Topic: More sexism in Smash Bros!!!

[Inccubus]

This alternate costume for Shulk is completely impractical for combat it is BLATANTLY SEXIST towards men by sexualizing a fictional character!!

[X]

My primary concern is how he's able to sport a sword on his back without a strap-on. Talk about lazy. That and his boxers are looking a bit too tight 

[Dracula9]

Dear diary, OP was cool today.

[Inccubus]

My primary concern is how he's able to sport a sword on his back without a strap-on. Talk about lazy. That and his boxers are looking a bit too tight 

At least it's consistent with the original game. ...lol, strap-on. Dirty X.

[uzo]

Now where did I put my bingo card again?...

[Shiroi Koumori]

You left it with Jorge...

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

LOL this one?

[X]

Yep, he's still borrowing it 

[Dracula9]

To this day, after seeing it many a time, I still have no idea if that bingo card is meant to be serious or sarcastic.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

It's serious to me.
And I posted it.

Quite often, the counterpoints displayed against a more inclusive behavior in games fall somewhere within the bingo card.

[beingthehero]

GET BACK IN THE KITCHEN, JORGE

[Inccubus]

I still have a problem reconciling the idea of arguing that a woman should be able to wear whatever she wants without risk of harassment and then turning around to harass a game designer for the choice of attire given to a fictional woman because it is assumed that the designer is a man.
At best that is disingenuous and at worst straight up hypocrisy.

[Dracula9]

Quite often, the counterpoints displayed against a more inclusive behavior in games fall somewhere within the bingo card.

Ahhhh, that makes sense. Still, there are times I really want to play the male counterpoint card in gaming/pop culture/etc., but always hold back because I know exactly how that's going to play out. Don't know if that counts as male privilege on my part for occasionally feeling that side of the argument (and I don't think it should, since half the problem with the sexism debate is the male half gets swept under the rug; there's definitely more on the female half, but the male half gets treated as nonexistant half the time). But anyway, I'm getting serious in a joke thread.

I still have a problem reconciling the idea of arguing that a woman should be able to wear whatever she wants without risk of harassment and then turning around to harass a game designer for the choice of attire given to a fictional woman because it is assumed that the designer is a man.
At best that is disingenuous and at worst straight up hypocrisy.

This is exactly the way I look at it. And it's also the chief reason I very rarely complain about sexualized female characters/outfits in gaming. If a real chick has the freedom of choice, why can't a fake one? The principle should stand regardless of whether it's a real person or not, just to hold the standard.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Problem is, a woman in the real world is her own person.
A woman in the game world has been designed by someone else (whether it's a man or a woman).

The people who designed such a woman, often due to lazy writing, pandering to the audience, through their own narrow-minded view of the subject, or other factors I cannot think of at the moment, will paint the character in a non-inclusive light, as either 'eye candy', or if an npc, due to the entire team designating the person as 'fodder' (GTA prostitute, AC whore, Hitman Stripper) or even 'background gore' (prostitute corpse in an alley, AC 'checkpoint' prostitute murder victim, etc.).

It happens a hell of a lot more with female characters than it does with males.  I'm not saying to stop it altogether, but scenario writers & designers need to stop being lazy and come up with more creative methods of showing their crapsack world or 'love to hate them' villains.  It's very often 'kill the useless wench', etc.  But I'm digressing from the joke thread so I'll stop the derailing and get back to SHULK SHORTS.

I know this is a joke argument in this thread, since this is a sarcastic thread about Shulk having boxer shorts as an outfit and all, but the argument that because he's drawn now with an optional shorts outfit, that it makes the entire industry either more sexist, or in another viewpoint, evens the score in any way.

One of the things I love about Xenoblade Chronicles (Shulk's game and the origin of the 'trunks' look) is that you can dress up all of the characters in the armors you buy.  That is, the armor is dynamic and all of the armor you buy 'can' fit the weight class of the character that can wear it.  There are also augments that allow you to wear heavier armor than normal.

Thus, you can have a character like Shulk wear things like "Magical Cream" (The trunks - essentially they handwave it as the 'armor' being a lotion you apply on the character), which, while hilariously revealing, also have magical properties.  The same outfit (though not the same style) can be worn by the female characters.  So, while it's still fan-service, it's all-inclusive fan service.

There are many fans of Swimsuit-wearing Shulk, and Swimsuit-wearing Dunban:



And, of course, there are many fans of the female characters while wearing the Swimsuit outfits:



As you can see, in this game, you can cover the characters as little or as much as you want.  Also, every outfit has interchangeable parts (armor, leggings, gauntlets, helm).  Entire combinations match aesthetically well, but sometimes you may increase a stat better if you switch up one for the other.  There are also more conservative pieces of armor for Sharla than the ones I just showed, I just grabbed something from the Web to show some variety.

I'm a straight man, but Swimsuit Dunban is one handsome dude.

[Ratty]

I still have a problem reconciling the idea of arguing that a woman should be able to wear whatever she wants without risk of harassment and then turning around to harass a game designer for the choice of attire given to a fictional woman because it is assumed that the designer is a man.
At best that is disingenuous and at worst straight up hypocrisy.

The problem lies in lack of choice. In games the more revealing female clothing is often better mechanically, meaning your only "choice" is to die or run around in a bikini. That's if there's a choice of practical clothing at all. Male characters are allowed to dress all sorts of ways, and to be short, fat, ugly, tall etc. But 98% of the time a female game character is defined by their unusual attractiveness and skimpy clothing. 1% of the time they're "Lol look at her she's so fat and ugly." and 1% of the time they get to be actual characters. With personalities and opinions that effect the story/gameworld, instead of just being objects placed in it to gawk at.

Keep in mind that women are half the total human population. Are you seeing a problem with lack of representation here? In an industry that's always talking about how it wants to be "taken seriously as art" and always preaching that it wants to "reach a wider audience". It's pretty freaking hard to reach a wider audience when you objectify and alienate half the people on the planet. Or be considered to have artistic integrity when almost all female characters can be summed up as "eyecandy" or "macguffins", and little else, in a naked attempt to pander to a presumed young straight male audience.

The problem isn't that some games objectify women, it's the fact that almost all of them do.