By David Futrelle
Last week I wrote about the wave of transphobia that followed the leaks that revealed one of the new characters in the upcoming postapocalyptic survival game The Last of Us 2 would be the woman above, a buff, butch badass named Abby who is apparently very effective at beating other characters up.
With her small breasts and muscular arms, some gamers have decided that she couldn’t possibly be a cis woman; she has to be trans. Cue a million “that’s a man, baby” jokes and, the internet being the internet, much worse. Meanwhile, more “serious” critics accused the game developer, Naughty Dog, of kowtowing to evil SJWs and trans activists pushing a cis-hating agenda.
I took a look at the Last of Us 2 subreddit today to see if the angry gamers were still at it. They were, posting bad transphobic jokes, ineptly-drawn cartoons and a photoshopped picture of Abby sporting a beard.
But I also ran across an argument I hadn’t seen before, accusing the game developers of “erasing women’s bodies” by featuring a butch woman in their game. This “misogyny” would not stand, a Redditor called Ralmoren declared.
“Funny,” she wrote, doing her best to sound like a feminist,
I bet SJWs like Neil [Druckmann, the director of the game] and Anita [Sarkeesian] think that making women ugly is only punishing male gamers. By doing this they openly admit their bigotry: that they think the female body only exist through the male gaze.
Abby isn’t ugly; she’s butch. And making a character butch is hardly a proclamation that one believes “the female body only exist[s] through the male gaze.” I mean, what? This is cargo cult feminism, adopting the language of feminism without understanding the theory behind it.
“No female gamer would feel empowered by playing with a pretty female avatar, right ? Female gamers need to identify with our characters, so let’s make them ugly (gee, thanks)! Women are only pretty for men, if it weren’t for men they would certainly look like baboons !”
Spoken like a true straw SJW.
I’m a woman, I play videogames and when the game gives me the opportunity I like to play with a female avatar. So now I should be penalised with an ugly avatar because some male gamers are attracted to overtly sexualised female characters (like it’s a bad thing? )? I mean, translate that to the real world, it’s like telling me “When you get out of your house you should keep your hair covered because some men may look at you a certain way.”
It’s really not like that at all.
F*ck this misogynistic bigotry.
Can we get creative game developers who have sane relashionships and views of women or is that to much to ask for ? Like not I-do-stealth-missions-in-panties-because-I-breathe-through-my-skin sexy, nor Mass Effect Andromeda ugly, but something in the middle ? Please ?
Here’s an idea: how about a range of female characters that in some small way reflect the diversity of women in the real world?
In a later comment, Ralmoren cites Bayonetta as an example of the sort of woman she’d like to see more of in video games. Here’s the totally-not-sexualized Bayonetta, who I’m sure would have fit in perfectly in the gritty postapocalyptic world of The Last of Us.
As Ralmoren explained,
Feminine, elegant, and kicks ass. Bayonetta is a much happier and empowering female representation than the austere, masculine woman trope we’re getting recently.
Ralmoren insists that, as far as she’s concerned, “there’s nothing wrong with being a masculine woman (I’m not especially feminine myself).” Never mind that she spent much of her previous comment attacking Abby as “ugly”
She continues:
but I dislike that this trope shows that female characters can only be strong if they emulate men, meaning that by opposition anything feminine is weak and needs to be shunned.
If all female video game characters looked like Abby, this argument might have some merit. But having one butch character in a game is hardly the same as declaring that “female characters can only be strong if they emulate men” (my emphasis). Again, if games actually depicted women more as they are in the real world, with a variety of body shapes and sizes, this wouldn’t even be an issue. In the real world, moreover, there are a lot more women walking around looking like Abby than there are women looking like Bayonetta (except at game conventions).
Elsewhere on the Last of Us 2 subreddit, others offered up even dopier objections to Abby’s looks. Like the dude who insists that she’s simply too buff to live in postapocalyptic times.
Abby is literally the only human, male or female, with that sort of muscle mass. In a post-apocalyptic dystopia. With no commercial protein supplies. Or working steroid/supplement factories.
The calorie and protein requirements alone are prohibitive in a context within which there is food and resource scarcity. But even granting that they gather enough food through hunting and they have this amazing gym that auto-produces steroids, why is she the only person in her group with that sort of build?
She’s either taking a disproportionate share of the group’s food, or she eats any members of the group that exceed her in size to both maintain her gains and insure that she is the only person with that degree of musculature.
So Abby’s not just trans, she’s an actual cannibal?
This game sounds better and better all the time.
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Not to speak too much about my preferences, but I actually like butch women, and I would imagine that some men do as well. Are those men keeping silent out of toxic masculinity or is something else going on?
I always find it a little funny when MRAs try to sound like feminists. They’re just so inept.
I also find it funny that Anita Sarkeesian is still living rent free in their heads all these years later.
Re: the photoshopped image of Abby:
a) When I was bored as a kid I would go through old newspapers with a pen and draw beards and antennae on random pictures. Do they seriously have nothing better to do than the digital equivalent?
b) Some women have beards IRL, including some cis women. I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve met at least a handful of women with facial hair so it can’t be that uncommon.
c) They would totally lose their shit if Abby had a beard ingame, but they are literally making up even more imaginary issues. You can photoshop beards onto any character you want (including the beloved Bayonetta) and complain about what you’ve created.
Yet no one would question a male character being the only buff person around…
While I’m not familiar with the original game other than little I picked up via pop culture, I would imagine that in some kinds of apocalyptic situations, there would be some cannibalism going around. Just mostly the survivally kind, not the murdery kind.
Aren’t there like fungus creatures running around or something? Maybe those are edible, just saying.
Except the protagonist of the first game. Just for example.
As a gymnastics fan it’s cracking me up that anyone would assume that cis women can’t have small breasts and muscular arms, women with small breasts and muscular arms are always going to be butch, and that it requires really high caloric intake to look muscular. Women don’t have to be either dainty and girly or strong and butch. We can be all sorts of combinations of things.
“Cargo cult feminism” yup. These people have such limited standards of beauty they have to spoon fed the entire concept to each other sounds like.
And that’s not a disturbing thought….yikes
@WWTH
To a considerable extent it’s the opposite. Generally speaking, a high degree of muscle definition (which is a. What Abby has and b. not the same thing as muscle mass) is a sign that someone’s been working harder than their food supply allows. In the case of bodybuilders and gymnasts, the undereating is deliberate, but post-apocalypse there’s probably gonna be a fair number of folks doing too much labour on not enough food because they have no other choice.
Yeah never mind that people from millennia ago who definitely ate less than us are consistently shown to have been larger than even Olympic athletes.
It’s also funny how the example given is a character whose, uh, sex appeal related qualities had to be toned down in Super Smash Bros. My bet is her next example would have been Mai Shiranui.
Sadly I’ve seen this kind of backwards logic before, from a contributor of a YouTube show I used to watch but kind of stopped because of this kind of nonsense. He (or, rather, an alleged female friend of his) complained about the idea of reducing the apparent breast size of Tifa for Final Fantasy VII Remake. (I say “apparent” because uh, have you seen the character models from the original?) The reasoning was the same, that it would constitute erasure of similarly endowed women like this friend.
So, in a world where people are constantly doing serious physical activity, nobody is going to grow muscles?
If you look at skeletons of hunter-gatherers, you can see from their bones that many of them were about on par with modern olympic athletes. It takes a lot more strength to live out on the land your entire life than what you’re going to get with an 8-hour work day plus some time at the gym.
OT (but connected ultimately to this site’s raison d’etre via Trumpism and its baleful consequences): I came across this in connection with the worsening political situation in the US.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/14/AR2010051404234.html
Late in it, it says:
The word “essay” is a link to what, one would assume, is supposed to be a publicly readable opinion piece. However the link doesn’t function correctly, and after a lot of fiddling around with the Wayback Machine I’ve been unable to find a complete copy of it anywhere, just excerpts and what seem to be copies hidden behind paywalls in a couple of places.
Where is the full text of this essay available?
@ numerobis and Dalillama
So much for “biotruths”… and they think they’re the ones who know science.
@Surplus
Not enough information is provided in the article. It appears to be a link to issue one, article six of something, but without a title there’s nothing to go on. Mr. Price does not appear to have any publications in academic journals, so Grodd only knows what the hell political broadsheet they were reading. Given that an essay I did find by Price was about the theological basis of humility in politics, I’ve pretty much stopped giving a rat’s ass about his opinion, though.
As someone who is vaguely a wlw, Abby is more than welcome to oppress me with her big muscles and small boobs. Like, please.
Odd to blame Sarkeesian. Hating butch female characters who solve problems with violence is one of her better-known quirks. There was a whole tempest in a teacup when she insisted Furiosa wasn’t a feminist character for that exact reason.
My husband is really upset about how the new game seems is going to go, but none of those upsets are over a character boobs who was 14 in the first game.
Bayonetta looks awfully happy. Is that due to the guns on her heels? If I wore glasses and guns on my heels, I would worry that my glasses would fall off and consequently I would shoot myself in the leg. But that’s me.
I do not get it : are they “forced” to play this game if the chara design does not fit them ? Or do they think game developers owe them the game ? Are not they the same people who, when some persons complained about oversexualisation or misogynism in a video game, told them to go and make their own game if they were not happy with it ?
If i had to complain about each game where the main character does not suit me, i would be in a neverending rant… (I have played a few adult games during this confinement, and if some of you are interested, i can make a quick review about some of them, but i am not sure to be of good advice)
I just finished the first Last of Us — it was so good. I’m really looking forward to this new one. The gamergate crowd’s disapproval is an automatic positive for me. Kinda like when a politician gets an F or D- NRA rating.
Huh, Bayonetta. Isn’t she naked? From what I remember, her clothes are her hair, and partially disappear at times. Not that that’s designed to appeal to horny boys, I’m sure! Whereas the game character I usually hear given as a good example by actual feminists is Femshep, whose looks are very much secondary to the traits she shares with Broshep.
Yeah the Last of Us was awesome. I am far more concerned with Naughty Dog’s abusive labour practices than their character designs.
Even with the last thread about this I felt kind of uncomfortable because I would have assumed the complaints about a muscular woman would have been more in the “butch dyke” vein. I guess it’s just that I hate how some people seem to think that all butch women are actually trans* men, and then this whole charade was something else entirely and I’m just so confused.
@An Impish Pepper
I once knew a woman who had pretty big breasts, and from what I gathered, she didn’t really have any issue with game or animation characters having big breasts, but hated how unrealistic they always were. She said this was one of the reasons she didn’t read manga.
I think it’s kind of rich that there are so many people rallying to demand big breasts on all the female characters like anything else is oppression, like their preferences are somehow holy. For years and years I’ve been reading otherwise interesting or entertaining comics (particularly manga or super hero stuff) with gritted teeth because practically every adult woman has such ridiculous anatomy that it’s kind of painful to watch. But I guess my “can supposedly able-bodied people please look like they could actually function” wish is just too radical.
I’m sorry, what?
I looked really, really carefully at Abby’s size and build. I mean, I had my laptop out and studied her for HOURS, and near as I can tell, the complete circumference of her arm around the widest part of her bicep has to be less than 1.5 inches. Hell, her entire torso from the waist to the top of her head is less than four inches tall.
I have been consulting physiology textbooks for over 3 weeks now trying to pin down the caloric intake for post-apocalyptic characters made out of pixels and I’m entirely unable to find the math Ralmoren used.
@GAZZA
Yeah, sadly the games industry is a piece of shit and in the case of the US, it’s down to shit labor laws and neoliberalism putting capitalism at a level of infallibility like a God except capitalism is not God and came about because money exists.
@Crip Dyke
Whew! And here I thought I was the only one to notice that Abby is so slight that she probably requires only 100 calories or so a day.
I “love” how whenever someone starts to complain about the plot twists of Last Of Us II, I have to brace myself in case they go off on a tangent about Abby’s looks.