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Forums - Gaming Discussion - The Worst 7 Female Stereotypes in Videogames That Need to Go

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BraLoD said:

Nope, don't agree, developers should have freedom to do characters spawing from any kind of possibilities, and if they want a prostitute, a damsel in distress, a badass strong female character or anything else, they should do it without a second thought.

What should stop is people trying to put a limit or rule to a creative work, just fuck off.

You are my new best friend.



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

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if real women tend to occupy these archetypes primarily then what is the problem?



Never really cared for female characters that fall under #7, especially characters like Princess Peach, but besides that, I'm not really bothered by these so called stereotypes.

If the game dev(s) want to make an oversexualized, overpowered warrior, then by all means, I'm fine with that.



"Just for comparison Uncharted 4 was 20x bigger than Splatoon 2. This shows the huge difference between Sony's first-party games and Nintendo's first-party games."

I wouldn't mind seeing more... common women in games. I will say that I rarely see characters who remind me of my female friends, and developers are often so determined to avoid creating some damsel trope that they go way overboard, just giving them a single trait (like being a badass) and pushing it to the extreme. What often results is a completely one dimensional character.

Still, I could say the same about male characters; if a male isn't clearly heroic in most games, he's almost always portrayed as either an evil asshole or an outright coward. There's no middle ground there.



"While you could argue that videogames aren’t particularly serious to begin with and there is nothing wrong with a little camp, it would be nice if the camp were at least not associated with a gender stereotype divide. If you are going to cover male characters in armor, you should logically do the same with female characters. Women need to protect their vital organs too."

...can't we just strip the guys down too? Please?



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7. I really hate when people call Zelda a damsel in distress. Especially in OoT and TP, but very especially TP. You're talking about someone who wasready to lead an army, only to stop because her people were in harm's way. As soon as she was freed what did she do? Fetched some light arrows, made you follow her orders while SHE shot down Ganondorf. She didn't reward you with anything. Once everything was said and done She went back to Hyrule and you  went back on your merry way back to your hometown. In what way was she a prize?

6. There are male versions of this too... How is this even bad?

5. I tend not to play games with prostitutes. Don't avoid them because of it, but I just happen to not be interested in the overall game. I think the exception is Sleeping Dogs as I love that game, but even there I never interacted with prostitutes cause I am not interested in that part of the game. 

4. Same thing with guys albeit less consistent. However what's more constant and cosistent than both genders with eye candy is killing a man for an objective. Objectively that's more disrespectful, but no one seems to take umbrage to this.

3. Ok, so this one is really stupid. Stupid because the game you're using as reference for this from the Soul Calibur franchise. That's all I am willing to say because I don't want to very thoroughly explain why this gives me a headache. This one is simply beyond dumb.

2. Now I'm not gonna pretend the ratio of hyper-sexualized men and women are close, but really ask yourself: Which of these hyper-sexualized games are popular? In fact, the only reason I recognize the character in the pic is becasue Wayfoward did like a platformer spinoff of the game, and even then it fizzles in my mind. I can't think of many games where women who show off a lot of skin and are badasses. On the other hand, off the top of my head I can think of Kratos and Asura who barely have pants. Yes of course there is Bayonetta, but I don't recall her thinking about getting laid. I also recall these games being good. Also a complaint shouldn't be that they have connection with real life or not. Its a video game. I didn't get mad thinking Kongs don't actually wear ties.

1. "Women aren’t always victims. Sometimes men are." Person shoould probably read what they write...

 

Now outside of the problems I have with the content of this article, I think that writing in video games does need to change up. A lot of game writing is fixed in the same reptitiveness, and a lot of times it comes off as boring as disinteresting to me. In games I value gameplay way over story anyway because I'd rather read a book or watch a movie than have a game tell me a bedtime story. However, removing ideas doesn't automatically bring new story elements, and games that do have those archtypes aren't bad because of them. It'd be bad if that's the only good part of the game. This article is silly

 

On the OTHER hand... I do find it very interesting that people are saying things like developers should be free to do whatever they want. I say this about movies, anime, and comics, but I always end it off with saying, "as long as it's good" or something around those lines. I don't believe I have ever said this about video games. I say this is interesting because they way I've seen it, I don't believe many really follow this notion. Not saying anyone here as I don't know anyone here well enough to make that claim. I was planning on making a thread about but I'm backed up on several as is. But oh will I soon...



The one steriotype we need to get rid of is having to have a female char.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

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Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

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Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

But of course male stereotypes in videogames, such as the profanity-spewing, cigar chomping meat heads 'roided out more than 90s pro-wrestlers and being able to nimbly run and navigate through any environment while wearing hundreds of pounds worth of armor, are A-OK right?



On 2/24/13, MB1025 said:
You know I was always wondering why no one ever used the dollar sign for $ony, but then I realized they have no money so it would be pointless.

For me, the worst is the kind of character that are mainly from Japan. Those who are grow up women or teenagers but act like children. You know? Like Vanille from FF13 or that girl from Heavenly Sword (can't remember her name). Every time they talk I cringe.



 

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RolStoppable said:
The damsel in distress point is funny because it asks the wrong question. The correct one is which woman doesn't want a man to risk his life to save/protect hers.

Or the idea in a hostage scenario we should blame the hostages.