Rivalry

Sometime ago a game like Marvel Rivals emerged and quickly endeared itself to many gamers, or did it? It turns out some gamers and especially female gamers have objected to the way the superheroines are portrayed there, if I was honest most of the female characters there are ridiculously busty. They also tend to be leaner than their male counterparts, which makes them seem more palatable to certain male gamers. Though it’s true not all male gamers are sexist perverts, let alone for life, but a number of games in the past have set the tone for certain things. Not just in depicting helpless women a lot, but also sexualised heroines fairly often too. In the cases with characters like Kitana, Sonya Blade, Cammy White and Lara Croft, though these characters are ostensibly admirable heroines this is undercut by unnecessary sexualisation at times, well until recently with newer games featuring the three of them appearing to be less sexualised than they did in recent memory. Though unfortunately this isn’t well-received by other male gamers, despite their respective developers’ sincere attempts to concede to feminist criticism.

Actually even in games that don’t sexualise female characters a lot, either that they simply don’t show up in the games at all, are made functionally interchangeable with their male counterparts in gameplay (though this is a grey area), and are also glorified NPCs as well. Based on my meagre gaming experience on PBS Kids of all things, but it’s kind of telling that when it comes to depicting and creating female characters in video games with most game developers being male that it’s going to be a hit or miss at times. Sometimes it gets complicated that even when the game doesn’t seem to be outright sexist, it’s subtly sexist in that the female characters either simply don’t show up at all or are practically NPCs at most. Conversely speaking, especially in the Japanese video game industry, there are games that technically fail the Bechdel Test but are highly aimed at the female gamer demographic in terms of the ways the male characters are portrayed as to appease to them (something like Ensemble All Stars).

Although the Japanese video game industry isn’t any better, this is something the US counterpart missed out on. Well for most of the part as it’s going to be hard naming what is the US equivalent to the Ensemble Stars game that the US equivalent would have to be created instead, but this implies the US equivalents to these games are either nonexistent or very rare at most. In the sense of a video game that’s unabashedly aimed at women that objectifies male characters a lot, that it may not necessarily be a popstar raising game the way Ensemble Stars is, but something that’s kind of upfront about pandering to cishet female preferences a lot. Or if there ought to be a way to push the envelope with male character designs that is somewhat closer to what their female counterparts get, like what would happen if you were to chance upon a male character who goes about pairing an Italian suit with a dog collar, it wouldn’t seem particularly that sexualised compared to what the womenfolk get.

But it is pushing things when compared to the way male characters are usually depicted, that does speak volumes about the rampant sexualisation of female characters in ACG media a lot. Where if you have a male character going about in a suit but where the tie’s replaced by a bondage collar/choker, it is pushing things in a way that’s barely if ever done to male characters. Or that it’s been done to male characters before but not for long (mind you I’ve seen Hank Pym wear bondage clothing before), whereas it’s painfully commonplace to see female characters go about in skimpy and really sexualised outfits, to the point where Super Mario’s Princess Peach stands out more for usually wearing more modest dresses. There are some people who feel that young girls shouldn’t wear skimpy clothing, to the point where it makes the character designs for early-teen characters like Misty feel iffier in this light. She’s supposed to be in the 10-14 age range so far, but dresses in a crop top and short shorts that make one wonder if she’s going to risk injuring herself more if she does something by accident when going out on a trip.

Princess Peach is very much an adult woman but she usually is more covered up, which goes to you show you given her prominence in the video game canon that a female character needn’t to be too sexualised to have any renown or impact. One other contender within the early video game canon would be Princess Zelda, who in her official appearances, barely if ever dresses this skimpily either. Though it could be argued that the sexualisation of female characters in the video game industry also started out early, it seems to have surged in tandem with having more agentic female characters around, that it feels like an attempt to compensate for having potentially emasculating fictional womenfolk around. Marvel Rivals seems like a more recent permutation of this meme, surely there are a lot of playable female characters around. But they tend to have absurd proportions, a number of them dress in a very sexualised manner and fewer still are stuck with the same colour scheme, despite being ostensibly very different women respectively.

If characters like Aloy are any indication, if you have a female character who’s both strong and not that sexualised, she’d intimidate some guy gamers a lot. Further compounding the problem is that even when the female character is sexy, but if she doesn’t have certain proportions then she’s not sexy enough. There’s this blogger who insinuated that such players aren’t even interested in good character design, they’re more interested in wanting the womenfolk to be as arousing as possible. Believe or not, I actually know of somebody who’s attracted to redheads, fat women, muscular women and giantesses, but the same fellow draws the line at ugly women and short-haired women that he seems to prove her point right. Sound character design might as well be traded for whatever that’s immediately arousing, especially in female characters, that contributes to an unnecessarily sexualised environment. I suppose if it were possible to push the envelope with male characters, that even when it doesn’t seem provocative compared to the women, it would still be daring compared to the way male characters are usually portrayed.

Let’s say that the upshot politican Colin Sallow wears a mustard-coloured Italian pantsuit with a very tight shirt that ironically leaves practically nothing to the imagination, despite being coloured black, then there’s forensic scientist Fabrice Tientcheu who also wears something similar. Then comes financial adviser Ilmar Tuglas who’s the most modest of the three men, if because he wears a buttoned up bottle green trenchcoat that’s paired with a violet dress-shirt, bottle green trousers and a violet choker with an emerald gem at the centre. He doesn’t seem that particularly provocatively dressed when compared to a female character, it would still be a rather odd character design choice despite not being this sexualised either. It’s not just that he wears a choker and jewel-toned garments, but that he also actually wears jewellery at all. When it comes to something like body dysmorphic disorder, this is kind of exacerbated in the ACG canon where such character designers can readily whip up the ideal woman. I even argued elsewhere that such depictions might even be more harmful than fashion magazines.

One can appreciate a well-done dress, but it’s kind of hard measuring up to a cartoon heroine with more sexualised proportions than you, goes about in a very sexualised manner despite appearances to the contrary and is sometimes depicted as if she were a porn star, that would be much more drastic than if she were confronted by a woman wearing a modest but nice gown. It’s easier for others to let these ACG depictions slide but in the sense they either think it’s imaginary or a mere mistake, without knowing it could be even more harmful as it more effectively communicates a certain message. With clothing you could learn to make something that suits your likings, or to create something for somebody else. But with cartooning and the like, one could cook up the ideal woman. It’s like if somebody’s so exposed to a near lifetime of looking at naked and scantily clad women in artbooks, comics and video games that it feels unfeminine for a woman to dress much more modestly, to the point where it might even be more provocative for a woman to go about dressed in a roomy abaya in public.

This isn’t always the case for Muslim-majority characters like Malaysia and plausibly Iran, Turkey and Morocco where you’re bound to have women who’ll find ways of undermining the modesty mandate in some other way, pushing things despite appearances to the contrary, though not for long. But supposing if things like Malaysian folk clothing, hanfu/traditional Han Chinese clothing, Indonesian folk clothing, precolonial clothing and Burmese folk clothing were to get popularised in the Philippines, especially after America collapses, that Filipinas might dress more provocatively if many of them went about in panlingpaos, changaos, baju kurung, ruqun and the like in public, than if they wore short shorts and leggings just the same. If because it would be really odd seeing more Filipinas dressing much more modestly than they did, where it would surely freak out a lot of people if a lot of young Philippine women wore panlingpao and baju kurung to the streets. There could be issues of cultural appropriation, but it’s essentially no different if white women went about in sexualised versions of Native American clothing.

But it does bring up the question if women in sexualised clothing is so normalised, what does it take to dress provocatively then? Could it be that the sight of say Sonya Blade in a more modest outfit be more provactive than if she went about dressed as if she were a dominatrix? Going back to the other example, because it’s so common seeing Philippine women in short shorts and leggings, that they’d dress more provocatively if they went about dressed in baju kurung and sarong in public. If because what they’ll be wearing would be so shocking and strange that it polarises people at first, because it’s something the Philippine public’s not particularly this used to. It would be similarly bizarre if something like Swedish, Danish and Finnish folk clothing get so popularised among Canadian women, that it would also draw in accusations of cultural appropriation at any point. Even if these same garments don’t get sexualised at all, it would still be weird seeing Canadian women going about in Danish folk clothing in public spaces like malls and restaurants.

A lot weirder than if they went about in American clothing, because it’s been popularised for years. So it would be super strange seeing a character like Kitana go about wearing a Song dynasty panlingpao with Song dynasty trousers to boot, especially if others are more used to seeing her in more form-fitting or skimpier outfits before. It would be really strange seeing Tanya go about wearing a boubou/kaftan in Ankara print whilst finishing her opponents in kombat, one would only wonder if players have (to develop) the patience to put up with seeing Sophitita in a modest Norwegian bunad (or even Ivy Valentine wearing the same garment). It would be pretty controversial for many reasons, but the fact that so many people are desensitised to highly sexualised depictions, that it would be super out of the blue seeing more women (both fictional and real) dress much more modestly than they used to. Marvel Rivals seems like the latest iteration of an earlier but ongoing phenomenon when it comes to sexualised depictions of women, that it would potentially serve to normalise/popularise these things again.

Modern Marvels indeed

There’s a game that took the world by storm and it’s called Marvel Rivals, it should be noted that earlier Marvel games did exist before. There was something like a Marvel game on Facebook before and another that had Tigra on it, but these disappeared without a trace. There are still Marvel games getting released after Marvel Rivals, but it’s been suspected elsewhere that one reason why Marvel Rivals gained a lot of support and not something like Concord is that the female characters in the former are rather sexualised. Considering that historically the video game playerbase is historically male-majority, well not always when it comes to educational CD-Roms at that which had unisex audiences even, and this is also usually the same audience that’s more supportive of highly sexualised depictions of women that it kind of found this audience. So much so this led to a lot of porn involving them at all, not that this isn’t unique to Marvel Rivals at all but that Marvel Rivals seems palatable to a certain audience.

Given the growing desexualisation of familiar video game heroines like Cammy White from Street Fighter, as well as Kitana and Sonya Blade from Mortal Kombat, Marvel Rivals feels like a weird throwback but one that found its audience. Even if not all early adopters of the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter games are male, the way these female characters were depicted in at least a number of the earlier games kind of influenced at least some gamers’ expectations for women. As if to compensate for the rather possibly masculine characterisations is to give them very sexualised presentations, but even then this phenomenon exists outside of video games. It’s even like this in the print side of things where such characters like Kitty Pryde arguably get masculinised over time, particularly when it comes to her characterisation. That’s not to say butch women and girls don’t exist at all in the real world, but it’s kind of hard thinking of Kitty Pryde as an everywoman when her interests and hobbies increasingly diverge from this over time even under Chris Claremont’s pen.

It’s like whenever he’s around at all though she had an interest in ballet before, this got overshadowed by longer lasting interests in or experiences with baseball and combat sports, it’s not that women and girls can’t get into sports at all. It’s not that women and girls can’t have tempers either, be mean to one another and stuff, but that Kitty Pryde came to be written as if she were a male character. Let’s not forget that Chris Claremont (who’s born in the late 1950s) came of age during both the rise of second wave feminism and the sexual revolution that it seems if Kitty Pryde were to be depicted as being into fashion and ballet either much longer or more frequently, there’s the possibility that she’ll be seen as utterly vapid and quite sexist in characterisation. So it seems there’s a tendency for subsequent writers to equate masculinisation with empowerment, not that it’s absent when it comes to fighting sexism, but it does pose new challenges of having to retain the characters’ femininity in another way. So sexualisation is in order to keep them distinct from their male counterparts.

It also risks communicating the message that to be feminised is to be sexualised, whilst other inherently feminine sensibilities like floral garments are disdained or ignored altogether. As if there’s a kind of palatable femininity that feels more reassuring if it were tarted up, well to certain people in the days after the sexual revolution, than if it were domestic and truly dedicated to the family (traditionally feminine vocations). Maybe not necessarily always the case but it does risk feeling this way when it comes to a version of femininity that’s palatable to pornsick people, which likely contributes to Marvel Rivals’ popularity when it comes to the way the womenfolk are depicted at all. If things like Super Mario are any indication, it’s possible to have a long-running and immensely popular video game franchise that doesn’t put girl characters in sexualised garments and give them ridiculous proportions for long, mind you Princess Peach has often worn a ballgown since her inception. It seems games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tomb Raider were well-intentioned attempts to avoid the damsel in distress meme that plagued a good number of the earlier Super Mario games.

But this also went with sexualising the female characters a lot that even to this day, a nonsexualised strong female character continues to polarise gaming audiences. It’s like this in the other parts of the ACG canon where it seems a number of authors and cartoonists pass off their sexual fantasies as empowerment materials, especially Wonder Woman, that this kind of sexualisation’s painfully inescapable once these charaters become deeply entrenched for years. Even authors who don’t seem to actually put out porn themselves like Takeuchi Naoko find themselves affected by the environment they’re in, it’s the whole bad company corrupts good character thing in the Bible, it’s kind of hard to avoid being in this environment if you’re surrounded by things that would tempt you to do something or even if it doesn’t, it still influences you unconsciously. In the case with video games habitually sexualising female characters a lot that it’s going to desensitise somebody or anybody to it, that it becomes normal to view women as sex objects this way. To the extent a sexualised male character stands out more.

Marvel Rivals might be one of the more recent video games to perpetuate it, now that both Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat actively strive to desexualise their own female cast as much as possible, that it seems its own popularity stems from having sexualised girl characters a lot. Concord is an interesting counterpoint in which it doesn’t just have diverse characters (in both senses of the word), but also where a number of its female characters are this desexualised, that it seems to deeply anger certain male gamers like almost no other. Marvel Rivals might not be the only, first or last video game to reintroduce and repopularise this sort of sexualisation that appeases to sexist male gamers a lot, it is the main one (that I can think of) that’s brought this to the forefront. But coupled with America’s decline (which has been prophesised by some) that it’s possible both Marvel Rivals and Mortal Kombat hinge on a nostalgic sentiment, the latter is especially about time travel to the past of sorts as of late.

It might not be evident with the former but it’s clear Marvel still strives to keep itself relevant in the present day, even when other countries’ games like China’s Genshin Impact are gaining people’s affections, it’s clear it still wants to be competitive in today’s market. But it’s still telling that even when a person does try their hardest not to give into peer pressure for most of the part, they’d still be affected by the environment they’re in. To the point where we get sexualised designs anyways, even when the character designer themself is not a pervert.

Would this fly if it were a guy?

I feel when it comes to the way male and female characters are portrayed in popular fiction (video games and crime media included), at other times it’s kind of unequal in the sense that many womenfolk are given outfits contrary to their actual intentions and personalities. It wouldn’t make sense for a character like Cammy White to wear a thong in combat, until recently if Street Fighter 6 is any indication given her stern personality. Morrigan Aensland, being a seductress, would gleefully moon around in this outfit. Imagine if you have a male character dressed up in what appears to a suit until you realise that his trousers have bondage ribbons to each side, making you wonder why on earth would he dress like this?

But the thing is that similar things have been done to female characters over the years that it’s obvious people are going to be desensitised to nearly naked women in some way, as if women are there to be looked at constantly and if they’re ready for sex or something. Not to mention I even argued that these kinds of images may even trigger someone’s body dysmorphia in a way it wouldn’t be with fashion magazines, especially when it comes to the female characters’ proportions and tendency to show more skin than needed. When it comes to clothing, one can always conceal their faults with some article of clothing. But when it comes to the way female video game and cartoon characters are portrayed, they’re almost always kind of perfect.

Maybe not necessarily perfect but given this is drawn that one can easily whip up the ideal woman, whereas with fashion you have to mold yourself to fit this. It’s like how a number of these cartoon characters rarely have cellulite in their thighs, even though women are more inclined to store that than men do, or why it’s pretty rare to find a hairy female cartoon character at all. The closest that I can think of would be Marvel’s Tigra, though she’s usually portrayed as if she were body-painted. So any depiction of Tigra as being actually hairy, as it is with her own eponymous miniseries magazine and a brief appearance in the She-Hulk stories, is occasional at best.

It’s not hard to see that female characters that consistently don’t have much body hair to begin with are going to be the majority, not just in the worlds of DC and Marvel but also something like Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Kombat, among many others. It’s not hard to see how this communicates the idea that the ideal female body (especially in most video games and comics) has to be without cellulite, not much body hair (which would be unfair to those who’re predisposed to being hairy) and almost always there to be gawked at. This is changing for the better in some games, something like even Concord for instance. But the backlash towards Concord points out at something.

Sort of like how there’s a lot of complaints towards this game having a fat character as a playable character, whilst this isn’t even unique to it as Overwatch has it too. But it still communicates the message that can alienate or harm those with body dysmorphic disorder, the more I think about and consider it. As for the more successful Marvel Rivals game, the only female character with a smaller bust is Peni Parker. But then again she’s a young girl, though it does communicate the message that women with smaller breasts are less womanly looking. Not helped by that most of the female characters in this game tend to have bigger breasts, coupled with narrow waists and wider hips as to impart a more zaftig figure.

Given my own struggles with body image, it’s not hard to see how and why these games could be off-putting to certain women. Instead of celebrating the female form, these images reinforce their inadequacies. To make matters worse, it’s more common for women to develop body dysmorphia so such portrayals are going to rub them off the wrong way anyways. The fact that both comics and video games struggle with female audiences should suggest that when it comes to those with body dysmorphia, which women and girls are more prone to, the way these characters are drawn often make them feel worse about themselves. It’s kind of easier to excuse these as they seem to be imaginary.

But I feel this could be even more harmful since people like Freja Beha Erichsen and Kate Moss don’t sport enormous chests, whereas Ivy Valentine and Sophitita often do which could easily trigger one’s insecurities about her breast size. Not only that but there are instances of female cartoon characters who are technically fully-clothed, but wear such skin tight outfits that could easily be body paint. It’s like they wanted a naked woman without making her actually naked, but then again it could be argued that female nudity in drawn art might be more off-putting than a photographed fully-clothed fashion model because the former could reinforce one’s insecurities about their body image.

Whereas one could appreciate the craftsmanship put into a well-done garment, though from my own experience fashion magazines are seen as kind of insubstantial. But I guess it’s easier to overlook the faults in the things you’re more biased to, even though it shouldn’t come as a surprise why these kinds of things are off-putting to others. Especially to those suffering from body dysmorphia that the stark contrast between men and women reinforces their inadequacies.