Well, here we are again, dealing with the insanity that is Feminist Frequency. Most of you have already watched the episode done on this: XxFirermahgerdden the Rezerkening 420YOLOSWAG Chat 43.69xX: OVER 9000 BODY TYPES! I am going to approach this in ways not approached during the show. First I will be showing five existing examples, spread throughout gaming, of strong female characters of various body types, explaining what had to be done to make these women work. Then, finally, I will give something constantly ignored out of convenience to the narrative. Also, I’m doing all of this considering the fact that my wife is a bigger woman as well, though to be fair she also despises the patronizing body positivity movement and tries to lose weight herself.
Let’s hammer this in.
To begin, Anita is exceedingly disingenuous by openly admitting she has cherry-picked fast-paced battle-based genres for her demonstrations. This cuts out RPGs, Sandboxes, puzzlers, and other narrative based adventures which have shown an extravagant amount of body types over the years, all because she is jealous of fit fighters. Even then, your basic MOBA (one of the things she specifies via DOTA2 and League of Legends) typically have upwards to 80 different individual characters! Chances are one of them is gonna tickle your fancy. Plus from what I’ve seen she doesn’t even consider the context of the interactions of the character. Most of them aren’t pulled in by their own will but by the will of someone above them. But that is beside the point. My point is it didn’t take me long to find this example: Lulu the Fae Sorceress.
Notice something here? She isn’t slender. Also as she is a fae – also known as faerie, for those who don’t follow Gaelic theology like myself, they are capable of breeding with humans. By those standards, she might seem attractive, particularly to those who have a thing for lolita elves. Don’t worry, Fae are typically centuries old and still keep their youth so no pedophilia here. Point is that’s not a typical body type for a female in games. Also, she is fairly mischievous as fae tend to be… not so much evil as simply chaotic… and notice the ‘skins’ bit. Those are common in MOBAs so you can customize your champion to your taste. (Source: http://gameinfo.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/game-info/champions/lulu/)
So where do we go next? How about straight up fighters? We’ll go to one of my still favorites- Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes, if only because I still don’t like the balancing on 3. Now MvC2 has about 53 characters to choose from, not counting duplicates (Wolverine). One character you could confuse for a young boy is that of SonSon, the granddaughter of the male character from an early Capcom platformer that never really caught on, based on Sun Wukong. Oh wait, you might better recognize the Japanese transliteration of that character: Son Gokuu. Thats right, this is a Rule 63 of the DBZ hero in essence, down to the transforming into a giant ape that spits out beam attacks. Now if that’s a normal female, that’s scary. Full disclosure, SonSon is one of my mains for that game. So now we have to our tally a lolita type and a transforming androgynous type. What’s next? (Source: http://marvelvscapcom.wikia.com/wiki/SonSon_III)
How about RPGs? Well, the Suikoden series is always a good place to pull from for multiple character builds. The second game of the series is particularly interesting because we have an example of an extremely muscular woman who is playable. Interestingly enough she is named, Hanna. The way she is designed using PS1 age sprite work is very impressive for starters, and if you look at her character from behind you can not tell any difference between her and a male barbarian character designed in the same era. She even sports a more masculine face to boot and is a fairly powerful swordswoman. She also tends to be rather stoic. Funny how these Japanese games keep showing more varied characters than many feminists want to admit. (Source:http://suikoden.wikia.com/wiki/Hanna)
I’m going to do something a little different for this one, I’m going to pull a game I haven’t actually played out of the ether that is Steam. With the plethora of games released there, I’m sure I can find an odd body type fairly quickly. Hmmm, what do we have here a few pages in?
It’s an indie title called FreezeME. To be completely honest here, I know nothing about the developer Rainy Night Creations and am not even going to suggest to anyone to buy this game; check on site reviews, look for gameplay footage and make your own judgments. This is purely to find atypical female body types and this 3D platformer has it in their main character known only as “R”. If anything she looks like a typical homely type of girl, not exceedingly fat but not slender either. Just average. Now that being said, I am probably going to check this game out myself because it also seems to have a neat mechanic in freezing aspects of the level using a camera. It looks to me like a legitimately fun game that doesn’t beat you in the face about its female protagonist. (Source: http://store.steampowered.com/app/390210/)
Alright, now we are to our fifth example. So where am I going to go for this one? Well to be frank the next one isn’t a protagonist or from a game I particularly like. In fact, the developers of this game have hit some shaky ground as of late partially due to their politics and some horrible singing. Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 2. Say what one will about Anthony Burch or Randy Pitchford, they did, in fact, create a plus sized female character in the form of Ellie. Now, this may seem like stretching but there is a reason I’m approaching her here, to address the current day mechanics of making a semi-realistic example of a plus sized woman in a video game. Particularly since this example was loosely mentioned in the show on this subject, especially one of Ellie’s ample bust size which is done realistically. Yes, such a build does exist in real life and is ironically enough in porn. I’m not going to link to it for obvious reasons but check out a site called boobpedia. You’ll find some extreme busts. However, in an interview they did talk about needing to create special animations. This was done prior to the level of motion capture now present in a lot of AAA titles so they needed several lines of specific code just for her presumably 48 K cup breasts. (Source: http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Ellie)
(Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-borderlands-2s-ellie-the-opposite-of-how-most-females-tend-to-be-represented-in-games/)
Now I said I was going to put up something often ignored as well. Well, I think it’s obvious to any MMORPG player out there that while a large majority of the cheap free to play ones have a very narrow character creator system. Many big time ones have a very robust character creator. I think the prime examples come once again from the Phantasy Star series. Starting with Phantasy Star Online and going all the way into the current Online 2 from Universe, there have always been a variety of character build options some used by NPCs and the like but even more so used by the players. Due to the existence of the “Skillet Set” weapons I’ve seen people model a character after Aunt Jemima. I’ve seen muscle bound women who are 7 feet tall, I’ve seen little kid type characters. Even pudgy gnomish female CASTS (androids). There is roaming around in the ether of the net the PSO2 Character creator. I encourage many to go out there and use it for themselves. See what can be made with full physics in place. You will be surprised.
So what does this show us overall? Like every other time I’ve done this, it shows ultimately that the representation is there. Not only that but it’s easy to find women of all types in video games. Do you want androgynous? Check! Do you want a brawny girl that makes you question your sexuality? Check! Do you want a loli type that will make people put you on a pedo watchlist? Check. Do you want a big breasted fat girl? Well, you might not but I don’t mind taking a peek at that Rule 34 every now and again. Now before I go and calm down my wife about me looking at some fat girls, next time we do our last bit on mentoring. Please remember to Game Freely!
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It always disappoints me when I read an article about ‘body diversity’ and that whole Big Beautiful Woman branch of porn industry isn’t really dealt with. I guess porn is still such a taboo these days it’s hard for those deep into professional indentity politics to mention that angle without starting a twitterstorm. Thus they just pretend it doesn’t exist at all. Maybe I’m just not digging enough but I’ve never really seen any mainstream feminist icon deal with it. I mean, in a videogame it’s still not exactly clear whether or not people are even considering the characters’ bodies when playing, but if you go to frikkin xhamster and see a pages of SSBBW porn under its own tag, pretty sure someone’s enjoying that.
I agree with you, in fact my wife is a big woman. I simply didn’t go deeper into porn in this article because I wasn’t touching upon that bit yet. Not to mention I would prefer to discuss with both Alison and Hannah on how they would want such an article approached considering it was their decision to take on my contribution in the first place. I want to be fair to them as I have been with every article I’ve submitted here so far. I may touch upon it as its own subject later on though if they are both ok for me discussing fat girl porn on here and how much they think I should show as part of the discussion. That just depends on how much crazier the body diversity movement gets. If they realize how porn and sex stories featuring fat and obese women are actually surprisingly common and have been for decades then there is no need for me to go deeper. If they start trying to force healthy, skinny women to get fat or mutilate them in other ways? Then I most definitely will tackle it.
Oh, I should really stay away from Disqus when I’m on my phone. I didn’t mean for that to sound critical of your article at all, sorry. I didn’t find anything disappointing about this and I really think you gave the porn industry no less attention here than necessary.
I was going off on my own a bit there when your mention of the diverse examples shown on Boobpedia from the porn industry, mixed in with some recent arguments I’ve been hearing from reactions to FemFreq’s videos. These feminists go on and on treating these normal pretty female characters from games like this is all the boys want. Then men such as yourself give them the real-talk about how diverse (or perverse) young and old men’s tastes really get, and I get excited because that should spawn a very weighty discussion.
Then there’s something which came up some time ago, someone had pointed out that really when people are playing games they’re not sitting there oogling the characters. We stare at crosshairs and puzzle pieces most of the time and everything else is really only so much flash-paper and lore. Again it just seems obvious for me that any adult would know this, an adult would know where people go when they want to oogle things and it would take really very little research to see an environment there that was totally in conflict with feminist claims. I want to hear how the feminist camp navigates this evidence to come to their conclusions about men.
In both cases I really get let down by what seems to be a total lack of response to any escalation in the discussion. I read this article too and I see great observations and I feel I know your opponents here will just shrug it off to repeat themselves, and the conclusions I’m drawing begin to frustrate me.
I hear other anti-feminists draw lines between feminist behaviour and personality disorders, in particular Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissism. Disorders featuring a kind of prolonged adolescence, a failure to develop intellectually because they were raised by people who never developed intellectually, and so on through the ages, I’m sure you’ve read about the generational stuff.
In the end I just can not navigate around the conclusion that the ‘unrealistic women in games/movies/comics’ issue is just something coming out of the minds of children living in adult bodies. They only want to run their mouths about popular things to look cool in front of their friends, but not really talk about the subjects of the stories or the many complex workings of these designs, and they’re the ones currently steering the popular narrative. I don’t want to write off this decades-long argument plaguing our creative industries as being the result of nothing more than a lineage of childish idiots because it makes me feel like a dismissive bigot, but god damn feminists make it so hard to give them any respect on this one.
Though I think in your reply to my own poorly abridged comment you make another good point, there’s really no point in going deeper into any of this if the opposition just isn’t putting on their grown-up pants. It would be wasted energy and probably detract from HBR’s, Alison’s and Hannah’s focus on men’s issues as you’ve already said. Again I didn’t mean to suggest it as an HBR article topic, or criticize you for not focusing on any personal chubby chasing in an already fine, pointed article.
In fact in this case merely begrudge your feminist opposition for not writing anything deeper on the topic in the first place.
Sorry if I’d caused any confusion, and thanks.
Oh don’t apologize! I want my stuff to be challenged just to show how much more solid my arguments are compared to the flimsy ones feminists have been putting up for some time. I wish more an more that people like yourself would speak up in my comment sections. Thats what they are there for. Plus I know sometimes I can fail to clarify certain points proper and this might open up future articles. Unlike feminists who seek to destroy hobbies I want to construct love for different veins of thought and expression. I want the debate. If you watched the whole thing with Liana K on yesterday’s stream then you see how far I’ve gone to try to get some proper challenge. Though I did not expect that to erupt into four hours of her bitching and moaning straight. She should probably see a doctor for that because if it lasts more than four hours….. Viagra jokes aside. I want us to have this sort of talk. If you’d like to help me more look back on my mentor articles please and put forth examples you can think of for my next weeks article. I’ll include them. Thank you.
what i always think it’s a rater funny how any feminist ever tends to ignore games where you can simply make your own character, and mostly how female that play those games most of the time really don’t care about that, it’s extremely rare to find a woman that actually played with the female dwarf character in the first Dragon Age game, while the female noble human is way more popular and that’s totally okay.
while the idea of having more muscular woman in games it’s not a bad thing the biggest problem it’s that every.single.time the sjw crowd will try to jump on it and try to claim that woman that isn’t ‘girly’ is a transexual because she is muscular, being a huge fan of the Dangan Ronpa games i have become tired of listening how many, many, many people decided that Sakura Ogami was a transexual. it’s amazing how the people that most cry about the lack of diversity are also the ones that most tend to misinterpret the characters to make sure they fit their own ideals.
Indeed, I’ve got something fun planned next.