Poll: Bayonetta 2: "Sexy" done right

[grassgremlin]

I don't think Bayonetta is "sexy done right". She's still an overly sexualized character aimed at the male audience. No female player benefits from seeing Bayonetta spreading her legs in front of the screen (well, ok, apart from lesbians).

The problem is that female characters in videogames are so objectified that we've reached the point that even Bayonetta seems better by comparison, simply because she might be a sex doll striking up poses for the male player, but at least she's a protagonist who kicks ass.

Thankyouverymuch but I think we can and should do much better than Bayonetta.

I don't think Jacob is "sexy done right". He's still an overly sexualized character aimed at the female audience. No male viewer benefits from seeing Jacob flexing his pecks in front of the screen (well, ok, apart from gay guys).

See just how easy this argument is to turn round ?

Everyone doesn't have to get something from every aspect.
It's ok to have something aimed at a specific demographic.
It's ok for some-one not in that demographic to still enjoy the game.
It's not OK to say everything should be grey mass appeal goo.
It's not OK to say Extra Chunky is not an option.

1) Jacob is entirely optional: he's not the protagonist of the game and the player can completely ignore him and isn't forced to see his sexualization.

2) Jacob's sexuality isn't the main defining point of the character, nor is it the main stylistic pattern of the entire videogame.

3) Jacob doesn't shove his butt in front of the camera, doesn't lick a lollipop suggestively while staring at you, doesn't spend his entire screen time being openly sexual. Jacob has absolutely nothing in common with Bayonetta.

4) You are comparing Jacob to Bayonetta as if that was even possible.

Every male character protagonist or not is sexualized..... When someone plays a game , the males are always heavy muscled brutes with manly hands and broad shoulders... and yes that is a valid point of sexualization . In real life not all are life that ,some are fat , unattractive or downright ugly , etc while in video games they are handsome , give strong manly poses , are masculine , with manly voices , etc . No male player benefits from seeing them giving manly poses in front of the screen.

ù

False equivalence, my dear:

Trust me, if a game had a male protagonist that was equivalent to Bayonetta, you'd stare at the screen in wide-eyed shock and disbelief.

Imagine a lithe, attractive guy who wears only a loincloth, has a big crotch bulge, and has special moves that make him mimic masturbation, put himself in a doggy-style position as the camera zoom on his ass, and lick a lollipop while murmuring fellatio innuendos to the screen.

That would be Bayonetta as a male. So empowering.

I see no problem with that.... Though i am straight male , i have no problem with a game that isnt targeted for me. I am of the opinion that women too should have games that they find appealing and men should too instead of getting rid of it all.

Coming from this fellow, everything you described was hot.

 

[grassgremlin]

Honestly, the problem with this argument is that most people who will disagree never actually played the game and can only see the character based on promotional videos, reviews and advertising.

The only reason why some people believe Bayonetta is "sexy done right" and "empowering" is because they happened to have played the games and witness these characters for themselves.

Bayonetta is kind of the victom of being lumped into a crowd because well it is a crowd.
Had the games been released when Sexy females weren't common people would give it a chance . . . however, because the market is so saturated it doesn't matter what Bayonetta does in the game. It takes a few clips and promotional poster to portray the character a certain way.

Wanna know a good example?

A character study.

Ivy is a sexualized character done wrong.
Present to me a detailed reason why I have came to the conclusion.
If it matches my own reason you get a cookie.

The idea is that if your answer isn't similar to my own conclusion, you have either never played soul calibur before or never paid attention to the games story.



To add, their are people who have played the entire game and have came to the conclusion Bayonetta is over-sexualized and objectified. I can understand their reason just as well as I can understand those who defend her . . . because they actually played the game.

 

[Callate]

I'm glad she likes it, but that's kind of beside the point. It isn't up to anyone else to dictate what someone finds sexy. You can shame them for it, if you're a sanctimonious and terrible person, but repression is an infamously poor way of actually changing the way people feel.

 

[GloatingSwine]

An important thing to recognise about Bayonetta is that the presentation of her sexuality is not incidental.

Not just to the presentation of her as a character, but to the moment to moment gameplay. To understand this you have to understand the genre of games Bayonetta is part of, spectacle fighters. A major part of spectacle fighter gameplay is that there are "flair moments", moments where there's a brief rest in the tempo of a fight whilst the character does a particularly flashy thing. Whether it's the over the top Obliteration Techniques of Ninja Gaiden 2, the fem-dom Torture Attacks and dodges into witch time in Bayonetta, Kratos' brutally demolishing a poor schmuck, whatever. They're moments in the game where the player gets to release a bit of tension not just because there's something cathartic happening on screen but because they are, in the good ones, temporarily invincible whilst it is happening (see: Space Marine, the execution moves did not render you invulnerable).

So, the sexualisation of Bayonetta is not subtractable from the presentation of the game as a whole without replacing it with something else.

This is an important reason why people are saying it is "done right", because it feels like a necessary component of the character and of the game as a whole, whereas in many other examples the sexualisation just feels so incidental, they're not doing anything in the game except being sexualisation, and if the game doesn't have the balls to go all out porn* they just end up being a bit tacky.

This is what grassgremlin is talking about with Ivy, not only is her sexualisation incidental to her character, it's actually contrary to what the narrative of her character purports to be, it's almost the ultimate in "doin it rong" when it comes to presenting a realistic and consistent character. (Plus by Soul Calibur 5 she's about 50 and should be tripping over those things)

*Srsly, I have played actual porn games which have less blatant fanservice during most of their content than many non-porn games. Seriously, if you told people one of these [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JodKGxAni8U] two [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuCdI8w_N3c] games was pornographic and asked them to guess which, unless they knew the games they'd probably guess wrong.

 

[Irick]

*Srsly, I have played actual porn games which have less blatant fanservice during most of their content than many non-porn games. Seriously, if you told people one of these [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JodKGxAni8U] two [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuCdI8w_N3c] games was pornographic and asked them to guess which, unless they knew the games they'd probably guess wrong.

It was close, and then I saw the goo girl.
Goo girl = Porn game. I'm genre savvy sempi~

 

[Erttheking]

*cut*

Wait, you didn't mean Jacob as in Mass Effect, you meant Jacob as in TWILIGHT??? What does it have to do with anything? That would be like me saying that videogames are sexist because if I watch a porn movie, there are naked sexy women in it.

Well yes that's the point you can apply the same arbitrary standards to other artistic genres and show just how stupid it is.

So tell me again how Jacob in Twilight isn't sexualised to appeal to women again ?

You can generally tell if a male character is sexualized or not by the way they act. Kratos?

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kratos5.jpg

Eh...no. The Pillar Men?

http://38.media.tumblr.com/57565e3ae9144dc0eefa44210bc5e257/tumblr_nbig47BgAm1s755fuo1_500.png

Much more so. Just the way that dress and hold themselves screams "Fuck me"

 

[SUPA FRANKY]

*cut*

Wait, you didn't mean Jacob as in Mass Effect, you meant Jacob as in TWILIGHT??? What does it have to do with anything? That would be like me saying that videogames are sexist because if I watch a porn movie, there are naked sexy women in it.

Well yes that's the point you can apply the same arbitrary standards to other artistic genres and show just how stupid it is.

So tell me again how Jacob in Twilight isn't sexualised to appeal to women again ?

You can generally tell if a male character is sexualized or not by the way they act. Kratos?

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kratos5.jpg

Eh...no. The Pillar Men?

http://38.media.tumblr.com/57565e3ae9144dc0eefa44210bc5e257/tumblr_nbig47BgAm1s755fuo1_500.png

Much more so. Just the way that dress and hold themselves screams "Fuck me"

Jojo parts 1-5 ran in Shounen Jump, a magazine aimed at Young boys though...

So they weren't really intended to be sexualized.

 

[Erttheking]

I'm glad she likes it, but that's kind of beside the point. It isn't up to anyone else to dictate what someone finds sexy. You can shame them for it, if you're a sanctimonious and terrible person, but repression is an infamously poor way of actually changing the way people feel.

Is having a dissenting opinion and not being happy with the way things are in media really shaming and repressing?

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

....Please tell me how the man thrusting his ass out isn't sexualized. Please tell me how men who have all fought in loin cloths aren't sexualized. Please tell me how the characters that constantly strike sexy posses aren't sexualized.

And most importantly, please tell me how a male character being in Shonen Jump makes it physically impossible for them to be sexualized. JoJo's Bizare Adventure has a HUGE female following after all. And in Part 5 the designs were changed to help appeal to them. Look at the main character for that part.

http://media.animevice.com/uploads/2/27367/526018-giogio.jpg


And it was still in the same magazine. So please tell me how the magazine it was in prevented the male characters being sexualized? Because maybe, just maybe, we can are capable of appealing to more than one demographic at a time. Because despite being in a magazine aimed at young boys, the series is TEEMING with homo-eroticism.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HoYay/JoJosBizarreAdventure

 

[SUPA FRANKY]

Snip

....Please tell me how the man thrusting his ass out isn't sexualized. Please tell me how men who have all fought in loin cloths aren't sexualized. Please tell me how the characters that constantly strike sexy posses aren't sexualized.

And most importantly, please tell me how a male character being in Shonen Jump makes it physically impossible for them to be sexualized. JoJo's Bizare Adventure has a HUGE female following after all. And in Part 5 the designs were changed to help appeal to them. Look at the main character for that part.

http://media.animevice.com/uploads/2/27367/526018-giogio.jpg


And it was still in the same magazine. So please tell me how the magazine it was in prevented the male characters being sexualized? Because maybe, just maybe, we can are capable of appealing to more than one demographic at a time. Because despite being in a magazine aimed at young boys, the series is TEEMING with homo-eroticism.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HoYay/JoJosBizarreAdventure

Part 4 is when the art style changed from Buff to lean, not 5.

And hey, I didn't say all that lol. Araki just likes poses. They weren't really intended to be sexy or anything. I guess you can think they are sexy, but that wasn't the intention. Araki had stated that he found Jojo posses " blur the line of fantasy and reality".

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

Wasn't intentional? If it wasn't intentional to make the guy who stuck his ass out sexualized then this guy has zero awareness about sex. Also I have seen plenty of posses done before in other media, none of them have the come heither look that that Jojo manages to pull off. Plus there's no denying that he acknowledged that the female fans liked it and capitalized on it.

 

[SUPA FRANKY]

Snip

Wasn't intentional? If it wasn't intentional to make the guy who stuck his ass out sexualized then this guy has zero awareness about sex. Also I have seen plenty of posses done before in other media, none of them have the come heither look that that Jojo manages to pull off. Plus there's no denying that he acknowledged that the female fans liked it and capitalized on it.

tbh, his art style was preety stiff in Part 1 and Part 2. Kinda shamefully emulated Hokuto No Ken's art :/

And no, poses have been in Jojo since Part 1, back in 1987. And they were just as outlandish as now.

 

[SUPA FRANKY]

Also, Part 2 and 3 were moreso about friendship and brotherhood, something people always seem to attribute homoeroticism too ( I get why, but...still)

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

I hope that you get to see the irony in that picture. Because that comic calling out a strawman argument is, in of itself, a strawman. Really any fictional argument that ends with the other side stuttering or throwing a temper tantrum after their point has flawlessly been defeated. just make me roll my eyes.

...No one said that there was. I don't know why objective has been brought up so much as of late by gamers. We just keep railing on and on and on about it with people saying "X isn't objective" or "y isn't objective" and every time I just want to shout "Was there ever any doubt!?" Male power fantasy and female sex fantasy can go hand in hand, but you don't see that many female power fantasy and male sex fantasy go hand in hand. The JoJo's are drop dead sexy and pose all the time, yet they are also built like brick shit houses and kick ass all the time. I'd like to see more female characters who are drop dead sexy and kick twelve different kinds of ass...I'd like to see more characters like Bayonetta and less Jessica Sherawat from Resident Evil. Less "Fuck me" and more "I'm gonna fuck YOU"

To be honest you don't see that many characters like the JoJo's too. Plenty of male characters are muscle bound but not all of them are sexy. Kratos is muscular and bare chested, but he's scarred, brutal, uncharismatic and he's covered in the ashes of his dead family. Kind of a dead off. Just about all the characters of Gears of War are huge and muscular, so much so that they look like giant slabs of meat that have grown legs. Scarred and ugly too. I feel that characters like Dante fall into female sex fantasy better than them.

Conclusion? More Jojo's and Bayonetta's please. More people that are sexualized and own their sexuality.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

I never said that Jojo didn't always do them. I said I had seen posses outside of Jojo that weren't as sexualized as the ones in JoJo I know they always did them in JoJo (Though oddly enough I don't remember any posses in the anime of part 1, just the promotional material)

 

[grassgremlin]

An important thing to recognise about Bayonetta is that the presentation of her sexuality is not incidental.

Not just to the presentation of her as a character, but to the moment to moment gameplay. To understand this you have to understand the genre of games Bayonetta is part of, spectacle fighters. A major part of spectacle fighter gameplay is that there are "flair moments", moments where there's a brief rest in the tempo of a fight whilst the character does a particularly flashy thing. Whether it's the over the top Obliteration Techniques of Ninja Gaiden 2, the fem-dom Torture Attacks and dodges into witch time in Bayonetta, Kratos' brutally demolishing a poor schmuck, whatever. They're moments in the game where the player gets to release a bit of tension not just because there's something cathartic happening on screen but because they are, in the good ones, temporarily invincible whilst it is happening (see: Space Marine, the execution moves did not render you invulnerable).

So, the sexualisation of Bayonetta is not subtractable from the presentation of the game as a whole without replacing it with something else.

This is an important reason why people are saying it is "done right", because it feels like a necessary component of the character and of the game as a whole, whereas in many other examples the sexualisation just feels so incidental, they're not doing anything in the game except being sexualisation, and if the game doesn't have the balls to go all out porn* they just end up being a bit tacky.

This is what grassgremlin is talking about with Ivy, not only is her sexualisation incidental to her character, it's actually contrary to what the narrative of her character purports to be, it's almost the ultimate in "doin it rong" when it comes to presenting a realistic and consistent character. (Plus by Soul Calibur 5 she's about 50 and should be tripping over those things)

*Srsly, I have played actual porn games which have less blatant fanservice during most of their content than many non-porn games. Seriously, if you told people one of these [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JodKGxAni8U] two [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuCdI8w_N3c] games was pornographic and asked them to guess which, unless they knew the games they'd probably guess wrong.

I couldn't it say it better myself.
Is Bayonetta above criticism? No.
But to say she represents something wrong in sexualization is debateable.

The reason she has what people call "agency" with her sexuality is the fact that she represents this outside of her character design. She's not simply drawn to be a hot piece of tail for the artist's fetishistic appeal, though verdict is out due to the fact she's designed by a female . . . but, she's drawn like a piece of tail for fetistic appeal AND she knows she's a hot piece of tail.

Compare and contrast this with not just Ivy but the majority of the ladies of dead or alive. They're design contradicts both characterization and their actions. Most of this time, especially with characters like Kasumi, they act as if they don't want to be dressed this way.

Ivy is suppose to be chaste. An alchemist and noble who's bio indicates she's Asexual. And yet, she's dressed like a dominatrix . . . this doesn't make sense. If Ivy reflected this in her personality, goals and ideals, then she could be taken a bit more seriously, but because she's chaste while fighting people with overt sexual moves, you're faced with the idea, from a famous quote from Roger Rabbit: "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn this way."

In some cases, it's a bit creepy when you think about it. The character is dressed in a manner the artist desired without consent. If Bayo is the kind of woman who chooses to dress provocatively, Ivy was forced by her handlers into ridiculous clothing for there perverted amusement.

Of course, all this falls apart because they're both video game characters and not real. Argue that all you want, but I'm referring to a real world implication. If they were real women.=, though . . .

 

[michael87cn]

I think this is hypocritical. It's a really fun game so people defend it. Sexualization is sexualization... even though sexualization isn't a word. It is what it is. "Yeah you can her butt and boobs and stuff but she's really strong and has a cool personality! It's okay to look at her naughty bits! ^_^"

Okay. Hypocritical imo... Personally I have no problem with sexy characters cuz I don't attribute media to real life. It doesn't affect me and shouldn't affect you. I don't play bloody games and gain a desire to cause harm to people and likewise I don't get brainwashed by sexy characters into thinking that's what women really should look like. Fantasy does not equal reality. That's normal. We don't have to normalize our fantasies just because they make some people uncomfortable. Boo hoo, they'll survive.