I don't play WoW, but Warcraft is still something close to my heart and in particular the Pandaren. So I have I have a passing interest in seeing what Blizzard comes up with.
And so I found an articleEarlier I was curious if Blizzard had released their concept of the female Pandaren for the new WoW expansion, and I came across a blog post titled:
From what I could assess , The post is on what appears to be a feminist's blog called "Geeky Gamer Girl" that prolly just plays MMOs and thinks that makes her a gamer, and she prolly likes to bitch about how women are portrayed in videogames.
I did not look heavily into the blog, so I could be wrong.
I read the article anyway, and something weird happened: I agree with her but completely disagree with all of her points.
Sexual dimorphismPart of the issue here is the sexual dimorphism in WoW. There's a few articles about the subject that go into it in depth, I've read
this one specifically around 2-3 years ago, and I sort of agreed with it to an extent.
 >Do you think there's a wrong way to do sexual dimorphism in a fantasy setting? |
 >No, not really. |
Long story short, a lot of people say the females are too vastly different from the males. It's clear the female designs are aimed towards mainstream concepts of beauty rather than lore accuracy, especially the newer ones.
The most obvious example of that is the Draenei race.
While I have to agree with the conclusion that the females tend to look purposely like supermodels, I can't agree that it's wrong they look so different from the males.
Fucking feminist bitchingTo sum up GGG's (Geeky Gamer Girl) article, She says that blizzard needs to avoid making the Pandaren females thin supermodels with huge boobs. I can agree with that in the sense that I wouldn't like it either.
Now, to me as I read her article, it sounds like her main concern in this is that video game developers make girls thin. And she struggles with reasons as to why they shouldn't.
Blizzard also released concept female version art of the Mantid, an evil, insect race in the new expansion. They added breasts. Big ones, at that. Wow. Now, I don’t know about you, but as far as I could tell, female insects didn’t have breasts. Sure, the Mantid are ‘humanoid’ to an extent, but their features are clearly predominantly insect based. Adding big breasts to differentiate between male and female bugs is both humorous and worrying. And come on.. they’re friggin’ BUGS.
This is uncomfortably getting into furry territory, but it's really unavoidable cause these creatures are literally anthropomorphic. It's a lil amusing she'd think B-cup are huge breasts. I'm more of a legs man though so what do I know.
| >That's like saying Pandaren shouldn't have opposable thumbs because pandas don't have opposable thumbs. |
 >Did you know pandas have six fingers, including the thumb? |
| >... |
| >It's true! |
Here's what's wrong with what she says:
- She's claiming to know how a fictional race in a fantasy setting should look like
- She talks about these things like they're real
- She admits they're part humanoid, which easily explains the breasts, but then immediately dismisses that to claim they're just insects.
- How else were they supposed to make the females stand out? Giant eyelashes? Paint them pink? That'd be far more absurd.
Now, being technically a furry (UGH! THE SHAME!) I've heard the "boobie debate" several times before.
There's 3 general responses as a why a creature which has no breasts can have some when turned into an anthropomorphic character:
- General response 1
Amazingly, people need to be reminded that an anthro character is something BETWEEN an animal/insect/whatever and a human. The hint was that normal cats don't fly jets.
tl;dr: An anthro character has human AND animal characteristic. Do humans have tits? well, mystery solved.
- General response 2
Maybe they didn't start as the creature, ever think of that? Maybe they used to be humans and THEN became anthro characters.
Example: Fucking werewolves.
- General response 3
I call this one "Fuck you it's my story and I'll draw tits on trees if I fucking feel like it!". Doesn't matter what anyone thinks, Blizzard owns this shit and they can do whatever the fuck they want with it. And you can't tell them it's wrong cause it's their lore.
It's a FANTASY setting THEY created. It's fiction and things work the way they say it will.
Players are afraid Blizzard will take the “furry” route and just design the female Pandaren to be slim, sexy, and busty. The argument is that they did it with the Worgen, so what’s stopping them from bringing the female Pandaren to the same fate?
Odds are, the furry route would be a chubby panda gal. She's so going for the wrong stereotype. Way to talk about something you know nothing about and make vague assumptions based on nothing.
Wait, the female Worgen is slim, sexy with big boobs? I have to admit I never looked those up. Lemme find a pic:
...Holy fuck that's ugly as sin. Does it count as demeaning to women if it's very unattractive?
As much as I think that's an erection killer, it does look like a slightly buffed up version of the human counterpart, so I dunno what the issue is.
Feminist crap aside- Diversity in a MMO = good
From a game design point of view, it'd be terrible to have male look like the females. You want to go for diversity and easily identifiable.
This is one of the things that I think Forsaken world did very wrong: Not only 3 races look basically human, but it's often hard to tell male from female apart. This results into a clusterfuck of not knowing what's what and the low diversity makes the general population look dull.
However, since the Draenei and Blood Elves, it's been obvious the goal of the designers is more to make male look buff and strong, and to make females look mainstream sexy. Obviously to make people want to play those races, attracts new players and keeps old ones in.
Crowds look way more diverse and interesting in WoW because of the sexual dimorphism.
Now, personally, It's boring to me they go with the mainstream concept of sexy for females, cause it does nothing for me. Skinny girls with no hips look boring to me.
However, as long as the males and female look different enough, I'm good with it.
- Stop ruining it for everyone else
It's already rare as fuck to get to play games where the female models actually look attractive, especially if you're not a "boob man", because even when it's the goal of the game to over sexualize the female characters, quite often all they'll do is give them big boobs.
Breasts alone do not make a girl attractive.
When we want to unwind and play videogames, god forbid the females in our videogames actually look good.
I'm not even picky about female builds, I love many different builds and I even like the big female Pandaren build that she says she likes, but telling people what they should use in their games is just out of line.
My character Pandie was in fact based and what me and Zach thought what a female Pandaren would look like. She's pretty big and a lil chubby, and I like the build a lot. But I'm not gonna tell people that's how they should all look like.
