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Well, let's dig in to this. "Less attractive" by what metric? Why should they be attractive in the first place? Are the men ranked on being attractive? I mean yeah, Chris Evans Captain America whoo-hoo baby, but the general run of video game male first person characters?
It's a stupid fight and I don't want to get in to it. If guys want doll characters in high heels, fishnets and plunging cleavage bashing people's brains in with baseball bats, well... you do you. But it's not any realistic level of 'attractiveness'.
Here's the less attractive version of Harley Quinn, right? Oh my gosh, the new version doesn't have her arse swinging like a pendulum, this is an affront!
It's a silly thing to get worked up over. Guys want the exaggerated boobs'n'butt, sure, let them have it. But it's not "less attractive versus more attractive", it's porn attractive.
Can you name many conventionally unattractive male game protagonists from major franchises?
I went down a mental list, and all I could come up with was Mario, who barely has human proportions anyway. The other one was Link in the classic Zelda games, but that was fixed by Ocarina of Time (one of the developers’ wives famously asked for them to ditch the bulbous nose and the rest is history.
You have a wide variety of looks for male protagonists, but they usually fall into the pretty boy camp (Link, Cloud, 9S in Nier Automata) or they’re more classically masculine (Simon Belmont, Snake, Chris Redfield), or they’re somewhere in between, bishounen who project some masculine energy (see Alucard and basically all of Iga-era Castlevania, or brother Nier in Replicant). This is the way it always was and I haven’t seen much deviation.
Women have frequently fallen into the supermodel camp. You have Lara Croft, Bayonetta, Samus, 2B and the old Harley Quinn as classic examples. I prefer petite and/or cute, personally, so women like Lara Croft and 2B don’t do much for me, but, say, Zelda from Skyward Sword does and a lot of female characters from RPGs fall into that camp (a recent example would be Xenoblade 3, with Mio, and there’s a steady selection of Fire Emblem and Atelier characters over the decades that work fine for me). So my tastes have always been a bit underrepresented. Suffice to say masculine or chunky characters aren’t that popular with guys, and there’s room for guys with my taste but they’ll rarely be the only protagonist in a game outside select RPGs, which is fine. Heck, even Saber from Fate, who would realistically be muscular, doesn’t look like it.
I don’t play many AAA games, so I’m mostly unaffected by the trends I’ve seen. But the trend seems to be that every attractive female character is made less attractive by conventional standards, and every new female character is either ordinary or unattractive, which has never been the case with guys and seems to continue not to be the case. By what rubric in film, television, or popular art could you make the case that Aloy from the second Horizon game, or that protagonist from the latest Fable trailer, or the Forspoken protagonist, or that super-masculine woman from The Last of Us 2 is attractive to men in the general population? Maybe there’s some art from certain periods with large women, but that’s always seemed to be a result of the artist’s proclivities, not overall trends. I don’t recall seeing masculine women being all that popular with men in any period in history. Why have new characters who look like Samus seemingly become so rare? And why have things seemingly tilted away from those female signifiers of beauty, as in the case of Harley Quinn?
How many modern male characters have seen the equivalent treatment? I don’t even recall many recent male protagonists, but does, say, the guy from the latest Assassin’s Creed adhere less to conventional male standards? What about the guy on the art of Baulder’s Gate 3, who at least looks like he fits into the bishounen trope? What about the new Prince of Persia protagonist, who, haircut aside, just looks very fit, the Simon Belmont type?
Regardless, it looks like the principles of female character design have changed, where the principles of male character design have changed more incrementally if at all. I think that’s what people are latching on to.
Screw that, I'd just be happy if anyone could name a merely average-looking male game protagonist from a major franchise.
The protagonists from L4D are regular looking slice-of-life type people. Last few GTA's as well.
But to your point I did have to rack my brain for a few minutes to come up with those.
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Again, Mario is my go-to for that. Can’t think of a single other example.
If you count Emil as a protagonist in Nier Replicant, that could work, but he doesn’t even look human so would that count?
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Kratos and Agent 47 would both be ugly to most attractive young women.
As someone who knows nothing about this subject in general, I had to look these characters up. They may not be handsome, but both are tall, muscular fighting men still. Not exactly average-looking.
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I don't think Harley is beautiful, but then "vacuum sealed into her costume" isn't appealing to me. I think the character is unappealing in general because of the whole back story, and then Margot Robbie in the movie version of Suicide Squad just sealed the deal about "this is ugliness" for me. But I'm old enough that I think tattoos and dyed hair are signifiers of trashy, not hawtness.
Like I said, I like cute, petite women, and frilly costumes help, so Harley’s classic design does nothing for me, and her persona is repugnant. That’s my taste, but I get that I’m not in the majority.
That said, I do think her curves are in line with what might be considered conventionally attractive, and her face is probably closer to that as well in the old games.
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By most metrics both the audience and the people doing it would recognize.
Are we doing merited impossibility now?
That's Harley Quinn's character in a nutshell; psychotic pixie nightmare girl.
Which is not reality, and if you want the blow-up doll version of that in a video game, okay go for it. But it's not beautiful, it's not what real women look like, and from the outside for women, it's a tedious trope.
Like I said, male and female sexuality is different. I'm not unsympathetic to guys going "my fantasy wank material is not appealing in this new version" about their traditional games, Lord knows I've whined about changes to my favourite materials in media. But games companies have to expand the market to make money, which means trying to sell to women as well.
Personally, I don't think games like Suicide Squad are appealing to women, but there may well be some women out there who like those kind of shoot-em-ups. So the game studios want to reel them in by giving them characters to identify with, like Harley, and that makes turning Harley from the blow-up doll to something more appealing to women a necessity. Again, I wouldn't take Suicide Squad for free because the concept insults me: oh yeah, go ahead and piss on Flash's corpse, that's so mature. But I'm carrying over my preferences from comics where I like the Justice League and don't like the idea of "so let's kill the League", even more "let's kill the League in demeaning ways because old-fashioned notions of honour and dignity are to be ridiculed".
I'm way more on board with the criticisms of having Lex Luthor be the voice of SJW by admiring the Amazons for being free of toxic masculinity. Those kinds of changes are truly worth fighting over, not cosmetic changes to Harley's butt so it's less jiggly.
Also, what the hell did they do to Amanda Waller? She's supposed to be a hefty lass, not this pop-eyed skinny bint.
If there are fifty changes all of which makes the game worse to varying degrees, there may be only a few of them which are blatantly, inarguably, provably bad, but a whole lot of them which make the game a little worse but where a crafty debater can say "are you sure? You just aren't looking at it from the right angle." But the game becomes worse anyway, because all of these little changes with plausible deniability add up..
Don't women usually pick attractive characters in games? I believe there was a reference to that in one of the earlier discussions.
I'll admit that for female-oriented media, there are equally unrealistic expectations for men: can you dance? 😁
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Supposedly that specific black actress has some form of connection to SBI and that's why she has been in so many games lately. She's also in many of the games that had the "female attractiveness change."
If she's alternate-earth version of Amanda Waller, okay. But she's not canon The Wall to me. And I shouldn't poke fun at the eyes, but they are very obvious.
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