I didn't see your response for some time and stopped following the page. Sorry for the delay but here's a response.
nonhoration said:
That's actually the part that doesn't make sense to me. I don't find a woman making her own decisions about her own body in real life to be equivalent to a team of artists deciding what a fictional woman is going to look like (though they do clearly have the right to do whatever they want, there's no game breast censor committee). For example, if I choose to wear one of those silly 'sexy [x]' costumes on Halloween, that's a decision made by one person who wants to look cute, not a large corporation trying to market my body to dudes. But like, the developers of Mass Effect noting in the artbook that they met to decide how much skin it was "reasonable" for Samara, essentially a warrior monk, to show in Mass Effect 2? Especially since the response was "silly cleavage armor is okay because she has a biotic shield"? She looks goofy.
If you have a problem with the objectification of women itself, then the issue is objectification and not who is doing it. So, if a team of women had produced the women from Dragon's Crown, then it should still be a problem in a consistent view. If not, then the issue is actually with men doing this and that's a valid but different discussion to be had. But that would make who is doing it the problem and not that it is happening.
So the inconsistency comes in when you begin to draw a line at when objectification is ok and when it's not. If you decide to go to a Halloween Party as a sexy-kitty-nurse-witch then you are objectifying yourself. I agree that it is perfectly within your rights to do so and think nothing of it outside this particular discussion. But, in dressing as such, you are objectifying women to your admittedly smaller audience. You would be right that it is indeed your body, but you are also representative of your sex. Likewise, a line of code is just their code, but in the female form it is representative of females. If it is not wrong for you to objectify yourself and ergo objectify your sex, then it should not be wrong for someone to objectify their own line of code even if it objectifies a sex. It would just be representative of real women who objectify themselves, would it not? Please bear in mind that this particular line of discussion is meant to be an exercise in logic rather than any accusation for or against you.
A consistent argument would be against all forms of objectification except for perhaps the extremely intimate scenarios (say a wife playing dress up for her husband and vice versa). An inconsistent argument picks and chooses which scenarios are ok. Your "she has a right to do whatever she wants with her own body" argument is just a rationalisation and honestly a red herring in that it is equally a developer's right to do whatever they want with their code too. To demand they compromise their artistic integrity is somewhat archaic, albeit in the name of feminism.
As to the chainmail bikini nonsense. We're on the same page. Besides, sexy isn't just skin. Sexy is knowing you can depend on your partner and having things in common that make the relationship meaningful. When I was still on the dating scene I knew my basic intellectual and personality needs. I dated physically attractive girls who didn't have those things and so I didn't pursue a second date or turned them down because I simply don't find a person who is all body and no brains/humor to be attractive. That's prefering the wrapper to the gift. But maybe that perception is why I am now happily married for several years to a wife I love and know that I can depend on. That she is beautiful is a nice plus but is so very far from what's needed for a relationship. However, I can't speak for all males and have known more than enough to attribute physical beauty to being worthy of love and desire. I also haven't been a 13 year old boy for some time who isn't mature enough to understand the intricacies what love should be about and what it isn't. Unfortunately, those kids also make up the gaming demographic but less so than I think these companies realise.
That being said, those women do exist. So it's not necessarily unfair to portray them. But what I don't get is what we'd lose of we started portraying capable women who were still physically attractive? What harm is there to put some brains up in there somewhere? I think writers are starting to do that and I appreciate it, but until then I feel like their writing is incredibly lazy. By the way, do you happen to watch Elementary? They swap sexes quite well there. Very pleasing and even meaningful.
Spoilered for novel-length response:
Don't hesitate to skip over something if I get particularly long winded or boring. I will not consider it any kind of admission of being wrong or some such nonsense. I understand that your time is valuable.
My two major issues with the porn industry are a bit similar to the issues I talked about in my other post actually: consent and violence. It is really difficult to define consent in any porn, but especially internet porn. Once money is in the equation and can be theoretically withdrawn at any time, if a woman is desperate does she really have an option to say no if a scene is changed from what she agreed to once she's arrived on set? How much amateur porn is "revenge porn" of someone's ex-girlfriend? It'd be a different sort of thing if you could guarantee that the performers that you were watching were consenting to both the acts presented and the publication of said acts, but right now as it stands, aside from a few companies who market themselves on being 'ethical', you really can't.
I wouldn't know, I haven't devoted any sort of time to catalogue porn. I'm also not an observer of porn for ethical reasons. I used to observe it in my youth but at some point the issue of verifying consent crossed my mind along with the other potential exploitations of the industry (adult sex slaves, potential underage individuals, ruffie victims, etc) and so I made a conscious decision to stop viewing it. Having a fiance (now wife) at the time didn't hurt that decision either.
That being said, I'm not sure being desperate needs to be part of the equation. It'd be like saying that a bank robber didn't have a choice in the matter because they were extremely poor and desperate for money. I do not consider adults who
consent to be in porn knowing that it will be on the internet to be victims of some sort. By saying yes they made their bed and now they have to lay in it... for cash... To call them victims too is to trivialize the individuals who really do not have a choice in the matter. Ones who could not give consent. I bear no ill will towards such individuals at all. I just don't think they're victims.
The violence aspect is a bit harder to quantify because some performers do consent to that stuff and everyone has their fetishes or whatever, but as a woman it kind of icks me how much of (especially straight) porn is about 'dominating' women or 'destroying' them or whatever buzz word they're using and being deliberately degrading.
As stated, for the reasons given below, I cannot think of any other industry that is more degrading to or objectifying of women.
Obviously women are objectified (sometimes literally treated as objects!) in the porn industry, but in a way it's almost less insidious than in our culture at large because viewers know going into it that they're watching men and women who are doing this for money. I may be wrong, but I don't see as much of an expectation that women in porn are just how 'average' women should/do look or act as I do for women in other forms of entertainment.
This is perhaps a lack of information then. Porn does lead to expectations that are innappropriate and has been the source of a myriad of books and courses on the subject. Men, for example, may understand that those are paid individuals but they also begin to expect their partners to behave in those demeaning ways. Heck, they may even think some of those ridiculous things is actually something their partner expects. I won't get too specific, but the overall expectation of women and how they should behave in bed has drastically changed with the introduction of internet pornography. Then again, women's civil rights have also drastically changed during the same time. However, this problem is actually a cornerstone argument for many feminists so I'm surprised you'd approach it in a more dismissive way while attacking gaming that comes nowhere close to that. I believe men begin to associate those actions with pleasure and perhaps even love. They are, after all, actively conditioning themselves to think that way while "using" pornography. This would be a hell of a case study if not for the given awkwardness of performing the study.
I have two problems, I guess, because it's both of those. Obviously, female characters are getting more 'serious' roles now than they were when I was first getting into gaming as a kid, but there are still a lot of women in refrigerators and damsels in distress and 'two women are working near one another therefore they must fight' happening in the industry as a whole.
Let me respond to the damsel in distress bit. Not only has the damsel in distress been a major component of human history and folklore, but it arises out of something that every feminist campaign in the world can't change. Women are physically weaker than men. The average man has 40%-50% greater upper body strength and this is largely due to hormonal differences that give males denser bones, greater muscle mass and larger organs (bigger heart/lungs mean greater output). Even a female athlete has to do a tremendous amount to just reach average male levels and an atheletic male can easily outpace them because testosterone even helps expedite muscle development. This is why the Olympics seperate sexes. It isn't because they're old-schooled or sexist. It's to give women a platform to compete on that isn't unfair.
As such, there is a natural understanding that the women is typically the damsel and the male is typically the oppressor or hero. This still happens all the time in real life. It's cute that modern movies have a 130 lb woman knocking a 235 lb man through a wall but on some level we all need to understand that that's a farce and just meant to look cool. Guns are a great equalizer that can reverse roles and there are always weaker men and women who have trained themselves to be better physically equiped than men in a fight. But the average woman/man strength ratio is exactly as I stated and it's the aggregate values that form the perception, not the exceptions.
Additionally, the damsel in distress is an instant motivator. It makes perfect sense and readily plays off our human evolution. Men have fought for women since before history was written and this isn't a component of us that an enlighted education can just wave away. It has been bred into us culturally and perhaps even biologically. That being said, there is a difference between a useless damsel in distress and a capable damsel in distress. I mean, if games were to be trusted girls have a skull only slightly thicker than egg shells and they get knocked out as easily as one my high-five a friend. Thankfully women have mostly stopped fainting in games...
This means that humans naturally percieve women as weaker and so view actions taken by men to overpower them as fiendish and cowardly. Do you not personally agree that a man hitting a woman is more egregious than a woman hitting a man? Do you not agree that men are far more likely to be the aggressors and perpetrators of murders, rapings and nearly any other violent crime across cultures and countries? That we percieve men to be stronger than women makes the scenario more believable. This is also why the vast majority of foot soldiers we fight tend to be female. Because there's a perception of unfairness when we (males) kill or harm women, even in video games. Or, at least that perception should be there.
In this way, the classic damsel in distress isn't a problem. It's more realistic than a lot of the other scenarios and love is a lot more meaningful a motivator to gamers than some of the other contrivances writers try to replace it with. This is why the classic hero riding out to vanquish evil and save the oppressed is so captivating. Every day men struggle to impress and gain the hearts of women. Wars have been waged and nations have fallen for the chance to even be looked upon by particular women with affection. To ignore this part of humanity is to diminish the truth for the sake of a lie. The problem isn't the damsel, damsels in need do and have always existed, it's the perception that the damsel got there because she was stupid, helpless or did something wrong rather than that there was simply an evil force powerful enough to take what they wanted and she was it.
Games are getting the first half mostly right. That if something wrong is happening or if someone needs help that we should rise up to the occasion. The next part of the piece is giving the damsel a real purpose and personality too.
However, a lot of 'serious' roles are rendered more difficult to take seriously by the need for sexual attractiveness of the body shape and/or costume. See Wynne in Dragon Age: Origins talking about how old she is every 10 minutes and having the exact same body as Morrigan. See Miranda in Mass Effect 2 talking about the atrocities committed by her father as the camera pans up her backside to reveal her space wedgie. See Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite doing anything in public in underwear and a skirt, because apparently her period-accurate shirt didn't show enough cleavage. See the Commander Shepard beauty contest for the new default for Mass Effect 3. Even after two rounds of that nonsense, we wind up with a character who looks like an alien compared to her male counterpart because he has a human face model and she is just a copy/paste of facial features someone thought looked attractive. On the topic of Commander Shepard: check out the differences in the scar options for male and female Shepards in the first Mass Effect. Men can have a scar that basically rips their entire face in half, while women can have a bisected eyebrow. In order to keep female characters 'attractive', aesthetic choices are made that make even well-made and well-written characters difficult to take seriously.
This comes down to the general social trend of what constitutes attractiveness. I suppose there could also be some biological factors that contribute to what is attractive and what isn't as well. But in modern society, males can be ruggedly handsome and still have scars (which may only make them more rugged). Women with scars still aren't percieved as rugged and are often not percieved as less physically attractive depending on their scar. Now, you may mean that the option should be made. That is demanding that the developers create allowances for everything a person could possibly want whether than allocating their time for the most desireable options. This fails to take into account limited time resources available to create the customization editor.
If we start having editors that can produce anything and those features are held back, then you'd have an argument.
Sometimes it is, yes, and sometimes it fits the way that a character has been written for her to look that way (Isabela in Dragon Age 2, for example, would probably just laugh in the face of anyone suggesting she put on some pants) but not all the time. Since I was using a ton of Mass Effect examples earlier, Jack's relative toplessness fits her character really well and doesn't feel like pandering or objectification to me. When the in-game camera is focusing on her skin, it's highlighting her scars and tattoos - a huge part of who she is as a character - so it doesn't feel as much like someone panicked because it had been at least 30 seconds since we'd seen some side-boob and gamers need a fix.
Agreed.
I don't think many men would be comfortable with a Fabio clone as the lead in their video game either. Can you imagine a poster of even a less 'manly' man like Nathan Drake running around with his shirt billowing open, hair blowing in wind that seems to only affect him? Though I'm not sure whether that would come across to most women as attractive or hilarious, haha.
You consider fabio to be less manly than Nathan Drake? Are you just thinking of the long hair because Fabio is a hulk where it comes to muscle. I'm thinking Ken from Street Fighter as the Fabio game example. Long hair, lots of muscle, bare chest. Nathan Drake may have some stubble but he's about as unmanly as they come otherwise with little to no musculature and... is that a scarf or disheveled ascot? I mean, you do have your Links where you can't always tell if it is a man or a woman if you were honest about the artwork but I think we see male portrayals all over the board. Minimally dressed (Kratos), long hair (various), Bare chested (multiple), feminine and otherwise. As long as the character looks cool (like a badass) or even if the character is a joke like the Fabio archetype is now, it's still what people like. In today's times, modern handsomeness has somewhat gone away from the Fabio type and is much more in the hands of the Nathan Drake types. Would you disagree? We're beginning to see more of them because of that in, my opinion.
Handsome takes many forms and as long as the character is one of them, then it won't get in the way of the game for the player. If Fabio was still the ideal of masculinity today I would have no problem playing as him.
I will be honest: my God of War career consists entirely of trying to play it once at a party and accidentally super dramatically stabbing a peasant in the face because the monster moved. So pretty much everything I know about the series comes from promo art and that one hilarious sex scene (I think it's from GoW 3) where you have to mash the thumbsticks all around.
I don't think we're defining bulked up in the same way though if
this doesn't fit your definition. I don't know any women who would swoon over a dude with no neck and an arm as big as her thigh, though I'm sure there are some. Even the
bulkier Fabio covers I could find don't really reach those kind of heights (though maybe
this one comes close!).
As I stated in the previous post, Kratos' musculature is not a stable attribute. One moment it is hulking and then the rest it is just very defined/toned. You showed a picture that is playing a perception trick moreso than showing a hulking individual. If you were to look at him from the side you'd see his chin is down and his face is stuck forward and down. Like one of those hilarious comics that show what a comic heroine would look from behind while striking a sexy/heroic pose (spoiler: they look silly from behind and perhaps like something is incredibly wrong with them). This brings the head down and the shoulders up, which makes him look more musculature. Not sure why they did it that way.
It's better to look at the actual character models rather than the poster/stylistic renderings of him to see what I mean. Here's
him with a woman beside him to put it into context. Compared to
Arnold Swarzenegger, Kratos is a girly man. Kratos just has a really defined and buff body. They also gave him quite a pair of shoulders near the neck. But a hulk his is not.
Here,
take a look at this more recent Kratos. Try to ignore the large pauldron and think about just his musculature against the Schwarzenegger example I linked to. Kratos is just very well defined, not hulking, at least, not most of the time. Sometimes in cut scenes and what not those muscles magically grow ten times larger. But take a look at any of the pictures of him and they either deviate from that standard character model or use the same chin down perception trick I mention.
There have absolutely been bulky characters.
Haggar from Final Fight comes to mind.
In terms of my own experience and talking to female friends who are attracted to men: look at characters like those dudes in the swimming anime someone linked, or Fenris from Dragon Age 2, or Ryan Gosling in basically every film he's done since like 2004, or even Edward Cullen in the Twilight film. This might be a bit TMI, but I would personally not really find anyone significantly bulkier than, say,
Rain in Ninja Assassin very attractive. As you said, many game characters are bulky to the point of being grotesque.
I wouldn't mind playing as those characters. I've even been known to play final fantasy games from time to time. Take Raiden from MGS2, people didn't hate him because he had long hair. They hated him because he was a whiney little brat. Everything from his voice to the way he complained about things. That in addition to him not being Snake or Big Boss (the actual protagonists of the series in everyone's mind). But if he hadn't had those minor annoyances I'd have enjoyed playing as him and he was about as feminine as it gets and had a lengthy nude level where he had to run for his life while clutching his nuts (as if he had any...). If I were to be honest here, I'd admit that I had much less of a problem playing as him as I did after my friends and the internet expressed hate for him. I'd only found his voice and lines annoying.
A thing to remember as well is that beauty standards and desired body shapes have changed over time. This applies more-so when games (or other media) are trying to represent a specific time period in the past and all of the female characters still look like they got lost on their way to the CW casting offices. There is also the problem of looking realistic doing whatever the character's job is. A character with really skinny legs who is meant to be a hand-to-hand fighter who is kicking people all the time is going to look silly. Even skinny dancers tend to have really muscular legs for obvious reasons. A character who looks like a stiff wind might blow her over could be believable as a rogue, for example, but is going to look goofy if you try and call her a paladin.
You missed my question there. I do agree with you that slender (no musculature) fighters are a joke. It's that "130 lb woman ***** slapping the 235 lb man through a wall" example. But my actual question was whether or not women desire to look like/have a body like the characters portrayed in games. The ability to have it is besides the point.
Considering makeup and other beauty products, breast augmentation surgeries (holy heck, people are atually willing to go under a knife to achieve a different physical look, do you ever stop to just think about that), the issue of bulemia and anorexia in women, and even differences in clothes styles seem to push heavily towards a desire to look sexy. Those things aren't atypical behaviors, they're normal. Do you have evidence to suggest that women would rather play as curveless and somewhat comely (but not beautiful) women than the standard look? I personally think they'd like to play as an appropriately dressed super model just like I would prefer to play as such in the male category.
It's when the writers make the character dumb or just plain silly that it's not cool.
As you said, male characters tend to be handsome in a way that men want to look. The face-model for the male Commander Shepard, for example, is a model who does a lot of
this sort of thing, but you don't see anything like that from the in-game character model because that is not how companies think that male gamers want to see their character.
You mean because he doesn't run around with a bare chest? I don't know if that would have fit in a soldier scenario but the option would have been interesting. But since the standard clothing was various military uniforms or armor I don't know how much it would have fit. The fem-shep didn't have a particularly revealing outfit either, did she (I could be wrong here, please let me know if I am)? I think most of the individuals were generally fully clothed except for Jack and I guess she had a reason for it. I could be forgetting someone or something. But one woman was even FULLY clothed with zero skin showing.
Re: 'gay cooties' and women: I think that women are more . . . inured, I guess, than men are to seeing images of ourselves sexually objectified and are also less afraid of possibly if you squint accidentally possibly to someone appearing gay. I have seen the argument, for example (I believe it's mentioned in a Jimquisition video?) that companies believe that male gamers don't want to play female avatars who are in romantic relationships with men because they don't want to 'feel gay' or whatever. Men tend to be uncomfortable with depictions of men as in that "reverse objectification"
welder image that was going around a while ago, whereas I think women might sigh at seeing the female version dressed that way, there's not that deep discomfort with it that men seem to have. I have a friend whose husband refused to watch the episode of Castle that had the male strippers in it because it made him feel uncomfortable to see it, and it's just like "welcome to every time I try and watch anything ever."
Interesting. While I don't have an issue with it, I can't fault people who would find that uncomfortable.
Note that there is a difference between playing as an attractive male and playing as a gay male in the perception of gamers (as I'm sure gay gamers have some difficulty playing straight characters in games). The idea that women are less prone to disliking the sexualization of female characters seems to provide a more legitimate condition of it being more "ok" than the opposite would be where males may have an active issue with it.
I'll also point out for the sake of context that as of 2010 when the overall gaming demographic was 40%/60% that less than 18% of the gamers whose primary console was a ps3 or 360 were female. 80% of all females owned a Wii as their primary console with 11% owning a 360 and 9% owning a ps3 as the primary. There is no more current study but also nothing to claim that those numbers have drastically changed with the 7 percentage points increase of ownership in the overall market. This is a significant disparity between the sexes when looking at the target market of AAA games. While that doesn't justify objectification it should alleviate the notion that 50% of gamers are females who aren't being represented. When major console owners are 50%/50% male/female then that will be another story altogether. It should be mentioned that less than 50% of the respondents in that study that called themselves gamers had or were planning to buy even one game over the course of 2012 (the now famous study with 47%/53% women/men gamers). Which begs the question of how loosely gamer was defined and what the increase in mobile gaming had to do with the shift in demographics. Either, that means that over half of the respondents of that survey aren't even market targets of AAA game developers.
My impression overall on issues regarding the penis is that men tend to think/talk about this more than women do. Obviously for a heterosexual woman it is important for a penis to be present, but on the other hand, huge monster dongs are not exactly comfortable for most women and some women don't particularly even care about penetration and orgasm easier through other methods (this got kind of lurid for a costume design post sorry). Like, if I met a dude and his penis was dragging on the ground, my first thought would be 'omg that's freaky' and not 'huge dick must bang' you know?
Haha, did you see
penny arcade's comic on Dragons Crown regarding what the guy should look like? I think I may play as the guy in that scenario, the special attack would be a true power fantasy...
Joking aside, you're completely right on this front. A lot of it is with guy's perception of what women like and that's enough to make them want it, true or not. Women focus on some things that guys couldn't care less about in the same way. Take men who work out to the point that their muscles are grotesque. That's what they think women want (and some do) but it's a major turn off for a lot of women. But there are a lot of reasons for guys to fixate on that particular organ. Anything from porn setting a-typical sizes to slogans like, "Size matters" and all of that make men genuinely self conscious about what otherwise wouldn't be a problem. If thinking about this has brought me to any conclusion, it's that both sexes suffer from extreme self-esteem issues as a whole. That's healthy when it pushes us to be better but quickly becomes bad when it's something we can't or shouldn't change.
But I'm not sure how this contradicts what I was saying. If women fell for men with a particular feature and it was known to be attractive, that feature would be made "perfect" or exaggerated in gaming.
In some ways it is hard to ridiculously emphasize parts of the male body that women find attractive. For example, if you overdo it on abs or arms you start getting Marcus Feenix and as you said, no one wants that. But at the same time you don't see a whole lot of heroic male characters with lean bodies and high cheekbones running around with their shirts open even when it would probably be more practical to wear some kind of body armor, you know? You're not seeing Carth Onasi crying about his dead wife while the camera focuses on his tight butt.
Right, but armor often serves the appearance of a chiseled abs just as when women actually do wear armor there's a huge curve for their breasts.
But you're right, there wouldn't be close ups of his ass like there are of female characters in Mass Effect. Let me ask you, would you prefer that they come up with neutral shots or would you like the option in games to specify your desired perspective? Did mass effect have any similar shots of the male sexual options?
If my math is right and women do make up around 18% of the AAA market (computers not included, no data on them, but that 18% is also being generous), would you see that as more justification of using camera angles that would be more pleasing to males if they make up 82% of the target audience? Or should the target market's demographics and general preferences and orientation be ignored? How far should that be extended? Should panty hose be designed to be a little more comfortable in the croch region for the few men that wear them at a small expense to the comfort of the vast majority client?
There are few characters that I can think of who were designed to be specifically attractive to women, though I know that
Thane from Mass Effect was, and he's a more lithe character with a chest-window. I'm not super familiar with the Final Fantasy series myself, but when I was in university a
lot of girls I knew were super into
Sephiroth, a kind of skinny dude with flowing hair and a broodiness meter that goes to eleven.
Fenris from Dragon Age 2 is another character I know a lot of people swoon over, and the first of the linked characters without a chest window.
Ezio here has a bit of a reputation as a ladies man and a lot of women that I know really like him, and he's not particularly oddly proportioned.
Nathan Drake is obviously fit and a bit on the scruffy side, but he also looks like a guy you could meet in real life. Also a lot of people I know are into
Alistair from Dragon Age, though I'm not sure how much of that is physical attractiveness and how much of that is that he's a huge dork.
Interesting, that's a wonderful list of examples. Thank you for taking the time to put that together. I enjoyed or would enjoy playing as any one of those characters.
Innate gender differences
may be at least partially socially constructed. Studies have shown that adults treat babies differently based on their perceived gender, and that they even interpret babies' behaviour in different manners depending on whether they believe the baby to be a boy or a girl. So even though differences may be present in our current society, it does not mean that the differences are inherent to women and men. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't endeavor to change things that are actively harmful to one gender or the other (for example, suppression of emotional response in men because emotion is read as inherently feminine in nature and thus undesirable) and it doesn't mean that every fictional society needs to replicate these differences.
I would fully anticipate a social element in gender roles. The problem is two-fold.
One, you cannot verify that it was socially or biologically obtained because you cannot divorce one from the other (even the absence of being around others is a contrived culture of loneliness) and you especially couldn't state to what degree each may be combined to form the end result.
Two, even if it were purely social conditioning, you are every bit a product of your environment as you are your genetics. If you've been successfully conditioned to be one way then you can't help being that way any more than a butterfly could return to being a catepillar (forgive me if I'm unaware of some weird species that undergoes something resembling that change).
So the cause for differences in gender behavior is a non-issue. That it exists is all that matters here. Whether culturally or biologically conditioned, women and men behave differently. I'll point out that there is a significant difference between a virile male and a castrated male of nearly every species including humans. The differences caused by the disparity in hormones should not be ignored by any stretch of the imagination. Testosterone is a hell of a thing. Just like estrogen and progesterone cycles can be a real ***** (haha, I'll let you give me one free punch for that silliness if we ever meet. Please not in the face or baby maker).
You're not actually saying that it's natural to use to the word "beautiful" to describe the way a woman dies, are you?
No, but when you're talking about media that centers around death, such unnatural terms begin to make sense where they'd only work in that context. Would you agree that different contexts may demand an entirely different word palette (to appropriate the term for a range of vocabulary) to create the desired impact? Having not seen the show, I'd think that she died in an artistic and graceful manner whose description would only be fitting for females. I could be entirely wrong there.
I'm not sure if you'll be able to appreciate how refreshing it is to meet a man on the internet who is actually willing to engage this issue and not just being angry and defensive all over the place. Thank you.
I also appreciate you taking the time to hear me out to have a civil discussion. It's remarkably easy to be thrown into the cages with the angry and defensive ones rather than getting an earnest response that may help me grow in my views.
