Show off! ;p
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The short form is: A female character doesn’t wear those outfits and move that way because the character chose to. The character is a creation born of the choices of others. In the case of video games, it is also born of an entire decision-making apparatus signing off on those choices.
Whether they are empowered is not even a question that can be sensibly asked. Whether they are empowering is up to the audience.
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Words fail me right now… because you come off as being a combative dipshit that wants to sit and box. I’m sitting here agreeing it’s fucked up and you’re taking little kiddie potshots at me?
To that sir/madam/other. I say Fuck Off.
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Came here looking for Kate Beaton’s Strong Female Characters, but I guess those are a little awkward to place inline in a discussion thread.
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php/index.php?id=311
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=336
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“It’s powerful stuff. It’s really good for women. I think they’ll appreciate it and feel welcome.”
Well, if it’s intended for the audience to be women, as that quote above implies, then I’d say no; I personally do not find run-of-the-mill objectification of the female form to be ‘empowering.’
I think you’re right; my query results didn’t contain any game or character by the name of Sexblade, nor any game devs by the name of ‘Kenneth Farmer.’ (Although there is a cheesy looking game called ‘XBlade.’)
It’s gotta be satire/parody.
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It is also the sort of driving trollies fun @beschizza likes to share. So well played Rob.
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Hey, you know I love me some well thought-out snark.
The Warcraft movie patch notes are very funny 
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Escher Girls seems appropriate here.
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Yeah, at first I was like “Someone actually made a character named Sexblade and is playing it straight, vs a parody?”
Then I was like, I have to see this, but it wasn’t on the internets, so then I was like, oohhhh, it IS a parody.
ETA
Oglaf is hilarious. I catch up on him 3 or 4 times a year.
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Rob, Boing Boing’s Tony Clifton… :-/
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Actually a man-woman team:
Oglaf and PostSecret are the two things I go for first on Sunday mornings.
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Much of the deeper problem is that masculine and feminine are merely stereotypes, and that marketing frequently chooses to exploit those stereotypes. There are a number of possible ways to frame the current norms, most of which are not flattering. The range “of sexy female” types is exceedingly narrow, homogeneous, and superficial. The “powerful male” types seem asexual, as if steroids have caused them to not get it up anymore, and they are encased in Reichian emotional power-armor. Here’s one explanation of character armoring:
http://www.reichandlowentherapy.org/Content/Energy_and_Movement/armor.html
Armor is a metaphor referring to the muscular spasms, decreased moltility, postural mis-alignments, and character attitudes which an individual develops that act as a defense against the breakthrough of unwanted or intolerable feelings, sensations, emotions, or experience. Muscular armor serves, mostly, as a defense against anxiety, anger, fear, and sexual excitation. Character armor leads to emotional rigidity, poor contact with others, and a feeling of ‘deadness.’ With armor in place, the conscious control no longer has to actively defend against certain impulses or desires. As tenacious as psychological defenses tend to be, they can still slip or be overwhelmed at times, but armor tends to be ‘always on.’
Wilhelm Reich coalesced his ideas of resistence to ‘normal’ psychoanalytic methods around the concept of armor. The metaphor probably arises from the impression given of imperviousness to being touched by interpretation or education. It implies defensiveness. However, armor is more than a metaphor, it is a condition of the body that can be demonstrated.
Armor can be palpated as muscle tension. It can also be observed as impairment in movement. Patterns of armor do not strictly follow the pathways of voluntary motor nerves but rather show up as bands or segments. That is because armoring is more a result of autonomic system activity and so follow vascular patterns more than voluntary motor patterns. This is the same pattern as for ‘hysterical’ paralysis or ‘hysterical’ numbness that is well documented in the psychiatric literature completely independent of Reich.
When armor is fully in play, it it said that a person is exhibiting a ‘character defense’ and anxiety is fairly low. When armor has been weakened, either through therapy or chance experience, a person is said to be in an ‘anxiety defense’ An anxiety defense can be thought of as a temporary state brought about by de-armoring. It is important in bodywork not to precipitate too much anxiety at once.
I think that a person need not be into Wilhelm Riech or psychoanalysis to consider how this notion might be applicable here.
Much of the solution I think is in having more non-male people creating more games and other content for non-male enjoyment. The “lunky hero dude wins the scantily clad sexpot” archetype won’t disappear through shaming it away, people need to provide more varied alternatives, and even then it takes time.
Another stereotype is that of the player character itself. Video games have adopted a lot of narrative tropes (for better and/or worse) from cinema, while the underlying mechanics are often not truly based upon deep personal interactions, but rather physics puzzles and such which don’t require human avatars at all. For my own in-house immersive environments, my avatar was simply a geometric form, because I didn’t need a humanoid body to interact in the game-scape.
These assumptions about real life often find their way into comics, sci-fi, and fantasy media where there is no reason to suppose that contemporary Earth concepts such as “female”, “gay”, “white” have any meaning at all. These holdovers are for an unimaginative audience to identify with, not usually for the service of the narrative itself. For example, Boyega in the latest Star Wars movie was a victory for diversity in casting, but kind of meaningless in-universe where there is no reason to assume that any of the characters are even human, and even less for assuming that they are from Europe, Africa, or other real-world places. Identification relies upon an element of familiarity, of recognition - whereas diversity necessarily goes beyond identity to the inclusion of that which is truly new and different. This I think implies that cultural maturity ultimately lies not in more diverse stereotypes, but in eventually doing away with stereotypes. This involves a fundamental shift in storytelling as it has been generally used, where people are drawn into the depths of circumstances and decisions rather than relating to easy archetypes - in either sense of the term.
A funny contradiction is that whereas the video game industry likes to include superficially sexual elements in games and marketing, it has for the most part assiduously avoided video games about sex itself. They seem to be much more taboo in this medium than others, such as literature, movies, and even television. Whereas video games use a lure of sex, as a medium they are afraid of sex. Considering the low bar they set for themselves, this might be for the best. But it would be interesting to see more sex-positive examples.
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Ah, no idea. Great stuff!
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Point & Clickbait is the internet’s finest source for reliable, ethical, and above all extremely true and definitely real gaming news.
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You’re in so deep you don’t even realize. You think you’re on the other end of the spectrum but you’re still thinking about women and their actions and how they relate to you, not how women in media relate to women. All the while, you’re putting down certain classes of women to accomplish your attempt at white-knighting.
What I want is a woman that doesn’t have to do the tarted ‘I ain’t needin’ no man.’ snap snap head side shake.
That is the kind of woman that turns me on. Granted it doesn’t hurt she’s also good looking
“And btw no fat chix”
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You’re doing the same thing my stepdad does, latching onto a side point and trying ot use it to set me up as this monster you’re entitled to joust with, that you see as your god given right to drag through the mud. So wha’ts your real bitch? Why? Not the thing I posted, because the thing you’re latching onto is never what it is.
As for my post. ‘It doesn’t hurt that’ is a secondary point. Besides, attractivness is subjective to an extent. Some people would be turned off she’s bald, others that she’s missing an arm, or too skinny.
I find that hyper blatant ‘I am a strong independant woman’ shtick to be anti-feminist, or at least anti-empowerment since if you’re spending all that time talking, you’re not doing, and actions speak louder than words.
Let’s look at Yoko from Gurren Lagann. Bikkini, fanservicy, and sadly turned into mush in the mangas and so on. However in the show itself she’s very proactive, gives as good as she takes, and generally just is rather than preaching at how she is a role model or that she hates to be objectified or any or a hundred other tired cliche’s.
Recently saw a thing that tweaked women in gaming to have more realistic proportions… and ultimately it made all of them look better for it since you don’t have that sunk in chest, overinflated breasts, and in short the changes weren’t actually that great. Same outfits, same poses. Just… making it look more like how an actual body would look.
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I made a terrible mistake and did a google image search for “Sexblade”.
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