ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
No Iranian called me an incel
User ID: 812
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
22d ago
Vidya character designs are not neutral aesthetic choices. Like it or not, now they function as tribal signaling and flag-planting.
The “not every character needs to be attractive” platitudes are almost exclusively mono-directional. They are invoked to justify making female characters unappealing to the dreaded male gaze, while male characters continue to be drawn to conventional standards of attractiveness with far less pushback. In practice the principle rarely produces “realistic variation.” Almost all the time, a noticeable skew toward designs that many players find actively unappealing (TLOU2, Dragon Age Veilguard, Insomniac Spider-man 2) in mainstream IPs, which suggests the real goal is ideological correction.
I find that normies who repeat that line are, more often than not, responding to social pressure rather than stating a deeply held aesthetic preference. It is a low-cost way to signal alignment with the dominant cultural posture in certain online and industry spaces. Once the social incentive is removed, the enthusiasm for deliberately unattractive designs tends to drop.
Given that the core gaming still leans disproportionately straight men, the expectation that this audience should continually cede ground on visual appeal to satisfy feminist sensibilities is a political demand dressed up as design philosophy to treat design preferences that lean into conventional attractiveness as a moral failing. No thanks, I'll take more "goon fuel".
Marriage was firstly a legally and socially enforced arrangement between a man and a woman designed to reliably allocate resources and responsibility around offspring. By binding a specific man to a specific woman and her children, it created a workable answer to the problem of paternity uncertainty and gave the resulting family unit a clear claim on property, inheritance, and mutual support.
Modern economies offer earning vocations for women. We are in the age of Long Peace, we also have modern medicine, paternity tests, birth control and stable populations. The conditions simply aren't there to retvrn to your preferred idea of marriage.
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