Poll: Vote for the COH Forums Reskin

Actually, he's not wrong about the second part. You are coming across exceedingly dramatic, even if you don't think you are.

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Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I meant everything I typed.

All I'll add is that two of the three examples provided could not be participated in unless some of us got a transatlantic flight to the Plummit. So no, not really relevant to those of us who have limited methods of interacting with the Devs.

Oh and for the record, I'm quite calm about it all, just disappointed. At least this mess has prompted me to get AdBlock installed.

No worries, tanstaafl.

For what it's worth, I would be happier if they found a way to get the majority vote up above the forums, my personal preference means squat here. I think they should widen the margins on either side of the forums, so that the full images that ya'll voted on can be placed on either side. Zwillinger has expressed reluctance to change the user experience we're all used to, but to be honest (from a widescreen perspective, especially), usability experts recommend wide margins to cut down on side-to-side eye movement anyway. The mockup is a great example of a design that's easier on the eyes, Zwillinger.

(Edit: I'll add that I often resize my browser window narrowly to read these forums on my 23" monitor instead of maximizing the browser window like I normally do elsewhere. It's not awesome to read whole paragraphs that stretch into single thin lines across my monitor.)

To answer you briefly, yes, my stake burning comment was a metaphor. But "frothing at the mouth" is hardly an accurate description of what I imagine fuels runaway threads like this. I rather think it's the opposite. Calling people outright liars or accusing them of sexploitation, to the contrary, is often posted thoughtlessly and there is no room for metaphor there (have you read this thread?); and yet these things seem perfectly socially acceptable here. I'm not so much defending the devs here, as I am defending maturity, and the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned: I still think empathy is cool.

There are some technical suggestions in my last post which you seem to have glossed over. I'd much rather turn our attention back in that direction, as this little aside of ours isn't likely to cover any new ground. You are welcome to PM me with any further grievances over my exceedingly dramatic use of metaphor.

A lot of the time when I complain about something, it's pointed out to me that this is hardly a new thing and, upon reflection, that's usually the case. For instance, when I started badmouthing the writers about redundancy in their word choice for I23, I ran Dark Astoria and realised the problem was front and centre there and I never really noticed it until it became rampant... Or at least until I saw it enough times.

Why I'm saying this is because the problem of how women are drawn and designed in this game is not a current issue per se, it's the culmination of probably two years of built-up frustration that I finally realised has its roots a LOT farther back. What reminded me? Desdemona, as seen in Belladonna Vetrano's arc. I recall describing my first impressions of her to a friend of mine as "She's wearing a Carnival mask for some reason, she has one garter belt but no garters and her boyshorts are riding so high up her *** it's a wonder she can even walk." Subsequently, I was forced to interrupt my own sentence about something completely different to muse how it's even possible for that woman to walk in those heels at all, much less on soft soil and grass. "It's magic!" my friend responded, and it... Kind of made sense. To cut you off at the curb, I'm aware of Vanessa's fate, and Belladonna mentions it, which got us into thinking about Giovanna Scaldi, and whether there were now three people inside Desdemona's head. This prompted me to comment that if her head became too cramped, Vanessa and Giovanna could easily migrate into her breasts. "They're as big as hear head, after all." was I believe my exact phrasing. And indeed they are, with the artist feeling the need to draw fold lines where Desdemona's skimpy push-up corset had lifted her breasts up over her chest.

What I'm getting at is Desdemona is not a new character, and what I'm saying is not new information. And if it were JUST her, not much of anyone would have complained. I... Guess it makes sense for her character to wear tiny camel toe hotpants and a skimpy corset? Either way, she wasn't that bad on her own. But it's NOT just her, and that's the problem. Pretty much since that woman showed up in the game, we've seen both new characters and old characters remade drawn up in this much more sexualised style, and then literally drawn to be titillating. Even characters who weren't. Diabolique going from wearing pants and a trenchcoat to wearing a bikini and a flaming brazier on her head was pretty dang bad, but at least we mostly saw still of her in-game model. Then Penny, whom Jim Temblor, the "disgruntled young man" referred to as "a good kid" started wearing a belly tee with panties painted on her pants. And then we start seeing her posed sexy and people started seeing the pattern.

I ask you this - when is the last time that an issue has focused around a female character who was not skimpy? Hell, even Emperor Marcus Cole is starting to notice this. When he looks at his remaining allies in his personal story mission, he realises that he's down to a wounded man, a beast and an evil woman who dresses like a harlot. In pretty much those exact words, no less. We had penny, we had Diabolique, we had Tillman, we had Desdemona... I guess you can quote Nightstar, but at least to my eyes that robot is more fetishised than all the others combined, and she can get away with being NAKED. Not that I dislike what I see, mind you, far from it, but... I just have to wonder when we're going to focus on a female character defined by strength of character and competence in the field WITHOUT also focusing on her "assets."

When people talk about this particular problem of character design and artwork priorities, you have to understand that they're not being whiny crybabies who got hung up on a single mediocre piece of artwork. This is a problem that, for many of us, has simmered for damn near two years now, through the various "harlots" as Cole calls them, to the the various costume sets, to the various game art. Getting over it is simply not an option any more, because it simply keeps happening, and you'll find many people get more and more determined to make a stand with every iteration.

And the real kicker is no-one wants to "remove a part of comic books" by removing skimpy sexualised women from the game. But that can't be the only representation women get in this game unless they pre-date the current art team.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

There are some parts of the source material that I like and want the game to emulate, and others - such as inconsistent characterization from too many different writers over time, overblown summer crossovers, character deaths that are more about increasing sales than telling a story, and oh yes, absurdly sexualized (to the point of "_____ don't work that way!") female characters written by and for male fanboys of all ages - that I don't. Really, I get that it's extremely authentic, but do we have to copy the embarrassing stuff along with the good?