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A new wave of outrage is circulating on Twitter. Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is being criticized for Rose Belmont being insufficiently attractive. Hades II was also dredged up as an example of a game with unattractive characters in the same style, prompting the lead artist of the latter to clarify she wasn't responsible for Castlevania.
I personally do not think every woman in a videogame has to be designed as goon fuel, like Aerith and Tifa in the remake, 2B or half the cast of Overwatch. What surprises me is the ferocity with which the supporters of Hades and BC defend the artwork and decry the label of "safe horny" (which, as I understand, means technically, but not viscerally, attractive).
Hypothesis 1: they sincerely prefer this style and cannot understand why anyone would not like it. Maybe it's a learned preference.
Hypothesis 2: it's a form of "every woman is a 10" defense. They cannot say they wanted to have more diverse levels of attractiveness in games, because they implicitly agree that attractiveness can be ranked by saying it, and agreeing to this is very chud-coded.
Hypothesis 3: because some of the hecklers said the women in both games look trans, they cannot backtrack without losing face, because this would mean agreeing that transwomen are less attractive.
My X feed decided to drop a tsunami of culture warring on me after I (rather disinterestedly) hit like on a few posts about the Hades 2 debacle.
My general opinion is that I could not give less of a shit if I tried. Sure, all else being equal, I'd prefer that a videogame have eye candy than not, but I have never been remotely tempted to mix gooning and gaming. On a Likert scale, I'd put down a weakly disapprove when a video game makes the protagonists uglier than the mocap actors they're based on (uh, TLOU 2 and that game with robotic dinosaurs, neither of which I've played?), but it's a homeopathic dose of fucks given.
If someone wants titillation, the options are endless. Hentai games certainly don't shy away from the Male Gaze™, and the Chinese pioneer finding the distinction between NSFW and SFW, or at least they find the grey area where they won't get deplatformed. There are mods, someone's going to finetune DLSS 5 to exclusively enlarge badonka-donks soon enough. The market for attractive pixels is about as close to perfectly competitive as anything gets: near-zero marginal cost, plus a customer base that has never once been accused of hiding its preferences.
I can be annoyed that a restaurant I spotted while hungry is vegan, but I really wouldn't have to go out of my way to find a more palatable alternative.
I'd go so far as to say that there isn't any grand conspiracy to Erase Conventional Beauty Standards - at best/worse some companies are disproportionately staffed by people with taste that differs from the average straight man. By which I mean they have a large number of trans or queer people on staff. Some of it is definitely the product of ideology, I think the degree is overstated.
Far be it for me to dictate what people care about it, I just find the amount of burning passion for the topic perplexing. I suppose there worse hobbies.
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