Character design and characters

As some of you may know by now, I consider myself a skeptic when it comes to character designs, especially "sexy" character designs. You guys know the ones: chicks with huge breasts (DD cup and up), long legs, peach shaped rear ends, the works. Guys with toned, slender bodies, natural tans, feathery hair, that kind of thing. Now, I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify something here: I am by no means pulling any third wave feminist mumbo jumbo here, this blog entry is by no means a critique of the industry's tendency to design and market these kinds of character designs. Instead, I just want to ask a simple question: What is the line between a justified 'sexy' character design, and when the design is just gratuitous?

Because I KNOW that the three or four ladies who are reading this blog are gonna be having a fit over the large amounts of sexism that's bound to be found on this entry, I provide for them the beefcake.

Plenty has been written about sexualized video game characters: from Dr Nerdlove's study of male privilege in video game character design, to several blog posts decrying the sexism of female character design, to several news articles and academia research on the effects that playing sexualized characters has on the female psyche. And, let's be fair here, they are not wrong. Dr Nerdlove makes a solid point about the discrepancy between how male characters are designed versus how female characters are designed. His stance on this discrepancy, as well as Male Privilege on Nerd Culture, is provided here: http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2011/11/nerds-and-male-privilege/.

Now, let's be honest here: video game characters vary a LOT in design. You have:

Cute and Anime-ish

Super Realistic

Adorably cartoony

Realistically proportioned

And looking like Rob Liefeld was given twenty bucks to design them.

The wide variety in which a character is designed helps set the mood for the game's atmosphere. For example, you have Uncharted, a realistic adventure game, and so characters look as real as possible. And you also have Pokemon, a cute adventure story, so characters are designed as cute and charming. Characters are designed for the story, to fit with the story AND the world the story takes place.

But, sometimes there are designs that, well, anger some people. These are the people that look at a female character (yes, almost always female, sad to say), and see nothing but problematics and triggers. They see unrealistic breast sizes, legs that are too long, clothing more fit for the oldest profession than a warrior or a thief, etc. And then, of course, they compare these characters to the male counterparts, how well dressed they are, how their clothing is more practical, etc.

For example, let's take a good look at (Classic, as in pre reboot) Lara Croft. Lara is a sex symbol for video games, mostly because of the way she dresses. Her most iconic outfit? A tank top, hot pants, and boots. This depiction has had many people up in arms, because they felt that the sexualization was undermining her heroics. It's a little ridiculous, to me at least, to have a sentence like "Lara goes in, guns blazing, while her well endowed chest shows no signs of a good support bra." be anything negative. I mean, come on, let's be logical here: this is a fantasy. Lara Croft is a world traveling tomb raider who regularly goes up against giant statues, dinosaurs, dangerous animals, terrorists, zombies (or any of their equivalents), and so forth, and some people are complaining that she does all that looking like this:

You know, Lara is awesome. She's a one woman army, she packs a pair of guns and uses them with jaw dropping precision (in real life, this is, at best, highly impractical). She gets the job done, and she gets it done superbly. She has gone face to face with a T Rex and won! Lara is a three dimensional character, with her own distinct personality, a history, motivation, goals, with the autonomy to make her own decisions and the agency to act them out. And yet this is not enough for some people, because the fact that she looks like THAT is "demeaning" to them. And to make a point, they create a fan made character, Lawrence Croft, to "reverse the position and make the male gamer feel how girls feel playing Lara." Here he is:

Designed by DeviantArt user Ulysses0302. His DeviantArt is here: http://ulysses0302.deviantart.com/art/Waterfall-Glade-113589378

I would be lying if I said I was not at all bothered by this character design at first. I felt many things: I felt angry at this perceived attempt at lecturing, I felt bothered by the way this character was presented. But lately I got to thinking, "is that the artist's fault? Are the critics right?" More on that later.

Now, we need to face a fact here: sometimes a character is designed to be sexy, first and foremost. It's not a question of the design being sexualized for the sake of having the character be sexy, but a case of a character's sexiness being their defining  physical trait. And we have to be honest here, it's not always a good thing. Sometimes, this sexualization comes off as ridiculous. Sometimes it's a little hard to take a character seriously specifically because of the way they are designed. I am of the opinion that this is a bad thing IF the character was to be taken seriously. For example, this is Tina Armstrong from Dead or Alive 5:

Tina is supposed to be a professional wrestler. This is Chyna, a real life professional wrestler (from when she was actually a wrestler and not a porn star):

See the difference? Muscle mass, a toned body, these are the marks of someone who fights with their body. Tina looks like a model. Yes, she fights in the game, but her appearance is that of a model. This is a negative if you are depending on the character's appearance to heighten, or at least add to, the fantasy. And then, of course, we can't forget that  the game developers made Tina's father, Bass, actually LOOK like a wrestler. Here he is:

I'm pretty sure Tina gets her looks from her mom.

But, does that make Tina less bad ass? Are we so focused on looks that we overlook character? 

I am reminded of a game that looks very fun, Dragon's Crown. I haven't played it yet, no money for it. But I remember like it was only yesterday when I first heard about it. People were talking about this game for two years before it came out. Was it because the game was going to be THAT good? Actually, it was because two of the playable characters, the Witch and the Amazon, looked like this:

Two whole years, ladies and gentlemen. Two whole years and the biggest topic about the game was that TWO of the playable characters looked like something some 13 year old kid with talent and a raging boner would dream up. And you know what? I have something to say about that. See, here's the thing: this game is a fantasy game, where you control one of six characters through many, many fights against dragons, skeletons, zombies, and other kinds of enemies (I looked it up). ALL the characters are either beefed up super men, or women with huge, unrealistic tits. Guess what? This is a VIDEO GAME! It's not SUPPOSED to be real, it's supposed to be escapism! Want real? Go play outside! 

"Oh, but this is harmful to women!" No. Want to know what's harmful to women? Not calling the police whenever you hear someone beat his wife. Asking a girl what she was wearing the night she got raped. Seeing your friend walk away with a total stranger while drunk and doing jack shit about it. THAT is what's harmful to women. Not some skinny girls on the Disney Channel, not some photo shopped model on a magazine, not some anorexic teen singer with only a song to reach the number 11 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 as her claim to fame, and certainly not some video game character with huge tits. Our apathy is what's harmful to women. It's when we don't give a flying fuck about people that we harm them the most.

Again, I go back to Lawrence Croft. Again, I felt uncomfortable about his design. Was that the artist's fault? Is he supposed to re design Lawrence so that he can fit into my ideal of what a male character should look like? No. See, my reaction? It's on me. I was allowing Lawrence's character design to paint my view of him as a character. Once I reached this epiphany, I decided to give Lawrence the chance he deserves. I looked up the art that Ulysses0302 made of him, and honestly? I admit he looks cool, it's just that he's not the kind of character I like playing as. If Lawrence ever got his game, I wouldn't buy it, but I wouldn't ask anyone not to buy it either. 

But does that make me a bad person? Well, it makes me neither worse, nor better, than someone who refuses to play Dragon's Crown because of the Amazon character, or someone who refuses to try out Scarlet Blade because of the character designs . However, if I were to go to Ulysses0302 and DEMAND that he make Lawrence less campy, that would, indeed, make me a bad person, because then I'd be trying to control the way an artist makes his art.

If I don't want to play Lawrence Croft because I don't like his character design, guess what? That's on me. It's all on me and no one else, ESPECIALLY not the game designer. It's a question of my personal taste, my prejudices, and my perspective. And yes, this is a bad thing, because as far as I know, I'm missing out on the next Uncharted. And know what? It's the same for everything and everyone else. Don't like a character design? Fine, don't play the game. Want to play the game? Then either learn to at least tolerate the designs, or find something else to play.

There is a lot to say about what entertains us, and how we seek entertainment. And there is a LOT to say about sexism in video games, the game industry, and gaming culture, so much so, in fact, that no one blog entry can even begin to cover it all. There are some things that are just wrong, and it's clear as crystal why they are wrong. But character designs? This is more of a gray area to me, with no right or wrong answer. And it's a gray area because personal tastes play a big part in how one sees a character. There is no black and white here. An artist has the right to design a character to his/her own liking, and a gamer has the right to decide what he/she likes and doesn't. And honestly, I think that complaining about how a character looks isn't going to get us anywhere.

In the end, all I have to say is this. A character should be defined not by looks, but by what makes him/her a character. Judge the character by actions, because it is our actions that define who we really are. Focusing on looks just makes us superficial.