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Comments
^^ Well, people could, you know,play Tomb Raider at E3
There's still a sexual aspect but the trailer, but really I think it's a lot worse than the classic 'hello, boys.' approach the older games had. Granted that wasn't great either but still.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387693/plotsummary
The obligatory porn parody. Anyway, she was often pitched as a powerful sex symbol in mainstream media around Tomb Raider 2, if I remember some news stuff correctly.
This game lost all credibility after the "attempted rape" scene. Nearly everything about this game is tasteless, worse than DmC even.
At least DMC is quotable
No kidding, DmC is like Ultimate Spiderman written for teenagers. XD
DmC's fun and it seems to drenched in exploitation and grindhouse writing to be taken that seriously. Tomb Raider aims to be taken seriously. And really, while I think that DMC's problematic, I wouldn't say that it's exactly "tasteless" as far as videogames go. At least, relatively speaking
Oh, I wasn't calling DmC tasteless (okay, it kinda is tasteless to the Devil May Cry franchise), but it is incredibly stupid, an NT has shown blatant disrespect for the series too.
Now Tomb Raider, while in the same general camp (reboots that completely miss the point of the franchise) is a whole nother ballgame. Every time I watch a trailer for this game, it feels like it's catering to the ryona fetishists, it's that creepy.
I just think DmC is bad marketing and tonal decisions.
Granted, Tomb Raider has that too... but it's just so much more. Like I said, while original Lara Croft was hardly a feminist ideal, there -was- good stuff that could have been worked upon.
What's the difference between DMC and DmC?
DMC is the original Devil May Cry series, DmC is the reboot.
I think.
"Y'know, I used to think that the game industry was relatively progressive on the issue of sexism (i.e. is less sexist than society on the whole)"
What made you think that?
"Like I said, while original Lara Croft was hardly a feminist ideal, there -was- good stuff that could have been worked upon."
I would say "good stuff" more in the manner of shifting her intended target away from horny frat boys to adventurous young women.
Horny frat boys will fap to anything, so it's not as if they actually have to put effort into sexualizing her.
^^There's a way to apply sexuality without being pandering, but subtlety is not a lot of people's strong suit. And young men get enough attention as it is.
But is it really that hard to refrain from absurd boob sizes and stupid-looking skimpy outfits in inappropriate situations? I fail to see how that stuff is a question of either/or.
Yes. Yes, it is very hard. Immensely hard.
Okay. Then I expressed myself poorly. It was not my intent to state it as meaning completely neglecting one demographic, but I'm just so frustrated at their overrepresentation that I ended up exaggerating.
It's not like they make the games and deliberately ignoring them is not the solution.
Hell, even if something's for men so long as it doesn't disenfranchise women (like many games unfortunately do) it'll still have a heavy female fanbase. Look at Avengers or Final Fantasy.
I don't know anything about Avengers, but the Final Fantasy series has long had a female fanbase for various reasons.
"Various reasons" here meaning "pretty men" right?
Yeah, but the primary demographic is still male.
Honestly, the world of gaming could do with more finely tuned men with flow-y long hair. I'm really tired of huge bulky refrigerator men with buzz cuts.
You'll also find that the anime fanbase is well-populated by women. No real surprise; the standards of masculinity expressed in anime are much less, well, masculine from our perspective. There's also more female characters in traditionally masculine roles. From a Western sociological point of view, anime approaches androgyny, and that's reflected in JRPGs. After all, JRPGs are the original "anime as vidya" genre of game, and many of the standards and tropes that are central to anime are out in full force within JRPGs.
While it'd no doubt good to have more female characters and greater diversity among them, there's no reason a person of one gender can't identify with a character of another gender. Given that a lot of anime/JRPG male protagonists lack the hypermasculinity so common in Western male protagonists, female members of the audience might feel a lot more comfortable with them as an avatar of themselves. That's just speculation, though.
^ For that matter, there's a lack of huge bulky refrigerator men with flow-y long hair. Where's an epic, singleplayer Conan the Barbarian game when you need one?
There was actually one. Spoilers: It was eh.
That said, I think with all this concern about mass appeal it'd be great if we had sexy men AND sexy women in concert being awesome.
I think it's weird that a statement I use about comics to point out the varying body types in superhero men whereas almost all the women have supermodel bodies. I can't use the 'variety' comparison in games these days what with GUNSGUNSGUNSSPACEMARINESGUNS.