Where Does One Draw The Line?

[farseer_lolotea]

So I just ran across this.  And...well, I'm really not sure what to make of it.

On the one hand, the author's mostly right about the armor designs.  But on the other?  Not only is Rift one of the least egregious offenders, in even that regard, on the MMO market...but the issue seems to literally begin and end at the visual.  Even the author of

Comments

[reanimatrix]

Not to mention that there's reason, at least, for Asha's revealing armor-- to display her planar markings, her marks for pretty much sticking up to the current most powerful being in the game and telling him to go fuck himself.

And she needs to look at what Shyla does and Shyla's story-- I would hardly call her nothing but a hot babe either.

And Mona's outfit is pretty awesome now... and oh noes! She has big boobs now! *eyeroll*

ETA 3: And rape culture? Really? SERIOUSLY? Argh. WHY. God shut up and stop making feminists look bad. -.-

[farseer_lolotea]

The irony of it is that one of the previous posts at that site, on the topic of Rift, was about what a good job they'd done on the female models-about how they were still idealized (which is true of...well, most electronic-game characters), but looked realistic.  Admittedly, that was a different blogger, but even so.

I find it almost amusing that Zaewen goes off on this rant about how the game is clearly sexist because of how all of these characters are dressed.  But then, she turns around, agrees with Cuppycake on the models being great, and has nothing but good things to say about the lore.  Cognitive dissonance much?

...okay, I hadn't read the comments before, but I just found the "rape culture" one.  Wait, what?  Are we talking about the same game here, Maverynthia?

I don't think Anthousa's tits are actually bigger; her old model was wearing a bulky robe, and some cloth armor in Rift-for one, Sula's current badass-longcoat robe-seems to actually have volume to it (a detail that I rather like).  I do wonder a bit as to why they

[reanimatrix]

See, I started to read that post, and then had to stop because she started complaining about the fact that even the darkest Mathosian was pretty light skinned-- (they're not, I just made a Mathosian version of my main, who is meant to be black [and is the darkest you can get an Eth so I went for the darkest for Mathosian], and she's pretty dark skinned.) and called the Eth the most "human" despite the fact that I couldn't make an Eth that looks like say... a Swede (I made an Eth version of my Guardian, based on a pale ass character, and the closest I could get was this). The implications there are... unfortunate. Try to tell a homogeneous society like the Japanese or Swedes that they're not human. :P

[farseer_lolotea]

To be absolutely fair to Cuppycake, I think there was a point during the beta when Mathosians were almost uniformly quite pale, while Ethians ranged from light olive to very dark.  Skin tones (and some other options) shifted a bit.  I still said "what's that supposed to mean?" at the comment about the Ethians being the "most human."  (And considering both races are supposed to be humans, just different cultures, I thought it was a weird thing to say.)

I agree wholeheartedly that the game is progressive-possibly one of the most so in the genre.  (Not that I didn't have the idea for a fantasy setting in which the dark-skinned humans are the most technologically advanced culture long before Trion did, or anything...but I ain't gonna begrudge.)

All in all?  It seems to me like Cuppycake is focusing only on the models (and, despite being impressed with them, wording things badly).  Zaewen seems to be rating the importance of visuals (specifically, outfits) above that of lore.

As for Maverynthia, she seems to focus only on visuals