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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.
I wouldn't call it "learned".
There's a certain brand of woke woman that just genuinely does not enjoy seeing attractive women in media, and they would prefer for them to be unattractive where possible. I believe that this is a genuine, pre-political, pre-reflective reaction on their part (you should generally assume that other people's emotional reactions are genuine as a matter of charity). The question is why they feel this way.
If you ask them, they'll usually say something like "because those sexed up female character designs are objectifying, and I want men to stop objectifying women". But this answer is unsatisfactory for multiple reasons, both because it seems to be based on a mistaken assumption (that there is a mythical type of "authentic" relationship between people that is based on the Intrinsic Properties Of Their Souls rather than what they offer to each other in quantifiable terms), and because the revealed preference of many women (including many wokes!) indicates that they enjoy being "objectified" to a certain extent.
I imagine that the phenomenon is explained at least partially by the general leftist hatred of inequality and competition; it's just being applied to intra-female sexual competition in this case, rather than the more traditional domain of economics. If there are no attractive women, then all women can be equal in their ugliness. If all big budget games/shows/movies were contractually obligated to include at least one billionaire character who was virtuous and heroic and admirable (in the same way that audiences generally expect female characters to be conventionally attractive), and there were any leftists left who still made class analysis their primary focus, then we could imagine such leftists getting similarly frustrated and demanding that media start including more heroic poor people to balance things out.
Is it that they don't like seeing attractive women in media, or they don't like the idea of MEN seeing attractive women in media? Certainly I get the impression that if there's a movie made for women which contains an attractive lead actress (perhaps the Barbie movie?), it's far less of a problem for woke women.
I think this second issue plays a role, which is part of the reason video games are such a touchy subject. They are perceived as being made for men.
I think both factor into it.
I suppose it could just be as simple as "I don't want (unworthy autistic) men to be able to view images of attractive women". That would be needlessly vindictive and petty of them though, so out of charity I'm trying to find alternative explanations.
FWIW, I think it's "I don't want men to get inexpensive female gratification or validation."
I am always skeptical of evolutionary "just so stories," but I think that in the ancestral environment (as today) women were utterly dependent on male provisioning and protection for survival. (It's an interesting thought experiment to ask what would happen to women in 2026 if men disappeared. Almost certainly 99% would be dead within a few months.) Fortunately for women, men are very desirous of female validation and gratification. So not only do women not starve to death, they are given an exalted position in society.
But I think that instinctively, women perceive it as a threat to their very lives if men get inexpensive female gratification or validation. Here's an example of what I mean: Suppose a woman is hired by a male-owned pornography producer and is paid $200 to do some nastiness on camera; the resulting video is sent all over the world to be downloaded and appreciated by men for a few dollars each, if that. Almost all women get extremely upset by this. "objectification! exploitation!" they scream. By contrast, suppose there is a female OnlyFans producer who makes millions of dollars a year from desperate men who get naked pictures of her and text with call center workers who they think are this OF girl. By and large, women have much less of a problem with the situation, even though it still clearly involves both objectification and exploitation. Objectification + woman makes lots of money = fine. Objectification + woman makes very little money = bad.
Anyway, I think this principle makes sense from an evolutionary perspective and seems to fit pretty well with women's behavior.
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