1. Attractiveness, Feminine Traits, Sex Appeal and "The Male Gaze"
Gaming as a hobby both traditionally and currently is an overwhelmingly male market. This is simply a undisputed but hated reality to the woke ideologues. As a consequence of this it is natural that most female characters in gaming were designed from the perspective of what would appeal to a male audience.
This in turn naturally leads to looking at what traits men find desirable in women in the real world and then recreating idealized or sometimes exaggerated versions of these traits in the character designs. Hence you get the stereotypical scantily clad, curvaceous, attractive, large breasted character oozing sex appeal.
It should be noted that this is not something isolated to gaming, you can see the same traits for example in fantasy novels and their media adaptations, Conan, Red Sonya etc...
You also see these things traditionally in degree in western comics, sci-fi shows, anime and manga and essentially any media that is predominantly consumed by men.
This has been the status quo in gaming to various degrees since its inception, as a natural consequence of mostly being developed by men with the intention of being consumed and therefore appeal to other men.
Then something strange starts to happens in the 2010's: Feminism (a subset of woke ideology) starts to rear its ugly head. The idea in feminism is that overly sexualized female characters in media present an unrealistic beauty/body shape standard in the minds of impressionable men that no "real" woman could possibly live up to.
This is further compounded by believing that these fictional women exist solely to satisfy the sexual fantasies of men, that they are essentially walking talking sex dolls with no agency or purpose than to titilize and tantalize the prepubescent sexual appetites of men. This thinking then leads naturally to viewing such representations of women as offensive to womanhood itself.
To top this off they also believe that these negative depictions of women poison the minds of men to think of all women as simply walking sex objects without their own thoughts or agency, like they are some sort of non-human "other" that exists solely for the sexual gratification of men.
Realistically I would argue that these designs are a consequence of the evolutionary sexual preferences and preferences of feminine attractiveness in men's psyche and that naturally when trying to appeal to an overwhelmingly male market it would make sense to tap into and appeal to these preferences, while the feminists have it backwards and believe that these preferences only exist through a mechanism of social constructionism, almost a "monkey see, monkey do" approach.
In other words the only reason men have these exaggerated preferences is because they consume media that portrays these as normal and desirable in the feminist view. A truly backward approach in my mind that ignores millions of years of evolution.
So now through the lense of feminism we have identified the "problem" with these kinds of designs, and therefore their moral failings. How do we then fix the problem and make the world a better place in the process? In the minds of the woke feminists, we need to counter these designs and create something more "realistic". Then we can push this out into the world and it will change the minds and preferences of men in what they find attractive in women!
So having these "problematic" traits in female characters in media is no longer just an eye roll moment or a chuckle at the silly things men like in fantasy women. Now it is a moral failing to have a character with these traits and we must right the ship and move things in the opposite direction to have a positive impact on the world via purposeful social engineering attempts.
It is important that we understand this mindset and the reasoning behind it if we are to get anywhere in understanding the current shifts in design philosophy in western gaming regarding female character designs.
So suddenly large breasts are bad, female characters must have modest, small or flat chests. Female characters cannot have hour glass figures, large asses, cannot be curvy or overly sexual. Cannot have large lips or dress in revealing clothing.
This is done under the guise of "saving us from ourselves" and "making the world a better place for women!" but deep down psychologically it comes from a place of jealously and resentment. In the sexual marketplace, average or unattractive women will do anything to try to get a leg up on the competition and improve their perceived place in the attractiveness hierarchy so this is one way that attempts to achieve that.
In a more simple way: If we can brainwash men with social engineering propaganda then they will find us more attractive and the genuinely attractive women as less desirable, then we will have increased our chances of finding a better mate.
You can see this most prominently with redesigns of existing or classic female characters from older titles/franchises. The female character is normally "updated for modern sensibilities", which is code for "made less attractive and less sexually appealing to men".
You can see it with Lara Croft, Mortal Kombat women as prime examples but there are likely hundreds of other very obvious ones that other members of the thread can easily point out. You see keeping the characters as is would be "sinful" a moral failing to the utopian ideal for society so they simply must be changed and updated to be more "modern" and less "backwards".
This is a huge sign of a "woke woman" in videogames. We also see this with new character designs for new franchises/IPs or titles. Characters are purposely designed to tick the checkboxes of what is considered acceptable to this ideology and then sent out to the world to attempt to spread their world view on the unclean and unsuspecting masses.
So while having a female character with small breasts for example or who is somewhat less sexualized doesn't automatically make them a woke character design, in fact there are even examples of these throughout gaming that predate the current woke ideology.
One example where it becomes undeniable is when a classic/existing somewhat sexy female character is redesigned in a remaster, re-release or sequel to a long running franchise and has all of their charm, fun and sexyness of their design sucked out of them to be replaced by a woke imposter wearing their rotting corpse. Examples of course include Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat as mentioned above.
In these cases it is completely self evident that the changes were made to fit the woke world view and for woke reasoning to the point where it becomes essentially impossible for anyone to credibly debate it or argue against it.
For new characters/new IPs it becomes a little more difficult to ascertain as we don't have an existing non woke version of the character to compare and contrast the changes.
A couple of dead giveaways are when a feminine, traditionally beautiful, somewhat sexy model is used as the basis of a character in a game (i.e: They are contracted by the studio to use their likeness and scan their face/body for use in the game) and instead of the character actually looking like the model, the creators in a bid to hit their woke checkboxes mentioned above will purposefully and willfully make the character look less attractive, less sexy, reduce breast or ass size etc.. compared to the real model.
The examples of this are endless but a couple of recent noteworthy titles that do this would Horizon series, Mass Effect Andromeda and The Last of Us 2. In Mass Effect's case the designers, still not happy with how ugly they had made the female lead, released a day one patch to make her face even more unattractive than they already had done (I shit you not). In The Last Of Us 2, the lead character's love interest had her breasts massively reduced in size compared to the real life model that used for the character, who was actually quite busty.
These decisions were not made by chance or mistake, by ineptitude or a lack of talent on the part of the modellers. These decisions instead were made willfully, purposefully to further the woke agenda. That is what makes those characters and it is safe to say other female character's in those titles/series "woke".
Even outside of those cases where we have an obvious contrast between the real life models and the in game rendered character, what we see currently is a trend away from the feminine, attractive, obviously sexy, curvy, busty characters that appeal to men and instead we see a push towards less attractive, less feminine, less curvy, less sexy, less busty character designs. These decisions are again not accidents or incompetence but purposefully made with the sole purpose of pushing the woke agenda.
This is a part of what people mean when they say that almost all of western gaming is infested with woke ideology and why people are being instantly turned off by the current trend of mostly female main characters in modern western gaming and automatically assuming that 9 times out of 10 the character is designed that way purposefully due to woke reasoning.
2. The Trans lobby
In point 1 above I covered the trend away from sexy character designs in general for women in games and the trend to towards less attractive, less sexy and less well endowed designs.
Another facet of the design process that I purposely left out for use here is the "trans issue". There has been a purposeful and guided push away from the feminine when it comes to character designs.
When I say this I'm not necessarily or solely talking about things like breast size but rather a push towards more manly or predominantly male facial/body features in character designs.
What you see are things like thicker, larger, fuller jaw lines, more prominent brows etc.. in terms of facial features while in terms of body shape we have things like taller, heavier women with large muscular physiques, broad shoulders, large backs, wide (normally flat or mostly flat) chests.
This pushes female character design into a more androgynous direction and from a character design perspective tries to blur the line between traditionally masculine and feminine physical traits.
So you might ask: "Why is this happening?". The answer again goes back to woke reasoning and their ideology. In the minds of the social contructionist, forms of media don't simply exist as a form of entertainment and escapism to be consumed, instead in their minds: every piece of media is instead an attempt to shape the minds of those who consume it and as a consequence of that shape society itself, popular perception and social norms.
"Ok..." you might say, but to what end? What is the end goal that they are trying to achieve? The answer is trans acceptance. It is obvious at a glance for most people to tell when someone is either a biological man or a woman almost every time, a big indicator of how we can identify this is based on physical traits, bone structure, musculature, facial features, anatomy etc...
So to make it "easier" for trans women to "pass" as real women the woke designers must blur the lines between what man and a woman are, in terms of their physical traits and appearance. The hope is to shape the minds of the audience sub consciously into accepting trans women as "real women". They do this by trying to muddy up the perception and understanding of what a woman is in the first place.
Examples of this can be seen in combination with point 1 above in the process of making woman characters appear less attractive, you can especially see it where an existing character design is feminine and sexy and then an updated version is released where the character is given more male style physical traits and facial structures to appear less feminine.
We also see the same thing where real life models are scanned into a game and have their features altered to be more masculine compared to their natural look, which results in more androgynous looking characters.
A prime example of this phenomenon is Abby from The Last of Us 2, she is such a clear cut example that not much else needs to be said.
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