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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 agree not every woman in vidya has to be goonbait, however:
has to be some sort of anti-record in this regard, unlike the first game I don't think there's a single conventionally-attractive female character in that one, like you cannot tell me Aphrodite of II is not a man's face stapled onto a woman's figure. Even so, I was still a big fan of the first game and, while definitely another example of uh, female empowerment, it didn't bother me much... until in some Xth run I hit a Dionysus encounter, and something clicked for me.
Now, obvious over-the-top safe(?)horny parody is obvious, you don't even see Dionysus often in the second game because he's no longer a "main" boon giver and you can only meet him once a run in his literal goon cave, but consider: can you imagine a distaff counterpart here, even as a blatant parody? Can you imagine say Aphrodite in full bikini bimbo mode, with her divine knockers front and center? Somehow I don't think the parody defense would've saved any shred of the designers' skin from being flogged on xitter at every occasion. It's just tribal shit. Pandering to the male gaze is shunned in a way pandering to the female
headcanongaze never was and never is.While Rose is not a great example of enshittification (IMO she looks alright, Belmonts broadly are brick shithouses anyway), and full-on goonerbrain is its own kind of insanity, I think that people designing stronk women like her or gestures at Hades II know exactly (or at least intuitively) what they're doing, and lambasting them for it is fair game. Castlevania specifically was a stupid choice of flex considering the more ingrained (and attractive) associations fans are likely to have upon hearing "Castlevania female protagonist". I try to retain my lack of interest in the culture war around vidya, but as the saying goes, the culture war sure seems interested in me.
Man I know so many real women who have vastly squarer or more masculine jawlines than this character, if that is really the ‘issue’. The reminds me of the controversy over the Cora character in Mass Effect Andromeda, whom BioWare inexplicably decided to give the Full Karen haircut (which itself was apparently reactionary ‘queerbaiting’ because they made her straight). Again, people said she looked like a man, even though in the real world many biological women have faces like this.
Traditionally, cartoon heroes have been exageratedly masculine or feminine. So charitably speaking, this is probably part of the reason some of these characters seem off. But it still raises the question of "why?"
You raised the issue of realism, but I think this is more of an excuse than an actual reason. In many of these games, the female characters are uglified but NOT the male characters. Also, in some cases of uglification there is a female human actress who is very attractive, far more attractive than the character based on her. These circumstances strongly suggest that there is something different going on than a quest for realism.
One of the earliest examples of this I can find is Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect 2, who was based on Yvonne Strahovski and canonically was genetically engineered to be perfect, yet somehow looks significantly worse than Strahovski. It's close, so the most charitable case I can make is that they started with a picture of Strahovski and changed it without recognizing that those changes made her worse, and/or engine/artificial lighting constraints magnified the issue. But Strahovski isn't perfect (her face is oddly wide, for one) and they certainly could have worked to improve it rather than the end result they got.
Less charitably, BioWare in 2010 was probably decently progressive: no M-M romances until ME3 (some F-F, but that's as much fanservice as it is catering to progressive beliefs), but Jacob was apparently planned to be an M-M option in ME2, so this may have been an early "can't make her perfect for the male gaze" despite her struggles with being designed to be exactly that serving as one of her major character arcs.
ME2 was debatably the last good game BioWare ever created, so that may have been some of the cracks showing before the steep descent to the depths of Veilguard.
I am less than convinced that Mass Effect 2, the game which famously and gratuitously focuses the camera directly on Miranda’s ass almost every time she speaks, was made by people who wanted to avoid the male gaze. Seriously, if you’ve forgotten or if you never played the game, look up a compilation of her on-ship conversations. It’s outright comical. The idea that Miranda “catsuit” Lawson is an example of uglifying female characters is just totally ludicrous.
That game comes firmly from the upfront and open “sex sells” era, it was a period where the pressure from major publishers was to make the female characters hotter and put them in less clothing. I would note that Mass Effect 3 is still very much under this pressure: just look at what they did to Ashley Williams. Publishers did not switch to the modern prudishness until about 2015-16, post-gamergate, and it was a sharp change.
It's a fair point, but nevertheless I have to notice that Miranda Lawson, the genetically engineered perfect woman, is notably uglier than the actress they modeled her off of.
And they don't fix it in 3 with slightly better graphics technology, either: if anything she takes one step further towards Michael Jackson.
It could have just been a miss on design that they didn't have time to fix, but it would be interesting to learn if there were conflicting interests at BioWare at the time. The person designing the character probably isn't the person picking camera angles and animations for the cutscenes.
Ashley is a good counterexample, but it also raises the point that making attractive characters in the engine is possible, because they did a good job with her, so what happened with Miranda? I wonder if the fact that she's non-white changed things. Now granted, she's also one of the most racist characters in the series (not that that's that much, but it's enough for some pearl-clutching), but again, the character designer isn't writing the dialogue.
But the reason Gamergate was so explosive is that a lot of those pieces were already in place: it wasn't that Gamergate was a starting point for progressives to make their way into video games, it was that there were so many there already that when the Zoe Quinn flashpoint set things off and made people reveal their true colors, the battle lines were instantly everywhere. Many of the people who would be fighting on Twitter in 2014 were working in the industry in the preceding years.
Publishers were setting direction, but lower-level workers were making decisions too.
I think Miranda was very much a case of design and/or tech failures meaning Bioware didn't achieve the desired look for her, rather than them actively deciding to make her look plainer
I think this is totally possible, but I do also want to reinforce that if this was "we wanted her to look maximally attractive, but screwed up", it wasn't a decision that was fixed in Mass Effect 3. Miranda was redesigned, but still looks worse than Yvonne Strahovski: I'd argue worse than her ME2 iteration, though that might just be "coming even closer to the uncanny valley".
Many other characters get significant redesigns, most notably Ashley Williams, who I do find significantly more attractive in 3. So if it's a design failure in 2, it has to be paired with a second design failure in 3: absolutely still within the realm of possibility, but at least an unusual coincidence worth noting.
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I don't know about this particular game, but I've seen comparison of male and female characters which make me think that the "tech failure" argument is generally invalid.
In other words, I've seen cases where (1) the male actor for the game is handsome and the character based on him is similarly handsome; and (2) the female actor for the game is beautiful but the character based on her is noticeably less attractive.
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