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I'd argue that recent Western/US male-oriented products (mainstream movies, TV series and video games that are marketed mostly to men) are made with fewer "conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters" than before (before 2010 or so), as a reaction to the preferences of feminist-adjacent normie women, who find the presence of such content off-putting, repellent and cringe, and who want to police the cultural consumption of men (especially young single men) accordingly, similarly to the antics of the church ladies of the old days.
I would like to point out that maybe the only aspect of female representation in Western/US male-oriented products that went down in numbers would be the "non-girlboss" part. Most female representation in Western/US male-oriented products are still "conventionally attractive" and "sexually alluring". Sex sells after all.
Which kinda begs the question as what is "non-girlboss" in your eyes?
I think this is only true in the most vapid of ways, where we can say that someone being selected to feature in a major media product at all is almost definitely in the top 50% of attractiveness (probably top 20%), male or female. But this doesn't really touch on the phenomenon, where stars who headlined major works would often be in the top 5% of attractiveness, and this has expanded to something closer to top 20%, if not top 50%, and the gap between 95th and 80th - to say nothing of 50th - is absolutely ginormous.
And there's the phenomenon in video games, where, technologically, there's no technological reason why every female character can't have attractiveness that matches that of Eve from Stellar Blade or 2B from Nier: Automata, and yet devs insist on modeling many major ones after real-life actresses and capturing their looks in a rugged, gritty, realistic way like in recent God of War or Halo games, instead of sexifying them like with Eve and her (IIRC) 3 human models in Stellar Blade. Or just overtly choosing norm-defying types of characters like many of the woman characters from Sony's $100MM+ failure (as you write, sex sells; and some devs sometimes seem to have decided that not selling is worth the not sex) Concord or one of the protagonists of The Last of Us 2.
I think @Botond173 is going beyond that, I think they're arguing that "feminist-adjacent normie women" is policing US/Western media output so that the top 5% in attractiveness can't headline major works in fear of triggering "antics of the church ladies of the old days". I posit this is untrue because sex sells. Or maybe all the top 5% are having a great time being OnlyFans and influencers and don't need to slave themselves to the media industry.
Your argument of expansion of attractiveness representation is fair and I understand that, though I don't see that really being a problem that normie woman exercise their preferences. With enough economic cycles, an equilibrium will be found and like you summed it, I'm sure "someone being selected to feature in a major media product" will still land north of the median attractive person for the rest of time.
I will concede on this one. I do think that economic pressures (maybe it's cheaper to just take the real life mocap actresses and don't touch them up? idk) or economic demands (female audience don't get jealous, female audience sees more representation of their level of attractiveness, etc. means more people buy the game or at least don't disparage it) leads to video games having an expansion in allowable female character attractiveness.
But then is it really that bad? it's not "man walking into traffic while distracted by woman" level of beauty but only "man would be down to bed her no alcohol required" level of beauty. Is this some danger to society?
This doesn't match my perception of their argument, but they can speak for themselves.
It's not that normie women are exercising their preferences, though. It's creators who overtly admit to buying into a particular ideology overtly designing women in a certain way that fits their ideology.
Mocap is something else, having to do with animation, rather than scanning the person's likeness in. Mocap actors often don't look like the characters they're portraying. In terms of scanning real people in, I'm pretty sure it's more expensive to do that than just to create a model from scratch, especially the work involved in getting the specific details to match the actor just right. And certainly, the caliber of actors they're hiring (Hollywood-level actors, mostly B-list, but the occasional A-listers like Keanu Reeves or Idris Elba) are not known for being cheap - a cost that wouldn't exist at all from scratch. In the case of Stellar Blade, IIRC Shift Up hired some models who have some celebrity stature but are certainly far from Hollywood-level.
This was an argument made regularly 10-20 years ago about changing gaming. The argument was... questionable then, and today, after games have changed, it just doesn't hold any water, given the way the market has responded. Jealousy by female audiences or liking more representation or whatever simply aren't significant factors in the market for video games, particularly the mainstream AAA titles that people are mostly concerned with. Someone who believes that, by doing this, they can make their mainstream gamer-targeting game more economically successful is someone whose beliefs are defined by ideology, not by reality.
It's only a danger to society like any other media like OnlyFans or Andrew Tate are: i.e. in some crazy Six-Degrees-of-Seven-Bacon way about various downstream effects with very questionable veracity. But in terms of it being really that bad, yes, it's really that bad. Denying the creation and dissemination of greater beauty when it would cost nothing more than less, just to feed some ideological commitments, is a travesty.
Hmmmm, I think your argument differs from @Botond173 in that so far they seem to imply a normie-women-demand-driven-policing of cultural output, while you are saying that ideologically-driven-supply-policing is going on. Sure I can buy that, but can you go into a little more detail on why this is a travesty? Seems to me like it's more an irritation than some kind of societal harm. I suppose in contrast, arguments can be made that OnlyFans leads to financial exploitation of lonely men, and Andrew Tate is....also financial exploitation of lonely men.
And there is a charitable take where many of these games (TLOU, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc.) have a particular aesthetic (more photorealistic, more gritty, etc.) that benefits more from NOT having supernatural-level of beauty. When there are games that benefit from having characters that are supposed to be pretty look pretty they still look quite top 5% pretty (Dispatch, Tomb Raider, Clair Obscur, Witcher, etc.)
The loss of the sheer breadth and depth of beauty that could and would have been created by the immense amounts of resources and talent in the video game industry but for the choices we're talking about is hard to fathom. What truly are the limits of beauty that we could have created in this medium if the standard were such that the minimum acceptable standard for the least-attractive female character was "man walking into traffic while distracted by woman" level of beauty, then what would the median female protagonist of a AAA game look like right now? What about the most beautiful one? Like, we can appreciate the Eves and 2Bs of the industry for being beautiful, but we don't know what we're missing out on compared to a world where a character with Eve's looks is considered the "kinda homely NPC that hands you the occasional side quest" instead of "outlier sex symbol." All not for any good purpose, but only to feed some ideological delusions that were never on solid ground to begin with and which has been utterly discredited by reality.
There's gritty and there's gritty. Video games, until recently (and arguably still now) couldn't do true photorealism, so "gritty" tended to mean "more photorealistic." But we have an example of a photorealistic medium where people tend(ed) to have top 5% beauty - Hollywood. Often, even grittier films like, e.g. Oldboy or No Country for Old Men tend to feature actresses (and actors) who are at the very top end of the beauty spectrum. A video game like TLOU or Horizon Zero Dawn could easily feel quite believable while still having characters with, e.g. Eve-level beauty. They'd just have to also be dirtied-up, with appropriately messy clothes and such.
That these are the video games to point to, and that the standard is "top 5% pretty" for a medium aren't constrained by human biology or human existence (i.e. neither the theoretical genetic limits of human beauty nor the true real limit of real adult women who really came into existence IRL apply here) is what I think reflects the negative direction the video game industry went towards. If the basic minimum had been "top 5% pretty" with the median protagonist being "literally no human on Earth has ever looked this pretty," the world would have been a much more beautiful place.
I'm not sure if this is not also just an ideological commitment to "beauty" that goes the other way and therefore also kinda extreme.
Also, I'm not sure if the general perception of beauty in video game is skewed. I started getting ads for video games recently and I thought to myself if these female characters were transported to the real world and made more "real" a bit, they would instantly become the most attractive person around. Like even Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn who I think is the poster child for the outcry, she's fit, redhead, bright demeanor, instant top 10-5% if transported inside a train carriage in NYC during commute time.
Actors and actresses bring more than just to fill in a character. They bring their own fan base, they do press tours, they had to get hired, TV/Movies are a particular experience where it's asked that viewers don't do anything, can't interact, just fed. And in fact, even in the movies you mentioned there are critical characters that are not top end in beauty. I didn't see Oldboy (both versions) but in No Country for Old Man, I can think of the old man at the gas station with Chigurh and the coin flip, and all the way the end where the wife of Llewelyn was killed by Chigurh, there is definitely an attempt at dressing them down to be more homey, realistic level of beauty/non-beauty. Chigurh himself, yes played by the attractive Javier Bardem, but with a deliberately ugly and terrifying haircut ("When he first saw the offending cut, Bardem is said to have complained that he wouldn't get laid for two months"). There are other movies where beautifully attractive actors transform themselves into being ugly to play a role (Charlize Theron in Monster, Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder) and are beloved for it.
Games are more than just a plot and some characters, there is gameplay, there is emergent properties from game mechanics and player interactions. Not many says Minecraft characters are sexy and that's why they play it. Maybe we can think of it that attractiveness of characters is, like other aspects of any work of a video game, can also be a bar and once cleared, it's good enough and can move on to other things. TLOU definitely didn't need the characters to be top 5% pretty to sell itself in video games. TBF, I don't know, Joel is probably top 10% in terms of attractiveness as a man yeah? but his attractiveness doesn't come from just his physical appearance. I suppose attractiveness is fluid and anime/catgirl/2B "shape" is not the only way for someone to be "attractive".
Maybe! It sounds strange to say that liking beauty a lot is ideological, but I admit to being extreme in it. The longer I observe the world, the more beauty I think it could use.
I think that we're talking in top 10-5% numbers instead of "practically beyond top 0.00001%" like, e.g. the Dead or Alive girls or the aforementioned 2B/Eve, for the protagonist of a major AAA (AA?) Sony franchise is unfortunate.
Indeed, no one needs these video games to be beautiful, or to have video games at all, or to have beauty at all. I haven't played most of these games, but I'm sure, e.g. TLOU2 is a very good game, thanks to its many positive qualities that have nothing to do with the (non-)beauty of its protagonist(s). I just think the world would be a better place if these video games had been more beautiful.
Indeed, and think of all the creative, varied, distinctive, never-before-seen ways of being attractive that we could have seen in this nearly limitless medium of video games if the character-design portion of the thousands of talented devs and billions of dollars that went into AAA games had been focused on exploring just how attractive they could make their characters, instead of meeting ideological commitments about challenging beauty norms or not appealing to the male gaze or etc. Losing out on that is what I find really sad.
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