Casual_Player

I wish I was wrong. I think there's a lot more story opportunities to be had by keeping these stereotypes separate.

But both TV Tropes (Western Character: Soiled Dove leads only to ****** With a Heart of Gold and Miss Kitty) and Wikipedia (under 'Entertainment') support my proposition.

If you know of better barometers of incorrect but ubiquitous modern perceptions than TV Tropes and Wikipedia, please point them out to me. I love reading about the uncountable ways the human mind divorces itself from facts.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Arcanaville believes we are "merely" looking at a City of Heroes Fan Service Pack which is giving us more Fan Service With A Smile.
I think, that for whatever reason, the Wild West has been exempted from those tropes.
Maybe the similiarity between Dance Hall / Saloon Girls and modern bar girls is just too much to overcome.
Maybe, for once, the general public is actually willing to entertain a darker truth instead of winking at it.
It's hard to say. But the undeniable public opinion is that saloon girls were whores.

And lastly, even if you want to stick your head in the sand and go for the Dude's "Well, that's just your opinion, Man", my opinion is based on the several years I spent working criminal defense in Baltimore.

I know a prostitute when I see one.

Was I somehow unclear?

Yes, I am saying that Paragon Studios deliberately built an Old West prostitute costume into the game, and is selling it under the Gunslinger misnomer.

It's hardly exceptional. It just adds to the 7+ years of sexual fetish gear rebranded as female costumes that the game already contains. You can debate about whether the costumes are demeaning or not, but denying their sexual nature is ludicrous.

All I'm asking for is a little honesty in the debate.

Sex Sells.

Scroll back up to that picture Alpha posted at the top of this thread.
The female costume depicted there is framing the model's primary and secondary sexual characteristics and literally wrapping them up in a bow. Do we need to talk about the purpose of the blush built into the face?

Paragon Studios is in the (admittedly T-for-Teen rated) sex business. They have been from Day One. Full stop, end-of-sentence, there is no room for debate here. Even the lightest stroll through the costume generator proves what I'm saying.

I'm just amazed it took this long for a thread like this to call them out on it. I blame the Gunslinger lie, myself.

It's apparently OK to sell sex in an upfront manner. But if you lie to people and tell them you're selling violence, and they instead find out you're selling them sex, they get upset.

---

As for bar maids, saloon girls and prostitutes; I know that historically they were different. One of the pages I linked to above goes into detail on the point.

But CoX isn't selling us the Historical West. It's selling us the Wild West. The Wild West is a shared fantasy that is a wildly filtered perception of the facts of the times. And in that perception, bar maids, saloon girls and prostitutes are all the same woman.

I'm sorry if this offends any present-day bar maids. But a google image search of the term 'bar maid' tells me that the bars are using sex to sell their goods a lot more vigorously than Paragon Studios.

Really?

Would you prefer the term Soiled Dove?

Or perhaps Painted Lady?

Personally, I don't care who's doing the art. I have confidence that Paragon hires competent and creative people.

But if the costume artist doesn't want his or her art to be compared to prostitutes, he or she shouldn't make costumes that exactly mimic the clothing of prostitutes.

This isn't an issue of one player's taste in hemlines. The art team went for a very specific look here and successfully nailed it (no pun intended): wild west prostitute.

I'm mystified by the amount of support there is for this idea. I know there are players who make characters that know each other, are related to each other, part of some grand internal fanfic, etc., but I didn't know it was that common. The fun for me in character creation is to make up something new and unique. I wouldn't use that temp power any more than any other out there.

But this does remind me of the one consumable I do use- Shivans. About once every two months I'll truck some squishy into Bloody Bay for 15 minutes and pick up some monster killing machines.

Would I buy Shivans from the market? No. Why would I? It only takes 15 minutes work, in a deserted zone that's been altered to make squishies more survivable.

I'm not even sure how a consumable comic would work. Do I only get to read it for a limited amount of time? A limited amount of page turns? o.O

A permanent comic? You betcha. I'd hop all over that. In my mind, that's sort of what we're getting now with the Sig Story Arcs.

A-yup.

Hum. If this goes on for another month, I'll have the points saved up for a new enhancement tray.

I'm in much the same boat. I know they made a movie back in the 90s and that it led to nothing. I've never seen it.

And yeah, the 'We want to capture the magic of the TV show but we're going to have to change it completely to make a movie' comments shoot up giant red waving flags on top of fireworks. I will expect nothing of entertainment value from this until it solidifies a lot more.

You heard it here first! New CoT is getting retrofitted back into CoT Classic!

/
// wishful thinking
/// so maybe that should be

So glad this was posted as well. What has been making the Doctor so brilliant these past several years has been the fact that it's obviously a labor of love by everyone involved. These two vids sum up that love perfectly.

Most of what you've mentioned was I21, and we're two months past that. Given the timetable the devs have adopted in the past year or two, we should be seeing I21.5 pretty soon now.

Two new trials and a new powerset seems like plenty to me for an issue update. You don't need to pad that with stuff they were working on last summer. That kind of arguing just cements your reputation further.