Samuel_Tow

I've been trying to budget my profanities for when one is really necessary or for when one would have the biggest impact. The rest of the time, I'll use word-swaps that either imply a meaning, carry a similar sound or just come out goofy overall. My favourite so far is the term "cluster-hug," but that's just self-praise talking.

OK, that is an excellent point that I would not have called in a million years. Thank you

Yes, indeed there seems to be a problem that ANY sexualisation or objectification is seen as a bad thing and characters portrayed in a sexual manner - even if there's more to them than that - draw immense ire just for BEING sexual. As gender roles go, someone made a good point before - men who sleep around are seen as greater men, demonstrating both charm stamina, yet women who sleep around are seen as lesser women, demonstrating loose morals and unfaithfulness. That in itself is a HUGE problem that needs to die in a fire, I don't think there's much room for debate here, but it's the sign of a deeper "something" afoot.

Are we, indeed, looking for a better way to retain fictional characters' sexuality, or are we looking to make them asexual in general? Are we outraged at gratuitous fanservice cheesecakes because we believe that kind of sexuality can be done better, or are we outraged because we don't feel that they should HAVE sexuality in any outgoing form in the first place? I know for a fact that people in general will groan at fanservice pretty much on principle and never really stop to explain why to such an extent that I'm starting to wonder if some even need a reason to hate it.

Now, maybe it's just because I'm a dumb guy, maybe it's because my morals aren't nearly as high as I make them appear, or maybe I'm just a letch... But I love fanservice! Obviously, just on its own its dumb, pointless and intellectual uninteresting, but hey - it's pretty to look at, to me at least. And if it isn't to me, it is to someone. The point where I feel fanservice in particular and sexual objectification in general become damaging both to specific characters and to "the industry" in general is when they either do damage to otherwise compelling characters by carving out their interesting personality and replacing it with breasts, or otherwise using sex appeal in place of good writing so what you end up with is schlock where you could have had a compelling story.

To me, fanservice is like junk food - it's nice to have, but you can't really subsist on it for long before it starts having bad effects on you. A movie, game or story that's nothing but sexy fanservice is like eating Big Macs breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that's just not a very good thing. It may be unpopular of me to say this, but if a story is decent and the characters are drawn up well enough... I kind of like a little fanservice here and there, provided it doesn't demolish the characters involved in it.

I guess the broader issue here is one of sexuality - is its very presence in a work supposed to be offensive in itself, or is its application and pervasiveness that's the issue? Do we want to stop seeing cheesecakes and beefecakes entirely, viewing them as something unambiguously bad for a story, or do we simply want to balance the sexy with the dramatic? Because for me, at least, the latter is the clear answer.

At the risk of shooting any credibility I have in the head, I... Kind of don't like games and stories as much if they don't have at least a little tittilation, a little fanservice or a little "something" along those lines. Even at the best of times, even in the best of stories, I feel there's room for a little bit of this. If I made a pretty girl who spends the entire story encased in a shapeless suit of armour, then I'll have at least one instance where she steps out, just for the sake of having a pretty girl on-screen. I believe that's more or less the root of Samus Aran's huge popularity - she's kickass role model AND she looks pretty.

Now, whether or not other people feel the same way, that I can't say, though I'd be lying if I said I didn't suspect many did. My point, though, is that in our efforts to make things fair and to abolish shameless exploitation, that we don't go all the way take out even the fun bits, as well. At the end of the day, objectification in itself is not a bad thing, and done right it can be fun as well as... "Moving." As such, we really shouldn't be arguing against sexualisation, so much as arguing for better ways to use it to the benefit of a story, instead of using it IN PLACE of a story.

I actually intentionally jumbled the words in a way that's difficult to read just to make a point that the stated "scientific" experiment is very biassed. Long words which are more rarely used and difficult to assert from context - like the word "assert" as I used it - will be much harder to "guess" from a faulty spelling, especially when that spelling clumps vowels together and creates new constructs, like swapping an "-ity" suffix word with an "-oly" suffix word just because the donor word had an O and an L in it.

Furthermore, this exercise assumes that words will be letter-swapped in ways that don't alter their meaning, but as the DamnYouAutoCorrect site will tell you, it's pretty easy to typo so that you swap entire words, oftentimes swapping the entire meaning of a sentence. Swapping a single letter could turn "I'm going to bug your wife." in the sense of ask her about something, into "I'm going to hug your wife." which may have a very different connotation.

Not to mention that some people - like myself - tend to read a few words ahead, expecting a certain meaning, and become confused to not find it. Telling me "our developers doing something new" is confusing, until I realise it's missing a question mark and "our" is actually "are." In neither case is this a proper sentence, but I am incapable of parsing it correctly if I - as a foreign speaker - happen to pronounce the word "our" more like "hour" and less like the letter R.

People assume that just because someone can decrypt someone else's illiterate scribble within an environment of solid context, that this can somehow translate to deciphering the same with no context at all. When someone in Help chat suddenly pipes up, asking (I assume) "how u do cot" then what am I to assume? That he's asking how to have sexual intercourse with the Circle of Thorns or that he's trying to find out which contact will hand out the Caverns of Transcendence Trial?

I will always stand on the side of proper, clear communication, because when I don't know what the hug someone is talking about, there is ZERO chance I'm going to piece it together out of netspeak and good intentions.

I've actually been very careful to not say "Huge Females" specifically, ever since that ooold suggestion on the subject where I first had make that distinction. It's less about me being pedantic and more because the term I prefer to use - Muscular Females - is closer to what I'm talking about. It's less about body mass and more about body physique, if that makes sense.

But yes, what you describe is more or less what I want that I consider feasible

I actually think that romance novels in general and Twilight in particular don't suffer so much because men are fetishised or objectified so much as because they present an objectification of men that disagrees with how men objectify themselves. How many times have you heard people launch into never-ending rants about those "gay sparkling vampires?" Because I've heard it a lot. This kind of abject hatred is so severe it starts to resemble the kind of hatred you see surrounding homophobia in some men. I'd post a link to that old spoof commercial for "hotdogs for momophobes" but I don't want to rock the boat, as it were.

Here's the thing - certain representations of men in fiction end up being so dissonant to actual real-life men's idea of how men should look and behave that they appear to feel threatened by the very idea that these kinds of men can actually exist and be seen as attractive by the opposite sex. We should kill it with fire before it spreads and infects real people and devalues the insensitive butch juerks we've spend our lives trying to be.

Now, obviously that's not the whole story with Twilight, because that mess has more reasons to hate it than I can name, and so the sparkling vampires and shirtless werewolves end up picking up a lot of hate for a whole myriad of different reasons, not all of which have to do with their basic concept. In fact, I think that one of the biggest anchors around the whole series - other than that it comes off like bad fanfiction - is Bella Swan herself. Yes, men are indeed objectified though her eyes, but Bella Swan herself is objectified by the way she is defined by the men in her life and her seemingly singular purpose in existence being to string these men who like her along like puppets.

That's where we loop right back into the objectification of women as hollow people who only exist to "be female" and to be dominated by men. Obviously, that's mostly down to bad storytelling, the central singularity around which every problem in the Twilight Saga orbits, but objectification on both sides is still a big god damn problem.

I do believe we can use Twilight as a good lesson in the objectification of men, however, both the good and the bad. And, yes, there can be good in objectification, because I refuse to believe that anyone can look at those ripped shirtless werewolves and instantly know why people want to see them, or indeed look at the dark, myserious, tortured and brooding vampires and realise why they serve as fetish fuel. And if that sort of objectification ruffles the feathers of a few men: Good! Maybe if more people are forced to confront their own self-image, we won't have as much stereotyping in popular media.

I will say one thing - while I feel the objectification of women in popular culture is far more severe and unfair, it is also more widely accepted as a problem and those women who want to define themselves have more resources and support to rely on, and slowly but surely, different representations of women in fiction are creeping in. Men, on the other hand, though their objectification isn't nearly as severe, still live in a constant pissing contest with each other and still have to live in shame when they don't conform to society's idea of the super man. Even today, "geeky guys" still get picked on, just to pull a random example out of a hat. Sure, not as much as once upon a time, just because the Internet made it clear that there were a HELL of a lot more of them than anyone ever suspected, and easily enough to have a community just made up of geeks and nerds where they can be themselves without fear of ridicule.

My point is that it's unfair to say that men don't face objectification and sexualisation and peer pressure and aren't held up to unnecessary standards of behaviour and appearance. The extent to which this happens is debatable, of course, but it happens on all levels of society. So much of male identity is still taboo and crossing over that taboo causes so many men to erupt in either towering rage or abject disgust. Because men aren't supposed to do "that" or be like "that." Why? Because they simply aren't. If you're a man, you're supposed to be a MAN and no-one really talks about what that should mean or if it should be such a stringent rule, but everyone is supposed to instinctively know about it. And if you don't conform, then you're not a man.

Women, thought the hard work and dedication of many activists, have managed to bring their gender identity issues to the forefront and are doing something about it. Men, even to this day, are still ashamed to admit that male gender identity issues even exist. And, speaking as a man, that's just sad and depressing in so many ways.

*edit*
As an addendum, here's a question that most men wouldn't ask and few will have a good answer for: Why can't men wear skirts? And before you say it, that's not a skirt, it's a KILT! And if it's not a kilt, it's a robe. And if it's not a robe it's a tunic. And if it's not that, it's something else, but it's NOT a skirt, god damn it! Because skirts are for women, and mean can wear women's clothes. Because men are ashamed of their femininity. Men are ashamed to be "like women," to the point where telling a man he's like a woman is considered one of the worst insults you can throw around. Both because far too many men are conditioned to he jerks and see women as the inferior gender and because far too many men are conditioned to believe that a very narrow, very specific ideal is the only way to be a man and everything else is shameful. And not only are men conditioned to be narrow-minded about their own self-image, but they're conditioned to be ashamed of discussing it, because it's not MANLY to be sentimental and introverted and sentimental.

Yes, I admit, women have severe problems with gender inequality, but men have problems even admitting having problems, which is sorry in a whole different way.

When the shirtless male werewolves transform into their wolf forms, they explode out of their clothes, so when they return to human form, they're shirtless, and thus spend most of their time shirtless. That, to me, is on the same level of "convenient" as people with fire-based powers who burn their own clothes when they flame-on and have to return to their original forms naked, ala Sue Richards in the second live action Fantastic Four movie.

I definitely picture something completely different

I'll be honest here - when it comes to purely human or even just largely humanoid characters (think rubber forehead aliens), I actually do find it most aesthetically pleasing when these people actually look like human beings. Sure, I could remove a nose here, add an extra set of eyes there, slap on a huge pair of wings or goat feet or lobster claws, but the general body shape and silhouette I still want to retain looking human, and I'd wager that so do a lot of others. That's why you see more Makes and Females than you see Huge models - because Huge just look weird as people.

I've honestly most often seen Huge as genderless giants, something like a rock golem, a robot or a demon, that sort of thing. Female characters are defined by being women, Male by being men but Huge are simply defined first and foremost by being big. Sure, a lot of the time they're portrayed as men and given rough male characteristics (like male voice actors), but that's mostly because of the old irritating belief that the male form is the default and the female form is the deviation, thus if something isn't specifically female - and a huge genderless monster isn't - then it must necessarily be male.

Actually, let me go on a tangent about that: This is stupid, especially when you start making weird monsters. Take, for instance, my alien insect hive queen. In nature, a lot of female insects are larger than than male insects by a SIGNIFICANT margin. Or look at spiders - a female spider is something like ten times the size of a male one, and males have little function other than to provide a temporary mate and a quick snack. Because City of Heroes provides us with the ability to create this many weird and unusual concepts, I've simply grown to regard the Huge model as the "monster" model. It starts out with a human face, sure... But I never let it keep one.

I forgot what I was saying... Right, "huge" females! Yeah, I definitely don't mean something like the current Huge male, but with breasts. Not even close. So long as we're keeping to models that have a gender, I'd like to keep those models to more or less within human physique parameters, which means when I speak of muscular women, I want them to more obvious muscles and more solidly built bodies than necessarily more bulk. They already have more than enough bulk in their legs, for one. Personally, I don't need to see female or even male bodies become much more bulky so much as I'd like to see that bulk redistributed in a different way.

Yeah, sadly, that's the case. But look at it from my perspective - if I had to choose between having this kind of body but not being able to put a jacket over it, or not having this kind of body at all... I'd choose the former. I'm already limited to what I can do with my bigger females, because if I were to strip them of their big items, they'd just look goofy.

Damn! I used up my "monster people" tangent on the quote before! OK, what else can I say here...

I agree with you that feminism isn't just about clothes. That's why I put the word in quotes more often than not - because I don't want to claim to know what the idea is about. However, I don't think the issue with the costume creator is just about clothes, either, not intrinsically, at least. The issue is more about what we should even be allowed to want out of it. I want a woman with more muscular arms, but I can't have that. Why? David would say they just haven't had the time and opportunity to get around to it, because David is an awesome and cool person But others on the forums will say "because you shouldn't want that in a comic book game."

Do you see where the problem resides? It's less about what we can and cannot have and more about what we should and shouldn't want to have. Wanting a square-necked, barrel-chested guy is fine, but wanting the equivalent girl? Not so much, because the "equivalent" girl should be expected to be short, slim and wear high heels. Look at the Barbarian set - men got big boots and gloves and a loin cloth, but their female counterparts got high heels. Granted, there was more to it in the actual released set, and that went a LONG way towards saving the whole thing and making it one of the better ones, but the discrepancy was still there in what the art team felt best represented the set: A muscular male minotaur, a muscular male barbarian and a Santa's little helper Playboy bunny woman.

The reason the costume creator keeps getting called out is because a lot of times, it seems to imply that the female version of a masculine look is a feminine look that often has nothing to do with the masculine one. A male barbarian is strong, muscular and imposing. A female barbarian wears high heels and a low-cut top. I guess if you argue that that's just what's sexy for men, and the counterpart is the closest to it that's sexy for women, this might have some traction, but here's my counterpoint: I didn't want Barbarian gear because it made my character appear sexy, I wanted it because it made my character appear stronger.

Here's something to ponder: Men can look strong AND sexy, and this is how society expects to see them. Women, on the other hand can appear either strong OR sex, but not both at the same time because society expects sexy women to look physically weak and incapable, for whatever messed up reason that is.

That's a very good way of putting it, that I'd like to expand on somewhat. Aesthetic beauty, at least in popular culture, idealises a fairly small band of body shapes and general appearances - for men, it's big, strong and handsome and for women it's small, skinny and busty. On the one hand, I can kind of get that. We're both biologically programmed to look for certain physical cues and culturally pressured to look for others, so society having a small band of "ideal" looks is more or less understandable.

The problem is that this small band of ideal looks is very restrictive and very detrimental to character diversity. This then becomes an interesting issue: Should we have more of what society idealises so that we can feed that obsession, or should we add other options that might not be conventionally appealing, but could be desirable for other reasons? The thing, though, is that these "other reasons" tend to be viewed as weird reasons. I'm fortunate that City of Heroes is more open to differing ideas of aesthetic beauty, but aside from here, every time I mention liking muscular women or insect aliens or catgirls or ghosts or really anything that to a conventional aesthetic would appear weird and unusual, I get labelled as "weird." That's not necessarily a bad thing, since it IS technically true, but the deeper implication of it troubles me.

There seems to be the notion that there are only a select very few types of attraction, and that anything deviant from those types cannot and should not be attractive, and if it is, then there's something wrong with you. There's also the mind-blowing fact that some of us like specific characters exactly BECAUSE they are unattractive, as that's a key part of what makes them so interesting as characters.

Attraction also follows a series of different paths. Let's step out of the subject for a while and talk about cars. Some people like hotrods for their heritage, some like muscle cars because they're big and powerful. I personally tend to like more modern super cars. There's a saying among car fans of "It looks like it's going 100 miles just standing still." That's precisely what impresses me the most - a car which looks like it could go fast and corner well. I'm sure looks can be deceiving and sleek cars can be slower than chunky cars, but speaking purely of appearance, what looks beautiful to me is what looks fast. Also, what looks small, because you have the park the damn thing.

Overall, I get that society at large has a collectively narrow view of what constitutes beauty, but I still feel that divergent concepts should still be given their due attention because many people have divergent tastes. Many more than you'd think.

I didn't mean to insult you, Nyx, and I apologise if I did. I was actually in agreement with you - it's fine to like whatever you like and there's no reason to be ashamed or disappointed in it. Even if I may misinterpret what that is.

That's actually part of the problem. For weeks, when I went to edit my PlayNC account, I was hit in the face with an add for a new NCsoft game that featured a ridiculously skinny woman with rabbit ears, a tail and the most absurdly impractical high heels I've seen since the Witch set, and a large, brutish, thick, hulking male warrior with a box full of swords. That, pretty much, is where my interest ended, because, while significantly more unusual, I've seen this dynamic in practically every RPG ever made. NEXT!

You have a point when you say this - that's how games sell themselves. And I'm honestly sick and tired of it. I admit, it was cool once, or a few times. But I've been gaming for 15 years now, hell, probably even 20 if you count the old 386 days. I am sick and tired of that aesthetic to the point where a game displaying this to me these days just doesn't do anything for me. I want something different and, really, City of Heroes is just about the only game which can give me that. It may not be perfect, but it's a HELL of a lot more perfect than almost anything else I've played.

I guess, speaking purely for myself, the moral is that if you want to grab my attention, show me something I haven't seen anywhere else. And the "tiny woman, big man" duality just isn't it... To put it mildly.

I think we may actually have to disagree here. I'll give you right away that "small" doesn't have to man weak, far from it. With enough of a handwave, a small character could have powers far greater than bigger ones. Spriggan's Colonel MacDoughal looks like just a little kid in a baseball cap, but he's by far the most dangerous character of that whole movie and he doesn't even have to lift a finger to do it. He just looks at people.

However, where the "weak" aspect comes in is when a character is simply never allowed to be visibly strong. I can get that a healer doesn't need to be big or strong, and that her presence of mind could be the strength of an entire group, but when we start talking about female fighters and warriors and how they are depicted in other games, that's where "weakness" comes in. I don't know if you've seen any, but most anime that depict a "cute bruiser" do so more to highlight her vulnerability and weakness, all told, because while a small girl kicking *** is cool to watch, ultimately she's always way over her head, especially if she's on the side of the heroes.

For some reason, fiction always presents female characters filling traditionally male roles as weaker. The do so much to prove themselves, they have some degree of success, but when push comes to shove, they have to fail and be rescued. THAT is what I consider weak, and there's very little you can say to dissuade me after all the many times I've seen it done in movies and games. Hell, remember the other M?

Strong characters are strong not just because we, as the audience, are repeatedly being told that she is strong, because all that is is a faux action girl pretty much by definition. Strong characters are strong because they act strong and appear strong, and I have yet to see a female character described as a fighter, a warrior or generally physically strong, who actually manages to maintain that throughout a movie or game's running time, bar a very few, very famous examples like Samus Aran (most of the time) and what Lara Croft looks like she'll be presented as in her upcoming game.

Hell, look at Katie Douglass. She was supposed to be very strong and committed in original Praetorian content, but come First Ward and she's an ineffectual loudmouth whose only real use is the ability to teleport people, and who gets stuffed in a fridge before the end of the story, with no resolution to be had for her character.

First of all, let me restate - I'm not trying to argue feminism. I don't know enough about it and I'm in no real position to make strong political or social points even if I did. I'm just not smart or learned enough to do that. Secondly, I wasn't trying to accuse you of arguing against feminism, or even against strong female characters. Far from it, I have nothing against what you like to create and what you enjoy playing as. I apologise if I came off as saying otherwise.

What I have a problem with, if anything, is the idea in fiction that men should be the heroes fighting the good fight on the front lines and women should be the kindly healers, waiting in the tent to patch men up when they get hurt. The idea itself isn't evil, and is actually a more or less accurate portrayal of history from about medieval times to about the American Civil War. However, what I have a problem with is that idea being use as reason to exclude other ideas that don't conform to it, like most of the recent Tomb Raider games where Lara Croft did all of her stunts and fights and action while her two male companions spent their time at her manor, researching things for her. And when the manor finally did get attacked, they got their ***** shot up until Lara showed up to save them. Excluding the blatant sexualisation of Lara Croft's actual body, the stories drawn up for her are usually actually pretty respectful.

And again, I'm not saying YOU are arguing against errant interpretations of gender roles. Just because you like one thing doesn't mean you hate another. That's not my point. My point is that people in general all too often do just that, and I'm sure you've seen it even in this very thread. My point is that disallowing women to LOOK strong and only reserving their strength an informed ability is in itself a sign of weakness, if not in any one specific narrative, then in the whole of the genre in general. If the only way for a woman to be strong is for her to be strong of mind whereas a man can be strong of mind AND body, AND often is strong in both, then women are put at a very distinct disadvantage and, by comparison, drawn up as weak.

I mean, think about it: You mention very strong female characters who just look strong vs. male characters who DO look strong. How are women NOT at a disadvantage if men can be just as strong in terms of both emotions AND super powers, yet can also LOOK strong on top of it, which women can't? Do you see where my problem resides? I want my female characters to be capable of more than just being strong because I tell people they are strong. Like men, I want other people to SEE that they are strong just by looking at them, and the inability to do this is what I see as a problem and as an inherent weakness in the general depiction of women in this game as a whole, not just specific to what any one player does. Even when the game goes out of its way to give us a physically strong female character like Dr. Delilah Stein, she still ends up looking like a super-sized skinny girl.

I think I can illustrate the whole thing with an old argument from City of Blasters back in 2004, when Smoke Grenade meant people couldn't die and attacks 6-slotted with damage meant Fire/Devices Blasters were outright broken. People back then said "Why would I need a Controller who can hold people when I can invite a Blaster who can outright kill people so they can't attack me anyway?" Why, in the same vein, are male characters allowed to be strong in story and powers AND BODY while female characters can only be strong in story and powers, but never in body? How does that not make them appear weaker by comparison? Yes, you can explain around the discrepancy, but you can only go so far, and it still makes certain concepts outright impossible, or at least very improbable.

My problem isn't with what you like or dislike or the characters you make. It's with the whole idea that women don't NEED to appear physically strong and don't NEED to have hands-on fighting roles, and more specifically with what that idea doesn't allow me to have.

Spin it together into a tube and start hitting people with it. Fill it with lead buckshot if it's not heavy enough.

Or, I don't know, give us a "glowing energy mace" and make up your technobabble of choice while the patch is downloading.

You posted it while I was writing mine

I can only speak for myself on the matter, but let me give you a really stupid example:

Blasters. I hate 'em. With a passion. And yet, until a few months ago, I had a whole three of the things at level 50 and another couple at level 40. Why? Because I was genuinely, honest-to-god, convinced that I liked them, for no real reason than because I'd managed to convince myself. Give me a minute and I'll explain why.

Back in 2004, my first character was my namesake - Samuel Tow, the Scrapper. However, my second character was the Steel Rook, an AR/Dev Blaster that I made with a friend of mine and levelled up into his 30s on the old Smoke Grenade bug. With the bug fixed, the character ended up broken. I never deleted him, though, because he was partially my friend's character, and eventually I wrote a long, touching story for him, so I kept him. Eventually, the Blaster buffs came and I convinced myself that this character I couldn't delete but didn't want to play actually WAS fun, so I played him, and through blood, sweat and tears, I got him to level 50. Having thus convinced myself that I could play Blasters and having long since run out of powerset combos for Scrappers, I made a whole bunch of other Blasters. One of them was very dear to my heart as the protagonist of the best story I've ever written, and another was part of my most interesting idea ever, and both I got to level 50, through grit teeth.

Every time I loaded these characters up, I did so with a great deal of dread, but damn it, I liked these character's stories so I would play them and like it! Every time I died, every time Blasters pissed me off, I kept telling myself it was worth it, the characters deserved it, and if I could just be a little more careful, it would be all right. I kept telling myself that this really was fun, and I just couldn't appreciate it. And I actually believed that nonsense. For SEVEN ******* YEARS I played an AT that I hated, wasted my time on the forums suggesting things be done to it to make me like it more, trying new builds and taking advice and nothing helped. I hated playing Blasters, but I was so invested in them that I couldn't see past it. I honestly thought I genuinely wanted to play Blasters.

Then came I18 and inherent Stamina, and suddenly all of my previously Stamina-less Scrappers and Brutes became twice as strong and significantly more fun to play. My Blasters, by contrast, didn't change one iota since endurance was never the issue with them. That's when the bubble burst and I realised I didn't like playing Blasters, I'd NEVER liked playing Blasters, and I had flushed a combined 2000 hours of my life down the drain. That's not a fun realisation. Since then, I've deleted all three of my level 50 Blasters and replaced them with a Brute, a Scrapper and a Mastermind, and have been having the time of my life with these character, feeling like a four-sided idiot for paying $15 to torture myself every month, instead of using that game to have fun.

It took me a decision that several people have questioned my sanity over to force my own hand and admit that what I thought I wanted was a hollow lie all along, a hollow lie that I told myself, all because in I1 Smoke Grenade was bugged and I happened to make a Devices Blaster with it that I couldn't delete.

I wish what people want couldn't be influenced by society and circumstance. It would have saved me so much time and effort, to say nothing of saved me so much anger. Who knows - if it weren't for Blasters, I could be a jovial easy-going person right now

Yeah, Apex at the Vanguard base is just bad. He looks like if a Lego figurine grew to life size.

Honestly, the difference between middle physique and max physique isn't all that telling. Putting them side-by-side with captions makes it obvious, of course, but if I, personally, saw your max physique pic in the game, I wouldn't have called it.

Here's the thing - women get so little travel on most of their sliders (except breasts) that the difference in slider values is only telling from one extreme to the other, and isn't very obvious between degrees closer together. That's why how "big" a female character looks is often much more down to what costume pieces she's using. You'll note that both Brutticus and Xanta have large boots and gloves, large belts and large shoulders, as well as relatively smaller heads. Xanta, especially, really stands out less so due to her stature and more so due to the Medieval shoulders and the Glam hairdo - they're both huge and make her look much bigger.

Considering David shot down both a new model and reweighing the sliders on the old models so hard he left a hole in the sky... Yeah, obviously It won't happen - which is a pity - but there are still ways to work around it. As I've mentioned before, most of a the female model's body is more or less right, especially from the waist down. What women need is more mass in their upper body, and the easiest way to do this seems to give them a new pair of bigger arms via the Rrobotic Arms category. This should be easy to do without the need for new tech and without the need to tweak any existing costume pieces, though it WILL leave the arms separated from chest patterns and textures like short sleeve jackets are. Another possibility is to outright give them a new chest, as well, kind of like the Armoured chest, only bulkier, but this will probably require some work on existing textures and patterns to make sure they stretch right, as well as possibly realigning attached costume pieces like chest pieces and shoulders.

Huge are bad at depicting human people, so I would never argue that they're as common as Male and Female, and I'd even agree that they are more rare. I'm just saying that they're not as non-existent as you say. Keep looking, I'm sure you'll see one before too long. I teamed with one on a Death From Below trial the other day.

It's not an "us vs. them" mentality. I'm a man and I firmly believe that Western society, for all its emancipation, is still oppressing women far more than it oppresses men. Trying to present a legitimate grievance as an "us vs. them" problem and diminishing its importance in the problem does completely the opposite of what you claim to be doing.

What problems men have with social pressure are not the counterpoint to feminist issues that you use them as. They don't lessen or excuse feminism's very real, pressing concerns. Do man have social problems of objectification? Yes, they do. But how are they relevant within the context of a feminist tangent but to say "Your problem is less important because my problem exists?"

If you want to bring up the problems of the male self-image and the unrealistic standards of appearance and physical ability, then by all means, do so. I'm not sure it will be entirely on topic, but I AM sure there is room for you to run that tangent IN ADDITION to that of feminism, not INSTEAD of it.

You don't need to stamp out other people's ideas to promote your own. That's what I've been trying to say from the beginning. You can't come into a conversation about integration and solidarity and attempt to push your own idea by pushing out someone else's, largely because you don't have to. Trust me, there's room in the thread for everybody.

And yet society does this to us all the time. Grown men don't cry because little boys are heckled when they do. Grown women's only dream is to find a good husband, because that's what everyone seems to say. Everyone is supposed to want to go out drinking as often as possible, because if you don't, then... What the hell is wrong with you?

I don't want to delve into armchair psychology, but this is just what I've seen: a lot of what like - or rather what we believe we should like - is formed less by desire and opinion and more by the world around us. There's that famous ill parenting line "do what I say, not what I do," and it exists for a reason - because our environment forms who we are, and that force can be incredibly strong if we don't realise it exists. Hell, the very notion that "women are just drawn like that in comic books" itself should be evidence enough that people are masters at conditioning their own psyches.

If we allow all of these notions to go unchallenged, then they become status quo without anyone realising it. That's why I make it a point to challenge notions I disagree with wherever I meet them - not because I think I can convince anyone of anything or because I believe I can change society, but because I'm determined to prove that there are other ways to think about things, and little though I may know about it, I feel there ARE other, possibly even better ways to look at gender politics in comic books at large and City of Heroes in particular.

I know for a fact just how powerful these pressures can be, and how unseen their influence is. When you hear a certain notion enough times from enough people, it starts to feel like a basic truth of life that doesn't even need justification. It just is. There are certain things men are expected to do, and if they don't do them, they're weird. There are certain things men are supposed to like in a woman, and if they don't or like different things, they're weird. Trust me, I know a little something about that.

Someone previously made an interesting observation - some people seem to feel like for one "group" to get what it wants, another must lose something in return. If someone is seen as asking something different, said someone is either seen as either hopelessly wrong, completely alone or otherwise as an aggressor seeking to take something away from people who disagree. Generally, that's what bothers me the most, and I've seen it enough times surrounding so-called "furry" themes and anime themes.

It's true, you can't take someone with a fully-formed wish in his head and force him to stop wishing for it, that much is true. But by constant repetition of the same assumed values, you very much CAN condition a person to disregard his own wishes and instead replace them with the wishes of others. And it doesn't take 15 years of family upbringing to do that, either. A pervasive enough community with a strong enough social pressure can do this to a person seeking to belong within a matter of a couple of years.

Granted, WE aren't that community. One look at the Costume Request or Best Designs threads can show you will show that most of us genuinely do want everyone to explore his or her imagination and actually encourage and praise greater diversity. The costumes I see most often credited are the ones that make the most unusual use of the editor. We aren't "that" community... But we could be if we're not careful.

OK, anyone other than you Or it could be that I just read too slowly, that's not out of the realm of possibilities.

Though, to be honest, having to read fast is far more stressful to me than having to act fast.

And I feel completely the opposite way. As far as I'm concerned, the best pieces are those that fill niches which couldn't be achieved by the editor before, and "tall hats" is precisely one such niche. By contrast, I really have no use for another rubbery leathery bodysuit to add to the other, what, five? that we already have.

By and large, the costume creator has far too many holes for me to be satisfied with redundant patterns when the actually innovative pieces don't make it across to our side.

Amusingly enough... Yeah, that's pretty much it Even more amusingly, David already agreed to that and I'm still waiting to see when a window of opportunity opens up. My original request and David's acceptance are about as old as the Costume Request thread, so it should be easy to judge how long it's been, but on this account, I'm not willing to insist or rush. I get that this is a nice appeal thing, so just having it in the game, whenever that happens, will be enough for me.

Now, if I wanted to ask for a few more things, here's what they would be:

1. "Titanic arms." Using the existing Robotic Hands torso, add a pair of bigger, more muscular arms to the female model. With metal rings separating them if necessary.

2. The ability to have a larger rib cage, both sideways and front-to-back. Note I don't mean a larger "chest," I mean specifically rib cage. A large upper body in relation to the lower body is important.

3. The the option to have larger hands and feet without having to ALWAYS use Large boots and gloves, and more specifically without having to use gloves at all.

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However, the reason I keep going on tangents about this is because... Well, part of that suggestion has already been accepted by the art team, part of it should eventually come true and part of it won't happen. That's more or less a done deal. And yet despite this, I end up having to argue with people about how I'm not the only person in the world to want these things and how adding these things to the game won't be the same as chucking money off a bridge. That, I believe, is the larger problem: That we as a world-wide community seem to have certain notions ingrained into our minds so deep that we consider doing anything else to be pointless and wasteful.

Gender roles, to bring this back around to topic, are one such example, but within the context of a fictional game, they're hardly the only one. I had and still have a very hard time convincing a particular friend of mine to take that pink winged bunny girl I made seriously, just for a random example, and I've had people rag on my designs because they were "too anime." We all saw the furore over Dual Blades, did we not? "City of WoW?"

I don't mean to "cure" society off its bias, nor do I really want to shift people off of what they'll accept and what they want. But I kind of wish we'd move past stepping on each other's toes and proclaiming each other's ideas as "weird" or "unpopular" and constructing complicated arguments for why they should be ignored.

Whether or not I get what I want isn't so much the point, as whether I should even be allowed to WANT it, and honestly... Sometimes that actually does concern me.

Kind of a tangent, but: I really have to disagree here. Maybe that's me showing my sexism after all, maybe it's just me being picky, I don't know what it is, but I REALLY don't like ideas of using the Huge model to depict women. It's grotesque enough depicting men, and I really don't think there's much to be gained from it depicting women.

I've always tried to make a point of asking for "muscular" women specifically, as opposed to just "huge" women because I don't feel women need to bulk up to the point where they lose their humanoid body shape, but rather I feel they will benefit far more from getting options to appear stronger, more muscular and heavier built. Note, when I say "heavier built" I don't necessarily mean huge. You can have a person who appears solid without necessarily being all that big.

To be perfectly honest, I don't like using the Huge model to depict actual people. I never have. All of the Huge characters I have are inhuman monsters, both good and evil. To me, human gender only has a meaning when you retain a vaguely human body shape, and I just don't feel the Huge model has that, at least not with anything but the lowest physique sliders. I know very large body builders exist, both male and female, but... Let's just say that that's not what I'm asking for.

Here's the root of my disagreement - I don't think both this and what I want are compatible. Give it a shot and try to see how "small" you can make the Huge model, and you'll see that the answer is "not very." Even at its lowest settings, Huge is still huge, and "Huge Women" isn't what I wanted. I'm actually more or less satisfied with how "big" women can get, other than possibly bumping up their max height a little. What they lack isn't size or "thickness," it's definition.

Let me put it this way - take a large average man, take a large fat guy and take a large athlete. I'd wager a bet that they'll be about equally as thick, thought the average guy is likely to have less upper body strength and skinnier arms as compared to his legs, the the fat guy is likely to have much of his mass around his waist and the fat athlete is likely to have much of his mass in his shoulders, upper arms and thighs. It's that mass distribution that I'm really interested in shifting around, because right now it feels like 50% of a City of Heroes female is concentrated in her breasts and butt.

Here's where the rubber meets the road: Body shape. Not so much size, not so much weight, not so much thickness, just basic body shape. How much of a body is muscle mass, how is that muscle mass distributed, which parts of that body are intended to be strong, that sort of thing. As we've seen, people come in many shapes and sizes, but body shape tends to reflect where a person is strongest.

This, I believe, is where the art in City of Heroes and in comic books in general may be seen as sexist - men are almost always depicted as having tremendous upper body strength and women are almost always depicted as having tremendous child-bearing hips. I suppose that, in a rudimentary cave-man society, that sort of gender divide might make sense from a mechanical level, but to ingrain this in an environment that is, to a large extent, diverse just seems... Limiting. And I don't necessarily want men to be thinner or women thicker, so much as I want their apparent "roles" to be diversified a little bit more.

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Speaking of relative body shapes, here's a bit of a tangent:

Most people believe that a woman is sexualised because she is drawn to have large breasts. I can say with almost complete certainty that this is false, because the general effect comes less from the woman's breasts and more from her entire figure. MovieBob had a good point here - it's what women are built to represent and what they behave to exude that's the problem, not just the size of their cups. If we can get past the subject of breasts, we'll notice that what sexualises female characters in fiction is practically everything about them - the hips, the legs, the back, the arms and more.

Men, interestingly enough, suffer a similar problem, though I'm not sure how sexual it is in nature. Most men in fiction are drawn as primarily having great upper body strength, but comparatively rarely having strength elsewhere. That's why I call them weightlifters. This often means that men's legs suffer, and suffer greatly, either being drawn as short, small or underdeveloped. Men, for some reason, tend to be drawn as though they're cranes on tracks - great lifting arms positioned over small, stubby legs that aren't all that great at moving them around. The leg slider in City of Heroes seems to have escaped this to some extent, but still the only real way to make a tall, slender man is to jam the leg slider all the way to the right and cross your fingers.

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In either case, body shape and posture is the key much more so than size or weight. I'm really not suggesting that we turn women into men - which is what using the Huge model to depict women practically does - so much as I'm suggesting we give them more body shapes to play around with.

"Is that what a fat lady looks like?" Without having seen your character, I'm going to go with "no," because you can't actually make a fat lady in City of Heroes You can make one that doesn't look like she could catch wind and drift away, not one that's actually "fat."

If I may presume, however: I believe leg length, specifically short legs, and hip width, specifically wide hips, are the most common causes of these misconceptions. The female model, when given a high "muscle" slider, develops a very large butt, which wide hips make seem even larger. Reducing this helps. Also, a short-legged, stocky character often comes off as fat even for men, just because it's not long and slender. You can combat this somewhat by using longer legs, which will help make her look taller without making her look any smaller. In fact, a long-legged big character seems to look even bigger than a short-legged big character just because said character looks TALL as well as big.

Counter-intuitivel, making the breasts smaller on large female characters "to compensate" doesn't end up helping much. As the character gets bigger and her frame becomes heavier, large breasts start to look less out of place, at least to me. I'm not saying it looks better or worse, but trying to compensate for a large character by making the breasts smaller will not help.

Making the head smaller, on the other hand, will. Heads scale with character size, so a tall one will have a larger head. However, if you shrink the head, your character becomes "more heads high" and "more heads wide," effectively looking even bigger than she actually is.

It's cheap tricks like this that I use most of the time to both get the basic dimensions I want AND make sure the character still looks like a human being, when that makes sense.

It's possible I'm just not looking on the right servers. I can only see Victory and Pinnacle, since that's where I have characters.