Samuel_Tow

Wait, what's the controversy around Desdemona? I haven't heard anything about it. I thought she was just an intentional cheesecake in boyshorts.

I have to disagree with you on Sister Psyche. Her portrayal in the tutorial pic is just horrid. No offence to the artist, I'm sure he thought this looked sexy (though why she'd be trying to look sexy when the city is falling down around her is anyone's guess), but she doesn't. Her spine looks like either it's broken or it's made of rubber bands and her mouth looks like that of a blow-up doll. There's no reason for Sister Psyche to look like she does EXCEPT to titillate, and that's not an expression of her character or personality. She's not trying to be sexy around the other people in the shot (BABs and his weird jaw). It's like god folded her back in half so that she would be titillating to the PLAYER. And that's just wrong.

I mentioned before that I don't mind objectification of characters when it's accompanied by an otherwise compelling character, but this only extends to objectification of said character that makes sense. If Sister Psyche wants to a lace curtain because she's liberated, fine. We know it's fanservice, but if it makes sense for her character to do that, we can roll with it. Why not? But to pose her sexy in front of Galaxy City being destroyed is just horrible, poor taste. People are dying, homes are being destroyed, aliens and villains are invading, lives are being devastated before our eyes, but check out the butt on her! Poor, poor, POOR taste, that's all I can say.

There's a time and place for sexuality, even for cheesecakes. Horrible, appalling devastation is neither the time nor the place for it. Whenever I read a story, watch a movie or even so much as look at a picture and I see not what's actually being shown to me, but instead spot the shadowy hand of the creator trying to TELL me something through the work I'm observing, I get angry. And that's exactly what I'm seeing here - the artist telling me that Sister Psyche has a butt, breasts and large lips. That's not what you should be telling me, comic. I'm well capable of reaching that conclusion on my own without you rubbing it in my face and going "Look! Look! You're not looking!" What you should be telling me is that Galaxy City is being destroyed and these two heroes are fighting for their lives and fighting for the lives of the people. They should look heroic, or at least desperate. Instead, Sister Psyche looks like the meteors interrupted her exotic dancing practice.

I don't mind objectification or sexualisation of characters because, in the end, it's all fantasy. If you can make a compelling character who's also a cheesecake, then more power to you. But if you CAN'T make a compelling character but still choose to objectify it or, worse still, CAN make one but objectify it in such a way that you undermine your own characterisation, that's not a good thing. That's never a good thing.

Sucked or not, I still prefer them to the new, much more involved ones. So long as it doesn't take a mountain of work, I see no reason why this shouldn't happen.

I can? That would help. How DOES one buy points, actually? I've been subsisting on the unexpectedly high amount of points I got at I21 launch so I haven't bought any with real money. Can I do a one-off purchase with a card that doesn't stick around anywhere afterwards and doesn't have to be on file beforehand? That would be the ideal solution, I think.

I'd say part of it is the very simple matter of the cost of development, and part of it is catering to the masses. I'm not saying that's a bad thing - Paragon Studios is a business, after all - and I'm definitely not saying the masses are somehow inferior for being... Well, "the masses." A lot of times, popular stuff is popular for a reason, and I'm not discounting that. Short of entering into some kind of preaching monologue about how society is WRONG for what society likes, I can't really argue with that. People like what people like. Rather than argue against it, let's just accept that as a fact.

The underlying question here lies elsewhere: Should the studio solely focus on developing more of what people are believed to want, ignoring what what's seen as a niche request (read: most everything I request ), thereby satisfying demand, even when there are seen to be enough costume pieces in those categories, or should the studio instead try to broaden the field of choices the game presents by opining up new avenues of creativity even if there isn't much of a stated interest in them beforehand? This may seem like a typical long-winded question with a simple answer - give the players what they want - but I think there's more to it than that.

If we interpret players to want directly what's being mentioned again and again - in my case more muscular women - then yes, the answer is obvious. But if we, instead, interpret player requests to be the vague description of much more general desires, then the answer starts to go sideways. To stick to my own case, when I ask for a more muscular texture for women, this is just the most obvious aspect of an entire theme that I feel the game is missing - that of more masculine and generally larger women. Even if the game doesn't give me directly what I asked for, so long as it gives me things in that general theme, I still fell like I've gotten what I wanted, if not necessarily what I asked for. A good example here are the IDF boots. I asked for big stuff for women, and the IDF are HUGE. They may not be "titanic arms," but they're close enough in a broader sense that I'm actually pretty satisfied with my entire thematic request just by these boots.

More broadly, the question of what to develop is muddied even further by the fact that you really don't like whether you like something or not until you actually at least see it. I didn't think I liked high heels as a concept until I made that pink bunny in the OP and her high heels made sense, and gave me a good frame of reference for making heeled women in the future. I didn't think I liked skirts in general until I had to make a character who called for a skirt just because that's what made sense, and that one gave me a good basis to make newer ones. Opening new grounds opens new opportunities, and that's often much more rewarding than yet another suit of tech armour like the other eleven we already had before.

My point is that while on a superficial level it might look like designing more of what players have been using the most, that's not always the right choice. Saturating a theme TOO much brings problems of its own, problems of burnout and boredom and problems of fans of other things feeling left out. Expanding the game's conceptual breadth, on the other hand, earns us new fans who didn't like the status quo but like the new addition, it expands the horizons of some of our existing players and just makes the game that much more diverse. Of course, the problem of people who liked the status quo and don't like the new addition might feel left out, instead, and that's always unfortunate, plus I know there will always be the kind of people I actually can't stand who insinuate that if characters should NOT be allowed to look a certain way or borrow from certain themes because "it's not like that in comic books." That, really, is the unfortunate reality of "you can't please all the people all the time."

In the end, the answer is neither one nor the other. The studio has, so far, done a reasonable job of appending existing themes and opening up new ones. Hell, much as I dislike the colouring of the set and the fact that it's a T9 veteran reward, I still think Celestial was so far outside the established game thematic that it opened up a whole new game to us, not all of it Fantasy. The Barbarian set itself brought its own thematic expansion with the oh-so-sweet "girl abs" chest texture. They've been doing a good job, and I encourage them to press on the advantage and continue being creative, rather than being constrained by what "society" expects.

Well, I don't necessarily mean gifting points. If, for instance, I go to the "Buy Points" link from the Paragon Store, is there an option to "Pay with card on file" AND an option to a "One-time payment" with whatever I have on hand? How are supposedly Free players supposed to buy these points, anyway? Are they supposed to have a card on file that's just never used?

I don't think this will work. If you want to register a card on file but NOT subscribe to game time with it, then NCsoft try to validate the card by making a $0 withdrawal from the card. Thing is, banks around here don't allow that, it throws up an internal error in their systems, I get an SMS about a failed transaction and to NCsoft it looks like the card was denied. I was told up front that there's nothing they can do about this initial withdrawal, and the only way I was able to enter my own card was to let my subscription expire and then resubscribe, paying as I did this to FORCE NCsoft's systems to make a withdrawal greater than $0.

I was told I could subscribe to the game using PayPal, and I can, but hat means said PayPal account will be charged for subscription time. I can't list a PayPal account as the "card on file" because it's not a card and the option for it doesn't exist on the accounting site.

Trust me, I went back and forth with this for a whole damn week, and the best I got out of it was a workaround. I don't know to do this without actually charging myself for subscription the guy's not going to want and that I kind of don't want to pay for.

I would, but that won't work in this case. See, the guy is incredibly modest and he'll outright refuse something like this. The only way I've been able to buy game-related stuff for him is when I've already bought a game over, say, Steam and I have an extra copy I can't use, so we might as well. Convincing him to spend money on himself - even when it's my money - isn't really an option and is just awkward for both of us. Plus, the only thing he has is card that'll run into the same problem as mine, anyway.

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I guess my question should have been: How do Free players purchase points and do they need a card on file?

Interesting observation... When I was in high-school, myself, I somehow ended up making friends primarily with girls, since I was (and am) a wimpy guy who prefers the philosophical side of things and doesn't enjoy getting drunk off his ***, so most of the guys I simply hated and wanted nothing to do with. Ugh! You think your jocks are bad? Try the hooligan youths of the Balkans! Ugh, tangent...

Anyway, because I spent most of my time around the girls in my class, I did see a lot of what you're describing going on, though mostly as a bystander. It often surprised me how vicious and biting high-school girls could be just among each other something as simple as "those shoes don't go with those pants." You watch dreck like Totally Spies and think that can't happen... But it can. I never really thought about it this way, but "other women" do indeed seem to be women's harshest critics by far.

Speaking as a guy and from knowing other guys, "guys aren't that fussy." In fact, I'd go as far as to say that guys tend to be very generous, ignoring aspects of woman they find attractive, but focusing on the aspects that they do. Perhaps this is an expression of being shallower and possibly a disrespect for women in general by seeing them as a collection of "parts" rather than as a whole person, but in some ways it leads to a much more easygoing attitude. So what if those shoes don't go with those pants? The shirt is still very nice, so that's good, right?

I guess there's an argument here between judging people based on aspects of their whole, or trying to look past superficial aspects and judge people as a whole person, and where objectification comes from the former. Consider a costume-obsessed City of Heroes player (i.e. me), and what said player thinks when seeing a cool costume: "I want to use those shoulders!" "I want that hat!" "I didn't think those boots could look like this!" It's very rare, I think, that we'll look at an NPC with a costume we like and think "Wow, this is a good overall design, even though I don't like any of the pieces." We see a costume we like because it has pieces we want, or because it has an idea we like. When we see a costume we like, we don't see the NPC as a better person for having it, we see the NPC as a foam mannequin that the costume is stretched over.

I don't think City of Heroes can ever escape this kind of objectification. The costume editor teaches up to treat people as collections of parts, so when we see a costume we like or one we dislike, our heads break it down into its component parts and tells us which parts we think were used well and which parts weren't. Take, for instance, the Resistance-looking Magiacl Armour dudes from the Carnival of War - they look AMAZING for almost their entire body, EXCEPT those god damn Banded boots. They stand out, they look bad and they have no place to be on an otherwise great costume, but they are.

I should probably save the rest of that line of thought for a later quote

Interesting you should mention this. I sometimes say I'm "weird" specifically because my brain works in completely the opposite direction. Supposing I see a specific face as the "norm," I don't actually find faces that look like it attractive. I find them boring. Speaking purely in the realm of character designs, anything which looks like the "norm" turns me off, because it's been done, because I've seen many times before and because it's no longer interesting. Things that deviate from the norm look - to me at least - much more interesting.

Now, of course, I still find some things more attractive than others, but the ones I enjoy the most are the things that deviate from that norm the most while still remaining attractive. Speaking of female faces specifically, I like a pretty face as much as the next guy and dislike a disfigured face just instinctively. And yet, some of the coolest faces I've seen were the ones with the huge scars and giant stitches when I or others have been able to make them work. Pushing the boundaries of norms while still remaining tasteful is where I find the greatest aesthetic fulfilment. Restricting ourselves to said norms is just... Boring. Boring, because we can do so much more.

I honestly don't think it matters. Personally, I've never been against eyecandy or fanservice or any other kind of characteristic done primarily to look pretty. That's what half of my characters are, as a point of fact. So long as this is done tastefully, skillfully and constitutes only ONE part of an otherwise compelling characters, then there's really no shame in it. My single oldest female character, for example, is a cyborg who lost her own body and had to have her brain transplanted in an artificial one to save her life. As such, she has ended up with a "smokin' hot" body specifically built to be like this, which would normally be considered extreme fanservice. However, the tragedy of said character is that she has never accepted this body as her own and is, in fact, never comfortable in her own skin, so she'll abuse her own indestructible body with little regard for modesty, but it is her mind that she will guard ruthlessly, never letting anyone get close to her on an emotional level.

I like to think I've done a good job on the above because while she IS eyecandy to a large extent, I think I've done enough to "legitimise" her character as an actual person to "earn" the right to some fanservice I'm not sure if that's how these things actually work, but that's how I've always seen them: There's nothing wrong with objectifying characters physically, so long as you don't do this at the expense writing them as hollow author pleasure vessels devoid or any personality. A compelling character who also happens to be unnecessarily sexy is still a compelling character. A hollow character who was made specifically to be unnecessarily sexy, on the other hand, is a cheesecake, or alternately a beefcake.

Typically, men's depiction of male characters is rather limited as the way men view other men is rather limited in general. Arcana already covered much of that. When you see big burly men cutting the legs off spiders with swords the size of aircraft carriers - what Yahtzee refers to as "a 14-year-old's view of masculinity" - that's how a lot of guys like to be seen by other guys. I'm not saying that's always a guy writing the character in much the same way as I don't want to say it's a guy making the cheesecakes, but that's how a lot of guys like to think of themselves. In a culture which seems to promote beer-drinking, weight-lifting and contact sports as the height of masculinity, that's the sort of mental image men get of what they're expected to be, and that's the sort of mental image that bleeds into works they create.

Male characters written by women, though sometimes just the same, are often much more diverse and much more often centre on more spiritual qualities. There are a thousand tropes just for that, sure, but the mere fact that we always assume the "tank" has to be a big dude and the healer and tiny girl is reason enough to pause and think about it. Not all men ARE big and strong. Not all men SHOULD be. Not all men, furthermore, should even WANT to be big and strong, and the ones who don't shouldn't be mocked and ridiculed. But because there exists this kind of peer pressure pushing men into that specific stereotype, that's what we see the most.

However, I don't think male characters in City of Heroes are nearly as sexualised as people think, at least judging by what people tend to make. Oh, sure, the muscular beefcake exists, but most male characters I've teamed with are robots, hooded, dragons, in power armour or still something OTHER than beefy man in skin-tight spandex. You see a few of those, sure, but by and large, people just seem to feel comfortable making them in many different shapes and forms. Compare that to female characters, whom you almost never see masked. Hell, I had to fight my own irrational instincts before I could make a fully-masked female character before I could break out of that rut.

What I'm trying to say is that men are often seen as most appealing when they look like weightlifters, but this is usually restricted to how they are perceived by other men. When female writers get involved, the range of male characters becomes much broader. I don't want to say any less objectified as that's more down to the specific writer's skill and inclination, but it's clear to me that women like more types of men than men do

Speaking strictly of the realm of costume creation, I would very much like to see new costume pieces I never thought I'd want developed. To me, expanding my own horizons is probably the number one reason why I love this game. Before City of Heroes gave me this amazing tool to create characters with, I never even thought I wanted to make female characters. It felt weird to play them. These days, they're probably my most numerous ones.

Only ever sticking to the themes I know I enjoy is the death knell of creativity. Pushing my own boundaries, experimenting with things I'm not familiar with and even working with things I expressly DISLIKE is where I find the game's greatest excitement. With every new character I make that I never thought I wanted to make, I feel like I've grown richer in experience, and that's something money can't really buy.

Oh, sure, there are specific things I want just because the game doesn't have them, but when it comes to costume pieces, there isn't any one single thing that I specifically DON'T want. Even things I don't like when I first see them are things I'll want to toy around with in time, just to see if I can't make a character type I don't like in a way I'll still enjoy. The only time I'll argue against adding one costume piece in favour of another is if we're looking to add to a category that already has more than enough options, whereas adding to another that has few or no options would be much better. It's always better to expand the costume creator outwardly and enable more and weirder costumes, because it enables those of us who want it to push our own boundaries and increase the breadth of characters we create.

I have no interest in making a gunslinger, for instance. I don't like Westerns in the slightest and I don't like the thematic. I'm still excited for the Gunslinger set because I wonder if I can't make a gunslinger with a weird story and a unique look that I'm going to like anyway. And I'm pretty sure I can, if I put my mind to it.

Long story short - yes, I want them to spend time making costumes I didn't ask for, provided they're not adding to an already saturated category (like tech armour).

As I said before, I think the problem is less sexualisation and more objectification. You can make a character whose sole reason to exist is because he or she looks attractive. That doesn't have to be sexually attractive, any kind of aesthetic attraction would count here - good use of colours, unorthodox use of costume pieces, a seemingly impossible overall look and so forth. So long as that character exists purely for his or her looks and not for his or her personality, that's a character who's been objectified, sexually or otherwise. In this regard, men suffer as much as women.

However, I still don't think this is a bad thing. Like I said before - if said character has been written well enough to be compelling, then being objectified can be forgiven, and indeed enjoyed for what it is. The problem isn't objectification. It's poor writing confusing a pleasing appearance with a compelling character.

Ghost Widow is popular because she's the perfect storm of many conditions. She has been written as both a strong character and a tragic one, which gives players both sympathy and respect for her. She is also the most pleasant of the villainous lieutenants, neither being too disgusting in her villainy nor to irritatingly melodramatic in her tragedy. She is also written to be mysterious on a superficial level and interesting on a deeper level, as well. Even without a hot body, Ghost Widow is still "sexy" because she is written the part. That she also has very clear, striking, memorable visuals, a pretty face and a nice body is just the icing on the cake.

Like all the Seers and Widows, Ghost Widow is still objectified because she's a ridiculously hot woman in skintight vinyl, but her writing "earns" her the right to that, and she pulls it off because she's a compelling character who also happens to be sexy. That's the right way to do it, I think.

Precisely. I don't mind objectification or sexualisation - everyone is, or at least should be, free to pursue his or her preferences, even if I don't like the result. It's their characters, it's their choice. Where I mind this kind of objectification is when it EXCLUDES options and in so doing limits my freedom of expression, forcing me to use a much narrower frame of concepts than I'd like.

When objectification of characters exists as an option, this doesn't bother me. When it exists as the ONLY option, however, I have a problem with it. And right now, in City of Heroes, this exists for women a lot more so than for men for the simple fact that men have a lot more body shapes to choose from than women do. This brings me back to my previous point - men are allowed to be anything, from thin to chunky, from small to impossibly huge, from butt ugly to a fangirl's dream. Women, by contrast, are more or less limited to a fanboy's dream and not a lot else.

To the editor's credit, tools DO exist to deviate, but you have to know where to look, you have to know what to do with them and you have to pretty much hammer a square peg in a round hole to achieve this deviation, and even then you don't deviate by this much. I have at least two masculine women, at last two hideous monstrous women, at least two women with concealed faces and... Well, and so on. However, in doing this, I have pretty much run out of costume pieces, so any other unusual women I want to make have to either repeat much of the same pieces and slider options, or otherwise wait on future developments of the sort that I've been hounding David since he showed up on the forums

Objectification doesn't bother me when it exists in fiction. It bothers me when it's forced down onto my own characters, pretty much.

We were assuming that what we saw would be a small part of the costume set we would get. Turns out that, save for the hood, what we saw in that demo WAS what we would get, and we didn't even get the cool armoured gloves from that. The general stance was "It's good as a player costume, but not for the CoT." At no point did I get a sense that people thought that was good enough for a costume SET, just that it was something they'd wear.

Yet here I am, asked to pay the equivalent of $5, half a regular Super Booster pack for a third what would normally be in a booster pack in terms of costume bits, with only a one or two actually different costume bits in there. Because, think about it: What IS in that set which isn't a practical duplicate of something else? We got chest, legs, and boots that don't present anything new that existing textures couldn't replicate, we got a pair of gloves that, while interesting, aren't all that special, we got a hood that's not very good, a belt that's not very good and the most we got was a pair of unique shoulders and a skirt.

Once upon a time, that might have been enough for me to throw $10 at it, but I won't. Not this time. Not when I can see all the cool things that the set could have held but didn't, because because. Paragon Studios need to learn that if they want to sell me something, then it needs to be worth buying. I will not be nickel-and-dimed for half-finished products.

Proliferate more pieces to player, give us the pope hats, the belts, the butt capes, the cool gloves and so forth, then bundle the whole thing as a $10 purchase if you want. The price isn't relevant. So long as the pack itself is worth OWNING, it's worth buying, even if overpriced. Or, you know, do the sensible thing and add those things, then just add them to the existing $5 bundle so people who bought it already get more stuff and people who didn't buy it actually have a reason to.

For me, it's really not the hat or the belt or any one single costume piece. It's the very act itself which turns me off. I am DONE paying for products like this. I bought your Party Pack once. I'm not going to buy what may as well be the Party Pack again. Even I'm not that gullible.

Before the term "pope hat" gained popularity, those of us asking for the CoT mage hats were actually asking to use their "silly hats," instead. And I stand by that request. Yes, the hats are silly. I still want to wear their silly hats

No, no, I didn't mean to say you took it as a joke. I know that you and a few others agreed with me. I'm saying that people at large see it as a joke just because... Why would you want a woman with muscular arms? Real life women aren't like that, right?

I didn't mean to insinuate that you made fun of me. I apologise if that's how it came off.

You know, initially when I read this I was going to talk about how men don't need to worry about sexualisation, but something happened that led me to believe that sexualisation isn't the problem here. I'm not sure how to describe it, so I'll call it "caricaturisation." As I described before, it's quite possible to objectify characters and sacrifice their personalities for pure looks without this necessarily being sexual in nature. The problem, as I see it, is that men in popular fiction have been turned into caricatures of what a man is supposed to look like.

So what happened to change my mind? A friend of mine was watching trailers for a whole bunch of games, and something struck me about all of them, which I actually said out loud to him: "Why are men always represented with short stubby legs and huge bulbous chests?" And, yeah, why is that? Completely separate from the fact that I HATE this body shape with a passion, that's the body shape of a slow bruiser, more often than not, and not at all the body shape of, say, a free runner or a gymnast. So why are men most often represented as basically weightlifters, to keep that analogy?

The answer to that is "someone clearly likes stubby men," but I suspect it goes deeper than this, into some kind of core belief of what a man is supposed to understand. Sadly, I'm illiterate when it comes to metaphors and hidden meanings, plus I did ask that we don't draw broader conclusion just from very basic examples, but I will say this - if women in this game suffer for being skinny and petite, then men all too often suffer for being chunky and clumsy. In fact, the single biggest complaint about the male model that I've heard over the last seven years, many many times over, is the way they run. And I kind of agree - their running animation is stiff and inelegant, like the guy has serious muscle cramps and is trying to run without actually using most of his joints. It doesn't help that his pelvis never goes up or down.

My point, if there is one, is to suggest that I don't think the problem here is so much "sexism" or the sexualisation of men or women so much as it's the act of turning men and women into caricatures of their true selves, then trying to design a game around that very limited, exaggerated caricature. In this, men suffer as badly as women. Someone upthread mentioned how hard it is to make a male character lighter and skinnier, and I've fallen into this trap, myself. The original Samuel Tow was supposed to be a light, skinny, agile guy who relied on speed and precision with a sword. Trying to do this in-game, however, made him look just malnourished and underdeveloped so I ended up having to give him considerably more muscle mass than I would have liked, just so he wouldn't look like he's at death's door. It didn't help that the guy was and is pale as a dead man.

All of that said, women in games and even in this game still have it considerably worse. Though they sometimes look weird when you do this, you can still make thin men or thick men, tall men or short men, heavy men or light men. Women, on the other hand, really only work within a much smaller range of body shapes and much smaller range of demeanours, and their run style is still drawn up as though they're wearing high heels even when they're not actually wearing high heels, or shoes at all.

Consider this an anecdote, but I do want to comment on it just the same:

I don't. I don't say this to brag or as an excuse for my porn comic inspired bunny girl (yes, seriously), but more to illustrate a counterpoint to the common perception. For me, when I think of making my "heavy" a big dude and my "support" a tiny girl, a red light flashes in the back of my head and I think: "That's boring! Everyone's doing this, I've seen this a zillion times, so why would I just want to repeat it?" If it's been done, then there's no reason for me to do it, so instead I do completely the reverse. I make my "heavy" a big, tall, imposing woman and my "support" a wimpy but smart guy. This opens up the door to so many cool story opportunities, like...

OK, tangent within a tangent, but whatever

We all know that a lot of men see women as inferior. We don't like it, but it's a fact of life. If a woman tries to make a break in a "man's business," she's looked upon as a weak link and having to, as Ice Road Trucker Lisa Kelly put it, "work twice as hard to prove she's half as good." Well, why not take that situation and introduce a lady who outclasses the dudes at their own game. They're big, but she's bigger. They're strong, but she's stronger. Now just imagine how horrible it must feel for the sexist jackass who thinks that a woman's place is in the kitchen to get grabbed by the neck and slammed into a wall by "a woman" for being such a gigantic jerk?

Oh, sure, it's just as much a wish fulfilment fanfic to a woman who deserves it be treated with respect by the story she's in, and probably doesn't make for a very good plot point when the author is clearly biassed, but look at it from my perspective: How often do you see that in a story? More specifically, how often do you see it played straight and taken seriously? All too often I'll see "tough women" in movies played up as an act, where they fall apart and need A MAN to rescue them when the situation really gets serious, so to see even one female character act like a big damn hero even just once is still amazingly awesome, even if it's motivated by fairly base emotions.

So, yeah, make my "tanks" female more often than not, just because this seems like a more interesting concept to use. Much more so than "yet another tough guy." Hell, I'm waiting for Street Justice specifically so I can give it to that tiny school girl I posted in the OP. Big tough guys doing MMA are the norm, and I'm sure everyone else is already planning one. Me, I like to take the path less travelled, and so make a little girl who can make grown men villains cry for their mommy. You don't see that every day, and to me, that's what makes it awesome

This reminds me of something of a tangent and an anecdote:

Have a look at my Stardiver, my all-time most linked costume Do you see how she came out? Do you know how much input I actually had over her costume? Not very. Why would I make a costume in such a hands-off approach? Because the editor conspired to restrict me. Here's how things are tied together:

I wanted a character with as many auras as I could use, so I used bot the Celestial wings and the Celestial aura. The Celestial aura HAD to be white because the boots and gloves glowed white. The boots and gloves glowed white because IDF gear is set to match the colour of its glow to the colour of its secondary colour, which encompasses close to half or the item's surface. A gold primary was by design, and to avoid making the costume TOO bright, I had to pick either a white or a black secondary, and since a black secondary makes the lights not glow, I had to choose white.

Her eyes were originally intended to be green, but since I'm limited to only one aura, I had to match the eye colour to the Celestial aura colour, and the Celestial aura had to be white, as I explained.

Her Celestial wings were initially intended to fold down when she was on the ground, as they are on the pic. When I played around with it, I found that the offset from the back prevented the folded wings from looking like jet exhausts like I'd planned and just made them look goofy, so I had to go with the always open wings. The wings were intended to be white like the aura, but with them always open, they consumed and completely covered the white shoulders of the Celestial aura. The only way to solve this was to use a different colour for them, hence why they're a fiery orange.

I originally wanted to use the new Defence set as an undershirt for the armour, but thought it would make me look like a ponce to use a full set as soon as it came out, so I used "Defence Lite," which is Stealth, essentially. The colours I picked by concept.

She is wearing IDF boots and gloves to begin with because the IDF boots are both the BEST-looking large boots for females AND the only boots that actually glow. I had no choice in the matter. Once I'd used the IDF boots, it only made sense to pair them up with their set-appropriate IDF gloves, hence I didn't really have a choice there, either.

I never wanted to use the Celestial shoulders or belt. Correction, I wanted to use the belt, but it didn't match anything. However, I looked through all of the existing shoulders, an only the Celestial Armour shoulders matched the Celestial shoulder aura in any way. I pretty much HAD to use them. Once I'd use the Celestial shoulders and introduced an off-colour element to the costume, I could easily justify having another off-colour element in the Celestial Belt, which is how that one ended up there.

When making her face, I had to pick the sightless one, as that was the only one without features. Since I wanted a "black hole for a face," I needed framing items, and the only ones that fit were either Half Helmets or Helmets and the Half Helmets looked more alien. Only that one single chin strap, however, had the effect I wanted, which is to frame the face from below without covering the mouth, suggesting that there actually IS a mouth under there. The only mask pattern I could use to colour the neck separate from the face so as to make the face stand out as a black hole was Neck Cover, and if you look closely, that actually bleeds though the chin guard a little bit in the corner.

---

Why am I retelling all this? Because I want to tell the Art Team that when I'm faced with costume items with limitations, I WILL work within those limitations and make a great costume regardless. Sometimes, the limitations are so severe and chain into each other so much that the costume ends up designing itself. And that's just fine, because if that's what it takes to make a good costume, then that's what it takes.

Please stop keeping pieces from me because they "clip." I trust I've proved that I can work around problems like that.

This reminds me of something else that makes me outright angry, and which may or may not be breaking my own rules to think about it: Women thought of as necessarily SCALED-DOWN people as compared to men.

A slight reality check: I'm aware that, on average, women are shorter, light are less physically strong than men. That's part human biology, part culture ascribing different aspirations to either gender, but the basic fact still remains: Women are "smaller" than man more often than not.

Yeah, so? For years now, RPGs that offer you a choice of gender have had no trouble at all ascribing the same physical strength and other attributes to a character regardless of whether said character is a man or a woman, and that's a good thing. Sure, it's unlikely, but it's not impossible, and even if it were, that's what fiction's for, right?

So why, then, are we incapable of breaking statistics when it comes to character height or character weight or physical build? Why are women always, but always, depicted as one head shorter than men and always petite? Yes, statistically, they often are, but exceptions exist. I don't want to trawl the 'net for pics, but everyone should know that women exist who are both taller and bigger than most men. They exist in real life, but almost never in games or movies. Why?

To stick to my rules, I'd say the question here is "Why are women always depicted as smaller than men even in game with strong customization?" and, more specifically, "Why is that the case here?" The answer to that question, at least in my eyes, is simple - that's what "society" thinks a woman should look like, so that's what a woman looks like. You can deviate from this, but only up to a point, and that point is usually a very short distance away.

The reason this bugs me is selfish - that's not what I like - but the broader subject is still interesting, I think. It is acceptable for men to be short, it is acceptable for them to be tall. It is acceptable for men to be thin, it is acceptable for them to be brawny, it is even acceptable for them to be fat. The same doesn't hold true for women. A tall woman is seen as an oddity, a brawny woman is seen as a freak (something that shames me every time I see it in comments around the 'net) and a fat woman is outright ridiculed. But why?

Why are men accepted in all the shapes they come in, yet women are only really accepted in one shape ever at all? Simply put, because men are never scrutinised all that closely, while women are... Somehow, by some ungodly authority, held up to a strict, exacting standard of conformity. A British comedian once had an entire skit about all the horrible things women do to themselves to look prettier, ending with "But you know what the worst thing is? Guys aren't that fussy!" Speaking as a guy... No, I really don't think we are. So where the HELL does that kind of pressure come from?

Realistically speaking, all of that stuff I just said is largely too big for me to comprehend - like I said, I'm not smart enough to discuss things on that level. However, where it does affect me in a way that I can speak on with some authority is that whenever games give me a choice between a male and a female character, the male is well-built and brawny while the female is skinny and short. I would KILL for a game, movie, story or ANYTHING where the lead character and "heavy" is female and the wimpy support character is male. And, no, Heavy Metal 2000 doesn't count, as that movie is as sexist as they come despite its apparent pretence.

I suppose what we could take out of this is that we probably shouldn't hold our fictional settings to the same draconian, exacting standard as real life society. In real society, those norms are set up by the kind of group think that's very hard to shift, but in a game, they're set by the people making it. If a game's developers wanted us to have unorthodox themes, then they are completely free to do that. I dare say that might even boost their sales, but I'm clearly biassed

There's a broader issue of costume parity between the different models that I think exists separately of gender preconceptions here, and that's the issue of honest-to-god opportunity cost. I don't necessarily agree with men getting more butch Barbarian stuff and women getting more high heel shoes, but David still made a good point on the subject - they did what they could and they kept to social expectations, roughly speaking. That's not the art team's stance on feminism, it's just their stance on what they could work on in a given amount of time, and their choice to stick to what people would expect as a baseline, then fill in the gaps if and when they return to the theme.

Now, of course, there is the somewhat less pleasant question of whether those "social expectations" should even be acknowledged at this point in our collective cultural evolution, and I tend to be on the side of "Screw tradition!" just as a general thing, but when they're faced with a hard choice, erring on the side of tradition seems like a prudent business move. So long as we do get around to proliferating those sets at some point, I see no reason to hold the art team to task over which gender has what costume pieces. To me, this is more the Neuron syndrome than any actual slight against feminism. It's what they had time to work on and oh, look! Another costume set!

Long story short, I do believe all models should have access to all costume pieces, but I don't see most of the gender-specific costumes as an example of sexism but more an example of poor artwork priorities, favouring new shinies over filling long-standing gaps.

This may come off as a bit of a tangent, but: My ultimate goal in any discussion and, indeed, when addressing any problem very rarely is to actually find a solution. Much more often, I want to find out which are the right questions to ask, and I want to find a better way of presenting the problem. All too often - and this is rarely as true as questions of feminism - problems don't arise from lacking solution but actually from people not having a very good idea of what it is that they're trying to fix. Is feminism trying to fix the way fictional women dress? The way they behave? Is feminism even trying to FIX anything? What, exactly, is the problem?

That's not me issuing a challenge, but rather illustrating the point. A problem well-understood is a problem easily solved. It is when we're not clear what it is that we're trying to rectify that we start applying awkward, partial solutions that cause more harm than good and divide people as to how best to proceed. As such, most of what I'll be doing here is trying to put the "problem," generally speaking, in better, more concrete terms so that we're all on the same page

I want to put slightly different spin on that particular subject. If we accept that the main recurring problems are objectifying women and placing physical attraction over a developed personality, I don't think this is strictly limited to sexual appeal. The reason I listed the characters I did at the start wasn't just to show that they're skimpy-dressed, but that some of them are also deliberately "weird." And I'm not talking about my pink bunny girl or my green troll girl, those are fairly obvious. I'm talking about my teal slime girl. For her, I came up with her distinct look first and only THEN got to work on actually putting a character to the look.

What I'm trying to say is that you very much CAN make physical appeal your first priority when creating a character without actually making a half-naked cheese cake. That's just the easiest, most obvious way to do it - take all her clothes off. It is not, however, the only way. Years ago, I came up with the theory of "naked spots" as a way to make ostensibly heavily-dressed female characters still have the aesthetic of revealing outfits without their outfits being actually revealing, just by leaving a few particular places bare. This gives you the revealing costume aesthetic without needing a revealing costume.

Even more prudent, however, is the fact that you can shoot for simple visual appeal that is just not sexual in nature. For instance, my green troll girl wears quite a revealing outift, but that's not the reason I made her. Quite on the contrary, the reason was that she broke the conventional rules of female sexyness by being big (easily 8 feet tall), heavy-built and muscular, and by having both a demeanour and a personality that correspond to a large physical stature and great physical strength. I created Xanta as a thought experiment as to whether I could make a character greatly "un-feminine" by conventional wisdom and still keep her appearing feminine as a net result. To my eyes, I succeeded. To the eyes of others who've felt the need me so, she's gross. To each their own.

But that's kind of the point - I don't have to put a female character in a string bikini to emphasise physical attraction. That's just most guys' "thing." Speaking purely for myself as a fan of all things weird, unusual and unexpected, I can make something like this or slightly less recently this and still end up with a "girl" who exists solely because I like looking at her. Just because unusual brainstorm ideas are my "thing" doesn't make the notion of placing physical attraction at top priority any less of an issue.

But then, if I can extend physical appeal to what may as well be "everything we like to look at," then I have to ask the question - is that really a bad thing? Sure, when I made Xanta, I wasn't thinking of a deep, intricate character, but rather "Hot damn this looks awesome! I wonder if I can make her sword bigger?" but really, isn't that kind of the point? In this game, we make things because we like the things we make. Sometimes we like them because they have an amazing concept, sometimes we like them because they have an amazing ***, but so long as the character is done with taste, skill and enthusiasm... Isn't that a good thing overall, cheesceake though it may end up as?

I actually meant that the other way around. I have no problem with bringing real-life philosophy and, indeed, real-life culture into a discussion of the game, so long as it's done tastefully. What I'd like to AVOID, however, is taking our discussion of the game back into the real would and applying conclusions reached here onto broader issues. So City of Heroes players like making girls who run around in their panties. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is something I'm eager to discuss. What this means for feminism in general, on the other hand... Not so much.

Where we draw our arguments from isn't my issue. The broader the background the better. I just really want to stick to issues that are directly or at least tangentially applicable to the game, partly because that kind of is a forum rule and partly because we're mashing together a WHOLE lot of different subjects that are far too big to discuss all at once and I'm not smart enough to discuss them in full anyway

Maybe, but me suggesting it means I don't know anything about feminism... Probably means I don't know anything about feminism

In either case, I'm trying to sidestep the heavier of the problems for no reason other than because I don't feel confident enough to speak about them with any authority or conviction, and if I did try to, I'd make a double-cheeked *** of myself.

We're kind of treading into dangerous waters here, but this reminds me of a common debate I see in these threads - the notion that a revealing costume HAS to have been made by a man. I may, at one point, have believed that, but we're blessed with a game that probably has as many female players as it does male ones, and so I've seen enough women attest to making equally skimpy costumes, themselves.

As for the deeper subject, that kind of is a problem, but it's more of a problem of society and culture and that's veering a bit away from discussions about the game and into discussions that I'm honestly not competent for. That is, however, a marked problem for this game, because developers more or less make what we ask for, and it's been very difficult, historically speaking, to ask for costumes and designs that don't fit the conventional definition of sexy and attractive. And I say "difficult" not because I keep being rebuffed when I do this - quite on the contrary, David Nakayama has been nothing if not open-minded. No it's been difficult because it seems like a lot of players consider a female character who isn't somehow attractive to not be feminine and "I'd rather the developers work on something else." as is becoming a catch phrase worthy of "soon" around these parts.

That's a good way of putting it, though - if we can dissociate sexual attraction from good aesthetic design, we may actually end up with a lot more freedom. I wish I'd thought to phrase is like that from the get go.

Thank you. I'll go edit my post to include that.

*edit*

Aaand... Done

See, one of the reasons I found that revelation so interesting is because while it had never crossed my mind to think about it, as soon as I realised this was a "thing," I immediately started remembering things I'd watched and seen and realising this was actually pretty true. Worse still, I started thinking back to things I've described or had drawn and realising I - much as I consider myself fair in this regard - was just as guilty of.

I'm still not quite sure what I want to do with this revelation, but I'll be re-examining my female characters as I get around to playing them in the future, that's a given. Reading what I've written, I'm also reminded of the three prerequisites for the Bechdel Test:

Thank you. I'll go edit my post to include that.:

1. At least two female characters have to exist.
2. They have to have at least one conversation with each other, that...
3. Is not about one of the male characters in the cast.

I caught myself afoul of this rule when writing a recent story, but I caught it early enough in the planning stages to fix it Keeping an eye out for fairness in design is trickier than it seems at first sight. Just KNOWING about it seems like it should be enough, but it really isn't.

It does... But then it kind of doesn't, that's part of why the subject keeps coming up. This is one of these things that I really want to point to someone in management and say "YOUUU! You did this!" but the truth of the matter is I just can't. How women are represented dates back to, what? 2000? 2001? In fact, if you look at some of the oldest trailers and screenshots, women had a whole array of their own animations for powers, I believe, usually causing them to stick their butts back into the camera or contort their spines so as to make Michael Turner green with envy. As you say - that's how comic books are, for the most part, and that's how the game was made back in 2001 when "customization" was a dirty work and I'm more than positive no-one really expected how well players would take to such comprehensive customization.

To a large extent, that original legacy has shaped the game into what it is today. As I said before, BABs made female weapons small because females were made with small hands and giving them bigger hands was like giving them fingers - too much work. Whatever we may have to say about the Breast... Sorry, I mean the "Chest" slider or the Hips slider and so forth, the actual "Muscle" slider is also a legacy of the game's original roots, and that has always been more of a butt and breasts slider fort women since as far back as I remember. We've spoken about a new female model that's less like this, and David - the guy who's basically open to practically any suggestion - still said "No, that won't happen." in a way so final that I haven't really considered broaching the subject again since.

So, on the one hand... Yeah, that's how comic books are and that's how the game was made back before players really had any say over it. On the other hand, though... Some of the ways things are being handled concern me. I have to hand it to David for coming out of the Barbarian mess with head held high and a good point, but some of the things players said then - and indeed that players have said on the subject before - concern me. Sure, some people just don't like the more "butch" approach to making female characters, and I can respect that in the same way that I'm not a big fan of feminine male design, but I heard noises to the effect that women SHOULDN'T be represented with more masculinity, that this somehow took away from femininity and was in itself just wrong. I'm not saying that's actual feminism talking... In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not, but my point is that some people do genuinely seem to feel that way, and THAT concerns me.

I've more or less accepted my state of being branded as "weird" just because I have a couple of "giant women" that I've spent years asking for muscles for. It comes with the territory. Yet it strikes me that so much more COULD be done on the subject that simply never is, and a lot of the time it feels like the popular belief is that only I and, like, a couple other people here on the forums want that so it's not something worth giving a lot of attention to. I can't say if that's actually true, because priorities are something the art team is juggling all the time, but that's the vibe I get from some parts of the playerbase, and that really worries me. The developers I can argue, because the developers can be appealed to, even if they don't always look it. And appeal to them I have, but it's players that I kind of want to discuss with, because more often than not, it's players I clash with on the subject more than anyone else.

To make a long story short, though, I kind of want to see City of Heroes expand to include as many overall themes as is mechanically possible. I guess the reason this comes up from time to time is less because people want something that CAN'T happen and more because people feel like what they want is seen as "wrong" for the game. That's probably what I want to discuss more than anything else.

Here's the thing, though - I'm really not looking at the politics behind it, or indeed even at feminism itself. Like I said, I'm in no position to talk about either.

More, I'm interested in examining the representation of women in our game, because while we're miles ahead of most other MMOs, I'll definitely admit that much, I feel there's still rather a lot to say. I choose to examine this outside of context, because I don't think there's any one thing that needs to be DONE on the subject. More, I'm looking at examining people's mentality and beliefs and trying to find the broadest possible compromise between them. Because when it comes to how it relates to THIS game, I think what we really need is to come up with a more specific idea of what we should be asking for in the broadest possible terms.

Let me give you an ooold example: Female weapons were scaled down to be very small because the female model was made with very small hands. As far as that goes, it's only logical. However, the problem really isn't JUST giving women bigger weapons, it's the reasoning behind making their hands so small to begin with, and the reasoning behind why giving them bigger hands has never even been considered. It's not a question of JUST new weapons or modified old ones, it's a question of the rhetoric behind the very idea itself.

Again - I don't want with examples here, because examples muddy the broader issue of how we feel with the narrower issue of what we want in particular. And I do believe there's much to be said here without breaking forum rules. I like to think our community is reasonable enough to discuss "difficult" subjects with a level head.