the all-time best sellers ever. It has a female protagonist, and it seems a bit strange that all the eye candy is designed for men. I guess for humor’s sake, I’ll just close with this piece from Deviant Art called “What if Lara Croft Was a Man?” (by Ulysses302/Rafael)
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So the marines don’t need to have huge muscles to use their armor, yet they do. And the ghosts don’t need to have spandex bodysuits to use their psy powers, yet they do. And how is all of this explained by the made-up backstory, again?
And when it comes to male ghosts, why are all of them very muscular while the females are lithe? Why can’t I find and shots of succulent male ghost asses, when it seems very popular to depict female ghosts from behind?
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It still doesn’t make any sense. The gut itself - the physical size of his torso - actually would prevent the armor from fitting. Not only that, Star Craft takes place in space. One of the most consistent limits to space travel is weight. No one would be allowed to happily bulk up when powered exoskeletons are available.
Also, heavy weight often comes with some standard medical conditions that would prevent your ability to travel in space safely, “Even in the remote future people suffering from a heart disease or hypertension will hardly be able to go on a space travel.”
http://spacefeelings.com/medical-requirements-outer-space-travel.shtml
Here’s a list of medical conditions that are known problems for altitude. Obesity is included.
http://www.altitudemedicine.org/index.php/altitude-medicine/preexisting-conditions
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I guess they’re going for the Strongman type figure, so the gut wouldn’t be out of place if he is going for strength over appearance:
http://thegaragegorilla.blogspot.de/2012/01/what-s-difference.html
(this is obviously a weightlifting site rather than one for bodybuilders)
But I agree, it’s just serving the power fantasy so you can’t just have a short skinny guy coming out of one of those machines, even if he would be better for the job.
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No one ever said anything about a short, skinny guy. 
As I posted earlier, if you take a look at a lot of marines, you’ll see that neither of those images matches most soldiers. Just run a Google image search for the word “Marines” and you’ll see that neither of those body types represent a healthy, cross fit individual. Both of the ones you posted are deliberately muscle-bulked, and that actually gets in the way of armor and weaponry. Soldiers are typically cut, medium built, and lean (they carry a lot of gear, and your own weight adds to the weight of the gear). It’s muscle with a purpose, not just for display. Here are two pics - not for calendars - of marines in training.
Findlay (the statue guy) is supposedly built to look like that because of his backstory. (Forced to work in a mine after arrest.) The problem is, Findlay isn’t the only guy who looks like that. As I wrote just above, male Ghosts (who are blacks ops, and use psychic powers and martial arts close combat) are ALSO built like that - when male. When female, they look like Kerrigan (like a fashion model).
You can’t make sense of it, because it isn’t logical. It’s all designed to satisfy a fantasy.
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Well, most of those issues come from weightlessness and that is not much of a problem when you have artificial gravity. Also they operate from a ship larger than todays aircraft carriers, the size and weight of a single person isn’t much to care about in that case.
That makes even less sense. You’d need a lot of pretty expensive food to build up that kind of muscle mass. Why do they even bother relying on convict labour anyway if machines are so common? Sigh. Maybe the convict labourers I Googled were all just lazy, because none of them seem to be that beefy.
Edit: I should add that I don’t really care too much about factors like whether the body fits in the suit or whatever when it comes to playing a game, or whether the backstory is completely watertight. It’s a game, it’s fantasy, I can suspend my disbelief and appreciate an otherwise well designed game. As long as it isn’t overpowering or prejudiced, I don’t mind a bit of sexual or power fantasy either. If you’re a relatively powerless person with a boss who tells you what to do, it’s nice to imagine that you’re in control of world-changing events or that you have an idealised body shape. It’s the insistence that it must be this way despite the fact that even the rationalisation for this doesn’t make sense, or the denial of the underlying reason for the design choices that get me.
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Since this is a totally separate issue and I’m about hop off here, I’ll correct that for you before I go.
They don’t actually have that much to do with weightlessness (I mentioned “altitude”), but with cabin pressurization. Airplanes, and anything flying higher than that isn’t pressurized to match sea level, and for someone with uncontrolled high blood pressure, heart issues, epilepsy or a host of other medical issues, that can be a dangerous thing resulting in blood clots and other problems. You can even die. Some people stroke out on commercial airliners because of bad blood vessels in their brains that were fine on the ground, but popped in flight.
Weight is a constant concern in space flight no matter how large the vessel. That’s because you’re dealing with counting the amount of fuel needed to reach you destination. Even if you have super-wonderful futuristic warp engines, you’re still talking about something requiring “a few hours to charge up to make a jump” - so every pound counts, because pounds make the charge take longer. (It’s why baggage is controlled on airplanes.) Larger people also use more oxygen and more water. Heavily muscled people even more so.
So we’ll try this once again - no more answers for you.
Try looking up this stuff yourself.
But seriously! Everyone gets the best food (minimum 3,000 calories) when in a prison mine, because ya know, without that much food, he’d have to lose weight. He’d probably be eating closer to 6,000 calories if trying to attain that bulk! (That’s about 8 boxes of black beans and rice a day!)
As long as you keep misunderstanding the point, probably.
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Are you really want to argue, that the weight of some soldiers matter much on a 1’800 feet long spaceship with a crew of thousands that also carries around whole tank and mech platoons? Also the ISS has sea level pressurization, why shouldn’t interstellar spaceships?
Also something not mentioned, that Starcraft happens on different planets in a sector far away from Earth. The gravity of some of those planets could be higher, which would result in higher muscle build up. Though you could ask, why this doesn’t happen to the woman then. ^^
The original argument was, that Kerrigan as a female wears tight sexy armor, while her male “counter-parts” wear heavy power armor. I stated that this comparision is flawed because Kerrigan has a very different military role and that is the primary reason for her suit. I also added that male Ghosts wear more or less the same suit, while female medics also use heavy power armor. The whole muscle size thing is another topic.
Then others posted pictures of “real female marines”, which made no sense because Kerrigan isn’t even a marine to begin with.
You could ask, why are there no female marines in Starcraft? But that would be another topic again.
Mod note: Just a reminder that there is no point in arguing with a man who thinks he’s right.
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And plenty of people have stated that her suit is the reason for Kerrigan in the first place, and the military role is a distant second.
No, that would be pretty much on-topic for what everybody but you is talking about in a thread semi-title sexism in video games. You are maundering about some sort of ex-post-facto story/marketing justification for game design choices, when everybody else is talking about the game design choices and societal influences and counter-factual examples of those game design choices.
You are talking about fantasy. Everybody else is talking about WHY fantasy.
UPDATE: sorry, @Falcor. But… maybe if I SHOUT LOUDER???
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