Welcome to Stereotype City

I totally think games should try to be more disgusting. Try to imagine the ugliest, disgusting person you could ever think of and put him/her as the main character. I would love too see that.

For me, the reason why I think Lollipop chainsaw is the most annoying piece of crap on this world is because when you do the hole "trying to be cute yet sexy pseudo jailbait mass murderer" you cant have a white chick doing it... it only works on asian girs.. and worst of all dont fucking let Tara Strong be the voice actor...

When I first heard about Lollipop Chainsaw it was around last year after some of the 4pp members went to a three day convention (forgot which one) and they kept talking about pink chainsaws. By the end of the 3 podcasts it was my number 1 most anticipated game. However as time went on It seemed like the more I heard the less interesting it seemed. Getting a cheevo for looking up a girls skirt isn't appealing to me.

This shit will never stop will it?

Society is corrupting when we have to look to videogames for role-models of reality, something artificially created and planted perfectly. That is why you see the big boobed blondes with a sculpted body, the human mind is much more powerful than a human itself, or our imagination is at least. That leads to frustration because we all see these images, of powerful muscular men, perfectly beautiful women, who dont seem to have to wake up at 5 in the morning and get ready for work, or take care of a family, or study for some test.

It seems humans don't like the way we live, so we live in a fantasy land thats better than life itself, where we dont to work, everyone is beautiful, no repercussions, kill anyone without punishment.

I like your opinion though, it was interesting to read. I'm not sure what I typed relates at all but I dont know much anyway, I think its funny though women coming into video game culture and bringing all these problems with them; men are depicted equally as distasteful in modern culture

I liked Lollipop Chainsaw because of it's surreality alone, no she is not a good role model but it's also impossible for her to be a real person. Magical zombie hunter stuff aside, her overthetop bubbly personality and psychotic murderous intent is just something that doesn't exist. She's not a sexist character because she's not presented as weak, frail, and boneless. Nor is she a role model because it's impossible for her to be one. She's Juliet, she's weird, quirky, and I feel like her.. uh.. proportions aren't presented as sexy, but in a silly self awareness. At least that's how I look at it.

I'd say a great female role model isn't some badass, unfeeling samurai living in a world where men have the intelligence of rocks. Look at Karrin Murphy from the Dresden Files series. Yeah she's a badass cop who scraped and earned her way to the top of Special Investigations through hard training, dedication, and surpassing the low expectations that PD has for female cops. But she's not made of iron, her will isn't unbreakable. She's had two divorces and has a hard time trusting people fully. She has flaws and is human. She's relatable, but isn't helpless.

I think it's a two way street for male role models too. You have all these Master Chiefs and CoD guys running around and they just feel like cardboard cutouts. They don't have feelings because feelings are for "wimps n' ladies". When say a main character finds his hometown destroyed, a guy's usual reaction is video games is swearing revenge and going on a bloodthirsty rampage. It's a lot more believable when impactful when the guy breaks down and cries in defeat and anguish, asking why someone would do this, then swearing revenge.

In all fairness, while I get stereotypes aren't exactly the greatest things in the world (I'm a quiet white guy with no muscles, I have a stereotype that made/makes life a pain in the ass), games that go to stereotype land and reach for "Where's Steroid-Guy, where's Slut-Girl, where's Twirly Mustachio?! Shove them in here with crazy shit and EXPLOSIONS" are the ones that are the most fun. Games that work their way to be realistic and conciseness are the one time play rentals that better have an amazing story or mechanics or else I'm going to get tired of it. Games that just show no regard for decency or common sense just give off that "FUCK YEAH" that makes games what they are and should be- dumb stupid fun.

This day and age where arms will be thrown up in the air and angry mothers will send angry letters over a curse word just dulled down things that should be fun. I get that there are people who say "Fun is possible while having moral decency", and they are right, but what's a lot more fun is just plain stupid. There's a reason a lot of people say Saint's Row is better than GTA (I'm not one of them, not the point) because it doesn't care about being smart or worry about being straight up offensive.

I play games not for story or to even remember what it's like to be in the real world, I want pure dumb fun. Games like Bulletstorm do that, Gears of War and God of War are some of the biggest franchises because of that, and I'd wish there are more of those games out.

Tara, fucking just, thank you.

I've been trying to get the exact same opinion out there for the longest time now. Not only is it discouraging to a lot of female gamers, not only is it one of the reason that videogames AREN'T maturing (which extends to my industry, RPG books and the illustrations therein) but it's pandering, pure and simple. It's a lazy, inartistic way to get our bones hard enough so that we'll be interested for the ten seconds it takes to order something online. Even from a male perspective it's terrible, because it's just so damned transparent.

I'll say this though - I love boobs. I love pinup art, I love drawing nudes, and I think everything about the female body is just tops. The problem is, as you mentioned - there's no contrast. There's a time and a place, and developers for the most part aren't getting either right. The biggest issue I have is not that wacky, boob-centric characters and games exist, it's that there's so damn much of them.

Lollipop chainsaw tries (and fails) to redeem the design of the main character by being over-the-top and tongue in cheek. The problem is she's never all that self-aware about her sexuality and so the "joke" never coalesces - it all just feels weird and creepy. Bayonetta on the other hand is probably the most extreme and successful example of a character who knows exactly who she is. We laugh, have fun and forget about whatever the hell is going on because we GET it, and the protagonist is IN on it.

Mass Effect 3 - robot with tits. EDI was the 2 big shiny round straws that broke the camel's back and prevented me from buying ME3 - not just because it clashed so severely with the setting and tone but because there was absolutely no attempt to cover up what they were doing. I don't like being called stupid through the mammary medium. Again though, tone. If mass effect was actually more like space balls and the robot was a sassy cocktease who made jokes about the impossibility of her having sex with all the scifi nerds drooling around her, that's be an acceptable design because its embracing the ridiculousness of a robot with boobs - not trying to explain it away so that Mass Effect can still be considered a "good" setting with a "deep" story.

Something I've noticed in several series is the gradual increase of sex appeal of the female characters. The usual increase in bust size and tightness of clothing and the decrease of said clothing. I just find that hilarious in a bad way, like they just suddenly had a bunch of work done between games with no explanation except maybe they got older, and that doesn't even really cut it.

If you ask me, there aren't enough regular people in games. Like fat but not super-obese sumo man or just non-buff in general. I was excited at how you could change the body type in Skyrim but it was just one thing where you could be more or less muscular. I guess mods, then. Not the giant boob anime mods, either.

Stylizing is one thing, following archetypes and stereotypes very closely is another. I swear the actual character customization was reduced between Saints Row 2 and 3. Gender was a slider in SR2. A slider. Nobody does that for that these days.

If you want a believable story, go with realistic characters. If you don't care and want crazy sex explosions, then do that I guess.

I appreciate that you mentioned the male stereotypes too. I've read many articles that focus on how women are portrayed, but it misses how men are stupidly portrayed as well. While they aren't sexualized like women are, they're still rather insultingly portrayed as stereotypical "meatheads".

And while many games are about fantasy portrayals of all sorts of people, I would like to see more realistic characters now and then. Alan Wake comes to mind; the dude gets winded after running for a bit. Alice is a normal woman, as are all of the characters in that game.

sex sells

The only way these things are offensive is if you make them offensive in your own mind. You know how video game players are made to look in movies and TV shows? They're either pocket-protector wearing nerds or no life druggies who make it a wonder how they got the money to buy the games. Do I make that offend me? No. I just roll with it because it doesn't go "THIS IS YOU! YOU HAVE NO LIFE! JUST YOU SPECIFICALLY, ONLY YOU, ONLY PEOPLE LIKE YOU!!!" If you go to something looking for something that SLIGHTLY resembles you and/or what you do and translate as that being you, you're going to have one shit life. I could get offended by how some blonde guy is an idiot because I'm blonde too, but I don't because that's just a character. Are women used as sex symbols a lot? Yes, but that's because sex sells. Even then, guys wouldn't stop looking at women as "hot or not" if all of a sudden they were all represented as flat chested man face badasses. Even women do that, that's why bad guys are more likely to be ugly than not. Hell, most of Batman's villains are guys who were dipped in acid or just have some form of deformity.

I've read pieces like this so many times that I'm really just tired of them. Mainly because I don't particularly care to see every body type or trait represented in games. I like the character types I'm seeing, I don't need to see a chubby female or a scrawny male just to add diversity and represent more real people, that's not what I play games for.

Also, Lollipop Chainsaw is a terrible example for the argument you're trying to make since the whole purpose is in the extreme, it's also very self-aware much like Bayonetta. Now, I had my problems with both Lollipop Chainsaw and Bayonetta but I don't think the treatment of the female characters was central to that problem.

If your focus is only on the more extreme cases, where the purpose is fan service then sure, go ahead, but I avoid those games simply because I don't care for them, I don't think that they should be used to raise this issue since their sole purpose is cater to the horny nerd. If the "problem" you're trying to tackle is the over-sexualization or the hyper-attractiveness of characters in the industry as a whole, then I'm just not with you.

I like my attractive characters, both male and female. I don't care to have every body type represented in games because I like seeing attractive characters. As for games that are specifically aiming to be gratuitous, that's their goal and it's not a significant segment of the industry, it seems silly to single them out when what they're doing is pretty evident, no one's view of women should be altered by DoA, Bayonetta or Lollipop Chainsaw.

Quite simply, what's the problem? I don't see it. I don't know if it's widely changing people perceptions of gender norms and if it is, I really don't care.

Some of these replies are hilarious. In the bad way.

What I'm hearing a lot of is "Pffft I like it, therefore it isn't bad." or "I don't see a problem therefore there isn't any." or best yet - "Things that sell well are of good quality and have positive effects on their relevant industries and society in general." Awesome baby-level debate skills guys.

Ignoring the ridiculousness of those arguments, the solution here is less stereotypes and sexy pandering and more decent characters and designs. "BUT!" you cry in your shrill baby-voice, "That's just what you like vs what I like! No one is REALLY RIGHT!" Wrong, baby-minded person. One is allowing negative stereotypes to propagate, the other is reducing those stereotypes. Media matters, and something as "silly" as videogames still have an effect on the shared consciousness of society. Second, and I'll say more importantly, the solution is allowance, not prevention (allowing more decent characters rather than forbidding bad ones. You guys need your dumbed-down, pandering, lowest-common-denominator baby games right?), while the argument against is prevention, not allowance.

This shit shouldn't be hard.

Never cared. loved em but never cared. So if I like big tits and hot women that makes me sexist get real.

I feel like Lollipop Chainsaw purposely attempted to make Juliet's sexuality over the top to make fun of that stereotype, but ended up feeding back into the stereotype. Whereas a character like Bayonetta is sexy, but her skills and razor sharp wit separates from the stereotype and makes that sex appeal humorous in comparison. She's "in on the joke" instead of being the punchline of the joke. Perhaps Suda 51 was trying to make the female version of Garcia, but the execution wasn't as sufficient.

Keep on writing, Tara. I love seeing more of your work.

The trick is that characters like Bayonetta have sexuality as a part of her overall character along with confidence and a cocky attitude that had fun in the situation she was placed in which transfers to the player. But when you make sexuality the one defining trait of a character for fan service or lazy writing, it is shallow as fuck and not interesting. For people to love and appreciate that level of shallowness makes them out to be close minded and foolish that they'd find it to be good or even decent.

Now I like breasts and sexuality because I'm 20 years old and in my prime but when you make that the only trait and blow that one trait so far out of proportion that it becomes stupid, it's fucking lazy, it's insulting to both genders, and it only helps to drag the world down.

There's quite a simple reason why men and women are generally superhuman in games, comics and movies. Real life is boring, very boring and so we do not watch these forms of entertainment to be reminded for how boring real life is.

Instead we watch it to fantasize about impossible characters, situations and stories. Imagine if Bruce Willis was a normal guy in Die Hard, he'd have been killed in the first encounter with the terrorists rather than magically avoiding every bullet or just taking the punches without any effect.

This 'perfect' figure form of both male and female shifts and adjusts with time. Not too long ago women were all after having a flat posterior, but then some celebrities made larger rounded buttocks popular.

Then there was the size 0 craze, which in my opinion just looks ugly, finally back to people promoting curves.... This will continue to shift and change over time, in 10 years who knows what impossibility people will want.

A little late to the party, but I really enjoyed reading this article. Going to pass it on to a few of friends and my fiancee.

P.S I actually tried to imagine what it would be like nailing jello to a tree.