Sexy (Patreon)

You can't talk about art, without someone else talking about "liberalization" (???) of characters.

The sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn's been released, and predictably, lots of conversations regarding the game aren't about its open world, graphical fidelity, or storytelling, but its main character not being attractive enough.

You've likely seen bait posts online being unironically carried by manbabies complaining about its lead character Aloy having peach fuzz, or more specifically, it being quote tweeted into Oblivion, because that's the thing… how many people are complaining about Horizon's lead character? Couple thousand?

I think that's being generous but let's roll with it.

Couple thousand people think the character should be sexier… for a game which sold twenty million copies.

So I don't really care about pointing out how it's correct to call these characters "supposedly controversial" because the people raising a stink are such a hysterical minority, it's amazing they're even being registered at all, and likely the only reason why they are, is because people enjoy mocking them and get positive attention for doing so.

However, one of the reasons this line of thinking spreads so much, is lots of people assume it to be true. They assume that game characters are "less sexy" to appeal to more general audiences in a changing world where sex doesn't explicitly sell.

I don't think even that's true though, and the reason I don't, is the sheer amount of horny I see on my Twitter feed.

Non-stop shipping of Caitlyn and Vi from Arcane, the entire internet wanting Lady Dimitrescu to step on them to death, one screenshot of Judy from Cyberpunk spawning pre-orders, people making characters miserable with Jack-O's Challenge, Tifa defining some comic artists more than their comics, and article after article about Overwatch Pornhub statistics.

…Are you sure there's less sex-appeal in games now?

I'm not seeing that here.

I'm not seeing characters that are less sexy than games which came before. I'm seeing characters that are more believably and/or uniquely sexy.

Most game characters these days are still based off of professional models, often wear suggestive clothing, and maintain an appearance that is absolutely impossible in our real world, but there's a lot less of generic Double D Blonde in a Bikini because it turns out, that's not actually a very memorable character design. It turns out that 6th generation games which banked on hypersexualized characters actually look really awkward and uncanny. It turns out that more people will draw fan-art, make cosplay, and search rule34 of characters that don’t just look like someone you see on Billboards for Bodyspray.

I've seen some people say it's a Western Game thing to have unattractive characters, but again… with Cyberpunk, Apex Legends, Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, hell, even Call of Duty games these days, I'm not seeing this alternate universe where every character's made to look like an amorphous blob.

If this is what "liberalization" of characters looks like…

I'm not complaining?