Well, at first glance there's cohesive aesthetic that is applied to all the characters in the picture, as opposed to the man being in full plate armor and the woman wearing lingerie. I saw children trying to approach or address issues they simply did not have the wherewithal to understand. And I didn't see that while I was playing XC2.

And if you choose a bad one, you're probably going to need to do it with an extraordinary amount of care. I'll just say this - there are a lot of good ways to move your characters forward, and a lot of bad ones. And these characters are objectified in their designs, and then objectified again by the plot of the game by making them tools to be used. I don't think my intent was to argue about the problems of who does the 'owning' in the relationship, but of the concept of ownership of sentient life more generally. You're right, it's not about the character designs specifically, but they certainly undermine a lot of character agency (and creative goals). I'm reading that book now, so this conversations feels especially timely, but I'm not always impressed or satisfied by Wolf's approach to the subject matter.Ĭlick to shrink.I'm criticizing it for picking a theme that's extremely complicated in the real world and exploring it in a juvenile fashion, while only at points touching on the larger underlying problems inherent in such an imbalanced power structure. If anyone has reading suggestions along that line, I'd personally appreciate it. It might help loosen up some too rigid conceptions. I know it's a complicated and flawed book, but I wish more people would read something like The Beauty Myth to get an idea of just how much influence capital, culture, and time have changed our perception of what counts as healthy, beautiful, and worthwhile. Not only are they holding fast a double standard, they're cleaving to a flexible, entirely amorphous ideal and acting as if 'health' were a valid cornerstone for building that ideal up. There is a whole lot of misinformation out there about body types, the way different sexes grow and age with respect to body fat and musculature, and the way culture affects our perception of what is healthy, attractive, and normal. It's also funny how many people equate fat with an unhealthy lifestyle.

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