Multiple video game companies are reportedly making their characters androgynous in order to cater to transgender ideology.
A screenshot from Star Wars Outlaws (2024), Ubisoft
Gamers have noted that many of the female characters being created by western game companies look more like men rather than women. One such example is Lara Croft. YouTuber Melonie Mac has been pointing this out for quite some time. In November 2023, she commented on the character’s new redesign, “They completely lost sight of the feminine tomboy balance of classic Lara Croft and went full generic lesbian design, just watch the Netflix show make it canon. Dreading it.”
They completely lost sight of the feminine tomboy balance of classic Lara Croft and went full generic lesbian design, just watch the Netflix show make it canon. Dreading it. pic.twitter.com/ET4oaamJqj
— Melonie Mac ✝️🎮🖤 (@MelonieMac) November 10, 2023
Just last month she also shared, “So Crystal Dynamics’ new unified ‘Lara Croft’ is Leon Kennedy confirmed.”
So Crystal Dynamics’ new unified “Lara Croft” is Leon Kennedy confirmed pic.twitter.com/LVrOdhiVRc
— Melonie Mac ✝️🎮🖤 (@MelonieMac) February 14, 2024
Back in 2021 Horizon Forbidden West was also criticized for making Aloy look more like a man. One user on X, AscendedZen questioned, “Why does Aloy look like Buzz from Home Alone now?”
AscendedZen on X
More recently Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was also criticized with a side-by-side comparison showing how Harley’s curves were removed or significantly toned down when comparing it to Arkham: Knight.
As recently brought back to public attention by YouTuber Endymion, in 2020 just before Naughty Dog was about to release The Last of Us Part II, an alleged “seasoned artist” informed Sausage Roll, “It’s not really about the sexual objectification of women. Women, like men, come in all shapes and sizes; to say that having big busty women is unrealistic is untrue.”
This insider then added, “This is only true for trans people. A trans woman can’t naturally grow large breasts, and not all trans people can afford implants. If you see a game where the women are a little less curvy, it’s not to because the game designers are worried about receiving backlash for sexualising women, it’s because they are worried about offending the trans community.”
He then revealed, “From a design stand point, this is a really challenging problem. I’ve had many board meetings about how to tackle this. Trans people want ‘realistic’ representation in our games, but they feel excluded if they are represented as too masculine or too feminine. That’s why you will see a lot of designers ‘nerfing the female form’ so to speak so that the difference between trans women and cis women is a little less noticeable.”
On top of these comments from this anonymous artist, YouTuber YellowFlash while speaking with former Team Lead for World of Warcraft Mark Kern, said, “I was told it was done to be ambiguous, to make everybody feel okay and included. … They’re purposely trying to walk a line here so that they don’t offend queer people. That’s what I was told. Now, take that with a grain of salt.”
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While Kern claimed he has not gotten wind of this, he did share that western game studios are “shooting themselves in the foot for Asia because Asia really wants beautiful women in their games.”
He then shared a story from World of Warcraft, “We had a massive problem in one of our leading countries. Korea was the leading gaming market at the time, China was still nascent … But with World of Warcraft we had a Horde/Alliance imbalance in Korea. Nobody was playing Horde, they were only playing Alliance. And the ratio was like more than 3 to 1, much worse than anywhere else in the world.”
“And we were scratching our heads trying to figure this out. So I said, ‘Get me every Korean gaming magazine and every website. Give them all to me.’ And I sat in my office, and I don’t read Korean, but I just plowed through and looked at all the games that were popular and coming out and I said, ‘Hey, all of their evil races have beautiful women in them. If you look at our Horde, we only have monster looking women, which is its own demographic, I’m not knocking it, but it’s a small demographic. So that’s why we added Blood Elves.”
Kern then concluded, “And China is such a huge part of the market I think that’s going to hurt AAA. It’s like if they go out there and their local games have beautiful women, but the US imports do not, that’s going to be a ding in Asia for them.”
Female Orc in World of Warcraft (2004), Blizzard Entertainment
What do you make of this reasoning as to why Western female characters look androgynous and more and more like men?
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