Dudebro Syndrome

[thessalian]

Yes, I am still whittering about Mass Effect. Sorry. At least there's some actual social commentary involved

Comments

[thewaterbandit]

PREACH. I have just dipped my toe in the spoiler pool re: character design stuff and I am NOT IMPRESSED. They way they have treated the female characters is nothing short of ridiculous, and it's been nosediving since ME1. I am so tired of seeing all the female characters being described as 'sexy'.

Bioware, I want to pretend to be a badass space marine. I don't want to see my proxy mince around in heels and makeup while the dudes get to have the awesome armour.

[tyrell]

Here's FemShep on some promo material.

http://www.badreputation.org.uk/2012/01/09/found-feminism-mass-effect-3-pre-order-box/

Having played through 1 and 2 as both, I saw
a) No less respect or badass-ness for femshep
b) Several unique conversation lines for her establishing her badassness when lazy mercs didn't take her seriously (including an extra red-button violence action when someone doubted she could take on Archangel).

[thessalian]

That much, I get - though frankly, I think part of that is as much lazy coding as anything else (it's so much easier to just not deal with the gender of the protagonist from a sexism point of view, and the society they're dealing with is supposed to be above it, one supposes). The in-character stuff wasn't really my point, though; it's the out-of-character implications. It's the mindset that says, "A woman can be badass but she has to look sexy doing it, so let's make 'sexy' or 'sexier' one of the first points we make when covering every female character design or redesign". Have you seen what they're doing to EDI? I've only got a vague clue about who or what EDI is and ... just ... WHY?

Seriously, when it gets to the point where Ashley's redesign is for sex appeal (clearly stated in the text) whereas Kaidan's is for ruggedness and experience, and then the EDI thing ... and this coming from a games company that for whatever reason decided to tweak a female's 'run' animation in DA2 so that it was this hip-wiggle thing that you sure as

[ainulindale]

I almost always play Adepts (or Sentinels). Ads can't shoot worth a damn, no, but the key thing to remember is that you don't NEED a weapon...you ARE the weapon. Being one who generally avoids the mage class in fantasy RPGs (I prefer clerics...rogues barring that), this was hard for me to grasp. I had a gun. I wanted to USE it. Not do something like...oh...hey, SINGULARITY, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE! I also learned to take at least one companion that WAS good with a gun until I finally got the controls figured out (Garrus). After so much DA and never having played a PC FPS game outside of Unreal Tournament, it took quite a while to get the hang of ME.

[cowards_kiss]

<3

You're kind of my hero right now. Just so you know.

[adelpha]

I seem to recall them doing a really good job with the female characters in ME2. Strong, interesting, flawed, and not walking, armoured arse-breasts. It would be great if they could repeat that in ME3, but I'm starting to doubt it.