(02-02-2015, 12:29 PM)Gegenji Wrote:(02-02-2015, 12:20 PM)Zhavi Wrote: The way that community is, there is a certain pressure to have a beautiful, strong character. Â There is a subtext that your character needs to be both powerful and attractive, and conventionally strong in that 'beautiful control' sort of way, where problems that arise are due to romantic drama and fights over territory.
... This trend was actually why my Champions Online hero (Lard Almighty) and APB criminal (Chris "Chrisco" Colietti) were both fat dudes. As fat as I could make 'em.
There's something deeply hilarious about some pretty large-chested heroine doing the daily grind of beating up street thugs and what amounts to the Blob from the X-Men squeezed into a college football uniform falls from the sky next to them before leaping away again.
Yes, I took the Hulk Super Jump movement power and I regret nothing about it. Used to joke that he'd make it so high up into the air that, if he decided to hip drop an enemy doing this, the last thought before impact would be "What smells like bacon?"
Haha, yes. All of my Champions Online characters are flat-chested females with the muscle slider jacked up. I frequently end up the most androgynous-looking individual in the room (though to be fair, making androgynous males is literally impossible with that character creator).
Of course, then my main ends up being a gun-toting ninja catgirl... which is exactly what'll happen to T'rahnu when 3.0 comes out. Old habits die hard, eh? Even then, however, I wouldn't describe any of my characters as "conventionally attractive" or "beautiful" in the way most people think of beauty, especially when it comes to women.
I wonder sometimes how many people are turned off just from looking at my characters, and never say anything about it. It's funny, too, when I happen to think my characters actually look really good but then everyone else tells me they look plain, or weird, or unattractive, or whatever, and I realize, well, godsdammit, this is how we end up with characters that all look the same! There's something to be said about that pressure to conform to normalized beauty standards even in a bloody video game with character creation where you have the freedom to go much, much further afield than IRL.
And this is with pitch-perfect skin texture, too. No pimples or zits or body hair or whatever. Sheesh, talk about high standards.
Anyway. I'm ranting now, but this really hits close to home for me. We play these things for at least some level of escapism, and yet even in our escapism we are subjected to this kind of shit... it's really bloody depressing, to say the least.
