Why not?
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I really love FF’s stuff…however when Anita says “female creatures who function to demonize femaleness itself”…
well…but could it also be that they stopped at the sexy+gross=creepy and just went with that? Sometimes a cake is just a cake.
the thing is creepy. working as intended in that regard.
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one other thing I notice, just in thinking of games in general.
I feel as if spider based creepy creatures always seem to be female which ties to the idea/notion of The Black Widow perhaps?
And clown based creepy creatures always seem to be male which ties into the idea/notion…um…well, when was the lst time you saw a female clown?
EDIT: Also…“ancient ideas of women as deceptive and evil”…Anita, come meet my ex wife please. Its not an ancient idea.
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Well, it’s not a standard Princess Phone. The metallic ring on the ear cup is all wrong, for example.
As you know, when Magnum PI was a thing ( 1980-1988) “cell phones” looked like this.
The 80, course, was all about cordless phones:
The Magnum character was firmly set in the present, so the character would only have access to technology known to the audience. Albeit, because of the rich benefactor, Magnum had really nice things: he drove a Ferrari 308 GTS, lived in a beach estate, and had a friend with a helicopter.
So I assume that’s the Ferrari 308 equivalent cordless phone for whatever year that picture was taken.
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I was suprised she mentioned GLaDOS. When you look closer, she seems to be a tied up woman, that depending on your reading, might even want to die.
Although, maybe I should not be surprised, it’s a nice spin on the classic damsel in distress where the damsel (GLaDOS in this case) orchestrates her own release by having the protagonist killing her.
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Sure, but the whole point of this kind of critical examination is that it reveals a lot about who is making the game and who they are making the game for when they start at ‘sexy’, immediately start shaping some 3D boobs, move on to ‘gross’ and begin deforming primary sexual characteristics. The point is the equation isn’t just an equation - it’s the first time they developers thought “hey, maybe a lady monster?” because they needed to fill out the ‘sexy’ part.
The whole reason to critically evaluate media is because, just like a cake, these ideas are baked and consumed by people.
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I don’t think a tasteful symbolic representation of a subverted trope can ever be considered a problem unless it was specifically to hide secret racist messages to a segment of the audience.
I brought up the Silent Hill 2 nurse, because it is a much less clear line:
The nurse was designed and specifically tailored for the single game: Silent Hill 2. They are the representation of the guilt the protagonist feels from lusting after hospital staff while his wife was dying. The design is to take the sexy retro nurse outfit, including cleavage, and then blur out the face as an “unimportant detail” for his desire. Pyramid head was his own id as a ripped dude with a sword the size of its body that regularly thrusted the sword into the nurses in the game as the protagonist watches from a closet. Very basic stuff, but it really was new territory back then.
The problem comes in every single Silent Hill sequel where the nurse always returns as a villain. This is mostly due to Silent Hill 2 being a truly artfully made sleeper… that spawned a mountain of other games that steadily got worse. I played the Silent Hill flip-phone mobile game set in an orphanage, and there were still sexy nurse bad guys.
Even the movie, which switched out the protagonist from a man to a woman still had pyramid head and sexy nurse bad guys. On top of that, the movie just shoved them in when it copied the plot from the first game which was a bog standard cultist-witch-evil story surrounding the personal story of a man searching for his daughter in this messed up town. Of course that movie also had the transitions in set pieces from the third game… it was all a big mess.
Shit I’m even noticing now they traded out their sensible flats for heels in the later games and in the movies. The flats only lasted through the third game…
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Yep, psychological horror turned really quickly to shallow gore porn and the unironic male gaze, and Pyramid Head who’s now an established character that rapes because he’s Pyramid Head, and “fans” want him to.
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I cannot stand instructional videos, and much prefer to read an article over watching a video.
I recently had to sit through a video based course which not only wouldn’t allow me to click ahead or fast forward, but actually made me sit through the video reading the questions and each of the multiple choice answers in full to me _before allowing me to select my answer and move on. Excruciating.
None of which devalues this video, which I did sit through. I’m just glad that there are some strong feminists out there to cast a critical eye on all of our cultural media. More perspectives can only make things better in the long run, and we can all benefit from checking our own predispositions once in awhile.
Funny, I thought Mass Effect 2 was actually really good on gender ideas and portrayals, but I didn’t twig to the obvious (in retrospect) issues written into the specific storyline she calls out.
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Dracula seems like the obvious first choice.
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That was my immediate thought
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I’ve never heard it explained so well and so simply before. Thank you.
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Well, yes. Captain Hammer uses his sexuality to lure Penny away from Billy/Dr. Horrible, more out of a desire to hurt his rival than to win the fair maiden.
[Quote]CAPTAIN HAMMER
Well it sure was nice to meet you… Doctor…
You got a little crush, don’t you Doc? Well that’s gonna make this hard to hear. See, later I’m gonna take little Penny back to my place, show her the Command Center, Hammer Cycle, maybe even the Ham-Jet. You think she likes me now? I’m gonna give Penny the night of her life. Just because you want her, and I get what you want. See, Penny’s giving it up. She’s givin it up hard, cause she’s with Captain Hammer. And THESE are not the hammer.
The hammer is my penis.[/quote]
So yes, Captain Hammer can be seen as the male version of the sexy, villainous seductress.
Though I mainly posted that gif because I love Nathan Fillion and it’s a funny one I don’t get to use very often. 
)
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Not always…
One reason I love that book is because it takes arachnids, one of my favorite animals, and gives them this rich complex society. To me most spiders, while dangerous and devious to insects, are the arachnid equivalent of dogs, except humans rarely reward that loyalty and we didn’t have to domesticate them.
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You are thinking of the “Trimline” phone.
I can’t tell from the still if it’s a real cordless or not…
…but prop guys sure did that with the “wireless” mics characters use on TV and in films, sometimes attaching a non functional telescoping AM antenna to an XLR connector and plugging it into a hand held mic, and sometimes just leaving the XLR socket of the mic empty 
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When I grow annoyed by all the aliens in SciFi that are tiresomely human psychologically and behaviourally, I think of how marvelous Vinge is at creating alien aliens…and then I remember that the less like us the aliens are the harder it is for me to get into the story. For all of my complaints about certain SciFi tropes, many of them exist for valid story telling reasons.
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