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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.
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".
Indeed. One can see just how receptive the woke were to complaints that mainstream book publishing is overwhelmingly run by women and is excluding men from being published. Why should straight men be any more receptive to complaints from the woke about visual appearances in video games?
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