Isabela's Pants
Can we please just put this issue to bed, already?
I could write a whole big thing here about slut-shaming and being sex-positive and how people bend over backwards in the most disgusting ways to defend things they like and Leigh Alexander and Bayonetta, but what it all boils down to is this:
Fact: Only about 11% of the entire game development industry are women. The figure varies area-to-area, with design and visual arts both hovering right around 10-11% and writing at about 30%*. Therefore, most female characters in games are designed and written by men, by sheer weight of statistics. BioWare's numbers may be better, but I'm willing to bet they aren't much better.
Isabela is not an actual person getting out of bed in the morning and choosing her clothing. She is a construct designed by a team of mostly men to be appealing to an audience that is still at least believed to be mostly men. So is Merrill, while we're doing this**. BioWare might be slightly better at acknowledging audiences other than Whitey McCis-Straight-Dude than the rest of the industry, but EA, at the very least, knows which side their bread is buttered on. Hint: it's the side that likes women with big breasts in low-cut tops and short skirts with thigh-high boots and no-strings-attached sex.
Even with the healthy dose of benefit-of-the-doubt I give BioWare because I love them dearly, I still cannot in any way believe that they sat down and said, "Hey, let's put a sexually confident woman in this game because sexually confident women are awesome and it's okay to enjoy sex and be sexual!" No matter how you look at it, the more likely scenario is that someone, whether it was BioWare, EA, focus testers or whoever, said, "Okay, now tits or GTFO.***"
It is a-okay to criticize pandering to that attitude, so long as the criticism stays focused on the designers, and not on the character. It's also a-okay to move to reclaim the character for feminism, so long as you acknowledge that the institutional problems in the industry and the creation of the game still exist****.
For my part, I'd probably throw some pants on her if I played on the PC, if only because I keep looking at her walk cycle and thinking, "Maker but that must chafe."
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* This is, as they say, a travesty.
** Give some thought to the bizarre virgin/whore dichotomy set up by presenting Isabela and Merrill as the two female romance options. Compare Merrill to Tali from Mass Effect 2. Try not to throw up at the thought that enough people want to have sex with the "virginal young woman with a bad case of hero-worship for the PC and a hefty dose of personal insecurity" to warrant a recurring archetype.
*** Or, y'know, "We need to make this character more appealing to our core demographic." Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
**** For an example of a complete failure to do this, see Leigh Alexander and all the people who devoted screen space to defending Bayonetta as a strong, sex-positive female character with the bizarre assertion that she was designed for that purpose. I can say with confidence that they were all dead wrong because Hideki Kamiya is a misogynist shitstain (and that is one of the least offensive things he said about the game, check this out for a summary of some of his other comments, they are mind-blowing). A sexist clock might be right twice a day, but that doesn't make it not sexist.
And I guess I wound up talking about Leigh Alexander and Bayonetta anyway. Oops.
I could write a whole big thing here about slut-shaming and being sex-positive and how people bend over backwards in the most disgusting ways to defend things they like and Leigh Alexander and Bayonetta, but what it all boils down to is this:
Fact: Only about 11% of the entire game development industry are women. The figure varies area-to-area, with design and visual arts both hovering right around 10-11% and writing at about 30%*. Therefore, most female characters in games are designed and written by men, by sheer weight of statistics. BioWare's numbers may be better, but I'm willing to bet they aren't much better.
Isabela is not an actual person getting out of bed in the morning and choosing her clothing. She is a construct designed by a team of mostly men to be appealing to an audience that is still at least believed to be mostly men. So is Merrill, while we're doing this**. BioWare might be slightly better at acknowledging audiences other than Whitey McCis-Straight-Dude than the rest of the industry, but EA, at the very least, knows which side their bread is buttered on. Hint: it's the side that likes women with big breasts in low-cut tops and short skirts with thigh-high boots and no-strings-attached sex.
Even with the healthy dose of benefit-of-the-doubt I give BioWare because I love them dearly, I still cannot in any way believe that they sat down and said, "Hey, let's put a sexually confident woman in this game because sexually confident women are awesome and it's okay to enjoy sex and be sexual!" No matter how you look at it, the more likely scenario is that someone, whether it was BioWare, EA, focus testers or whoever, said, "Okay, now tits or GTFO.***"
It is a-okay to criticize pandering to that attitude, so long as the criticism stays focused on the designers, and not on the character. It's also a-okay to move to reclaim the character for feminism, so long as you acknowledge that the institutional problems in the industry and the creation of the game still exist****.
For my part, I'd probably throw some pants on her if I played on the PC, if only because I keep looking at her walk cycle and thinking, "Maker but that must chafe."
-----
* This is, as they say, a travesty.
** Give some thought to the bizarre virgin/whore dichotomy set up by presenting Isabela and Merrill as the two female romance options. Compare Merrill to Tali from Mass Effect 2. Try not to throw up at the thought that enough people want to have sex with the "virginal young woman with a bad case of hero-worship for the PC and a hefty dose of personal insecurity" to warrant a recurring archetype.
*** Or, y'know, "We need to make this character more appealing to our core demographic." Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
**** For an example of a complete failure to do this, see Leigh Alexander and all the people who devoted screen space to defending Bayonetta as a strong, sex-positive female character with the bizarre assertion that she was designed for that purpose. I can say with confidence that they were all dead wrong because Hideki Kamiya is a misogynist shitstain (and that is one of the least offensive things he said about the game, check this out for a summary of some of his other comments, they are mind-blowing). A sexist clock might be right twice a day, but that doesn't make it not sexist.
And I guess I wound up talking about Leigh Alexander and Bayonetta anyway. Oops.