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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   1129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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That choice dismisses the idea that femininity can be dangerous to one's enemies or efficacious for achieving one's goals. It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.

From my understanding, currently feminist deny there is anything female-coded women are better at. Not that femininity can be used for good or bad, rather they demand be erased. I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.

If they were to admit that women posses certain strengths which men lack, it would naturally to the question of existence of male strengths which women lack.

I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.

I don't want to get too bogged down in the object level discussion of Aloy, but I think her having peach fuzz is a defensible choice. In our world, there are products to remove such hair. But Aloy is living in a post-apocalyptic world in 3040, isn't she? It's not hard to believe at all that grooming habits have changed, and women with peach fuzz just leave it as is.

Honestly, this kind of thing is something that takes me out of a lot of media. While we know that the Romans were big about hair removal, we also know plenty of ancient societies that weren't, and it's always strange to see "cave man" media where the women look like they stepped out of a modern Instagram photo, with shaved legs and armpits. I think a lot of creators across time have been cowards, unwilling to contend with the fact that humans are all, men and women, hairy apes.

In real life female peach-fuzz/vellus hair is normally very short, very fine, and barely-noticeable. Videogames generally do not depict details that tiny, so if a videogame model tries to depict something like that there's a good chance of it ending up being bigger and more prominent than it almost always is in real life. Compare to something like the left side of this stock photo. The real face has an incredibly subtle fuzz, with 3 tiny strands of longer hair, while Aloy's face seems covered in hair as long as those 3 strands. Or this set of 279 photos of women without makeup.

There is of course a range of exceptions (all the way up to women with full beards), and either those are the target audience for peach-fuzz removal products or they use them as examples while expecting the actual audience to be women with a more normal amount. But it's pretty far from typical. Now, I don't think the developers outright planned to have her be an outlier, I think it was probably "we have graphics so good we can have this incredibly fine detail", and then when that wasn't actually true and it was too prominent they were woke enough that nobody was willing to point that out.

Agreed, I think the anger at Aloy is often misidentified, even by the people that are angry themselves. She’s just a 5/10, and there should be a place in media for people that aren’t attractive, there’s really nothing objectionable about her in isolation. The issue is that she’s a product of a movement that doesn’t just seek to establish representation for unattractive women but also seeks to abolish representation of attractive women: see replacing Lara Croft.

This argument suffers from linking a thread about Aloy having a bodily feature that women are known to have, rather than any examples of her looking mannish or behaving in a masculine manner.

I mean, you can clearly also see she has Ron Perlman's jaw. Which as it turns out is actually a disorder?!

I just think the picture is at a bad angle. In this picture, Aloy looks fine. She's not a supermodel or anything, but she looks like a woman.

That screenshot is from Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017, the one people complained about/mocked was her changed model from Horizon Forbidden West in 2022. Here is her 2017 model compared to her face-model Hannah Hoekstra, while here is a comparison with her 2022 model. Also here is her early Zero Dawn concept art and here is the famous comparison with mukbang Youtuber Nikocado Avocado.

This comment suffers from implying that a woman having a bodily feature that women are known to have can't also make the woman look mannish.

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