It is a truth universally acknowledged that a gamer in possession of a good deal of free time must be in want of a woman to be weird about. This time, that woman is Kay Vess, the protagonist of Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world game 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Outlaws. The charactౠer looks slightly different in the new story trailer than in past looks at the game, with a more promine👍nt chin and a more mullet-y haircut.

In the past, the perceived non-hotness of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horizon Forbidden West’s Aloy, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 Remake’s Ashley, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2’s Abby have all inspired gamers to froth with rage. Even 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Tifa — maybe the most straightforwardly “hot” woman to ever be featured in a video game — inspired discourse because gamers thought 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix shrunk her boobs too much in comparison to the original game. A certain subset of gamers aren’t happy unless video game women look like they’re ready to pose on the cover of Mꦕaxim at any moment.

Hot take: you just gotta ignore people like this. They don’t understand the purpose of art and they don’t see women as people. I can't do anything about the second, but I think it's worth interrogating the first.

This faction of gamers has a completely unhinged understanding of why characters and stories exist. Most art does not exist, specifically, to turn the audience on. Obviously, there are erotic works in every medium, and there have been since The Epic of Gilgamesh or Song of Solomon. But, that's a specific context. You're missing out on a lot of great art if the primary criteria you judge female characters by is whether they make you horny.

The way characters look is an expression of who they are. People obviously can’t control certain aspects of their appearance — their height, their skin color, etc. — but there are plenty of things that they can control. What people do with the aspects of their appearance that are within their control speak to how they see themselves and what they value. Ethan Hawke once said that he’s never had his teeth fixed because he just can’t imagine Jesse (the character he's played for decades in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy) would care about that.

This is something that Hollywood has lost a bit as actors are increasingly expected to look more and more perfect if they’re going to lead a movie. Take a look at how scrawny Hugh Jackman looks in X-Men in 1999 when compared with his veiny, roided up look in 2013’s The Wolverine. Jackman was in great shape in the original X-Men, but great shape isn't enough anymore.

Or, look at some of the unconventionally attractive men who led movies in the 1970s and '80s (Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Danny Devito) and compare them to male leads today (Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Chris Pine). When someone more unconventionally attractive, like Chris Pratt or Kumail Nanjiani, does get cast in a big-budget movie, that tends to come with the expectation that they get in He-Man shape.

Or, compare the teeth you saw on screen in the '70s to the Veneers that gleam out at you from movie screens in the 2020s. Anodyne hotness has replaced character, and that bleeds over to what players expect in games. The peach fuzz on Aloy's cheeks doesn't register as a realistic detail for this faction of gamers because most on-screen representations of women are divorced from how regular people look. There are other issues at play — like, you know, how much time these dudes have spent in close proximity to real women — but some of it is downstream from the dearth of regular-looking people on screen.

I like how Kay Vess looks. She looks like a real person, and she looks like she could be a smuggler. It's the same reason I like Abby's look in The Last of Us Part 2. Her design reveals her character, with huge arms that reflect the hours she's spent bulking up in her quest for revenge. I like Aloy's design for the same reason. Her slightly burned skin and peach fuzz are believable for a person living in the post-post-apocalyptic world of the Horizon series.

It's a different approach than female video game characters got in the '90s and '00s, when they were often buxom and scantily clad. That reflected something, too; the desires of the (mostly) men creating them and the desires of the audience that was, at that time, perceived as almost entirely male. I prefer what the new approach to design represents: characters who can express who they are through how they present themselves.