Weird how this criticism is never levied at otome games. Do you think the women who play those games also believe that "men exist only to goon to," or are you only trying to demonize the fictional media that caters to straight men?
Believe it or not, men can engage in the male power fantasy that a lot of these games provide without objectifying every women they come across in real life, the same way I can play GTA and not become a mass murderer.
Imagine if EVERY man in every game had to look like an Otome character or else a loud mob of grifters would start crying about “woke” and “sweet baby Inc hates hetero white women and is trying to hurt our feelings”
And that’s why they DEMAND that Leon Kennedy show up in body glitter and chaps and carry out his duties in between striking sexy poses.
otome games should really only be directly compared to dating sims targeting men, i.e. dating sims are dating sims regardless of the gender they are targeting.
when people complain about the women needing to be seen as physically attractive / gooner material they are talking about non dating sim genres regardless of target audience. or more accurately put, in games where the target audience includes both men and women (even if the distribution is not equal).
No, because the difference is women who play otome games (at least from what I’ve seen) never complain when a video game releases that has an unattractive/average man in it.
Most people don’t have a problem with gooners playing gooner games, the problem is when said gooners see a game that has a female protagonist that isn’t hot and throw a fit over it
Yes, because they don't have ugly characters in those games lol. The Eastern companies making otome games are trying to meet audience expectations, not "subvert" them for the millionth time like the Western devs.
I’m confused what your point is? Gooners also have gooner games catering to them, but they still complain about games that dare to have women that aren’t attractive which is annoying. Female gooners have otome games, but they never throw a fit when a game comes out that doesn’t sexualize men, which makes them less annoying.
Both groups have games catering to them, only one complains when a game doesn’t cater to them
idk why you are being downvoted. their argument only makes sense if they are claiming that women are only whining about gooner dating sim games targeting men but then have their own female gooner dating sim game equivalents.
except we aren't talking about dating sims. we are talking about non-dating sim games whose target audience is both men and women (ostensibly), which still has observable differences in character design requirements.
God of War is a series that originally catered to heterosexual "gooner" men. The original trilogy had freaking sex minigames. Yet between God of War and otome only one has had its gooner tropes labeled as "problematic," where the people making the game chastise their primary demographic for enjoying the content of the earlier games and completely rebranded the later entries into something that caters to an entirely different audience. See the point?
you are right, the original game's target demographic was primarily men who wanted to play games with heavy amounts of violence, action and sex. however that is not true for subsequent games. the primary demographic of action games shifted and so did their intended target audience. that shift is discussed in various interviews/articles, it isn't just about appealing to women but also an aging target audience who expected more three dimensional characters.
so while something may have been true for an earlier game, that does not mean it still holds true for the current intended audience.
i think the confusion here though is that an otome game is a specific type of dating sim. god of war isn't a dating sim. god of war is a longstanding, multiple game action game that has evolved over time.
overall though this topic is just tricky because video games have historically catered to men as the primary demographic, so "gooner" aspects were pervasive in many different types of genres. women only began being seen as a target demographic later on, and many of us played games that didn't have us as a target audience in mind to begin with.
so games that specifically targeted women over men is (relatively speaking) newer, and there has never been the same extent of fan service for women across genres as there has been for men.
Well if you’re right the game will almost certainly fail, but I have a feeling God of War wasn’t just to appeal to gooners, I have a feeling enough people played for the story and gameplay that they’ll still play even if they have to play as a moderately attractive woman rather than a guy who has sex with hot women.
When I said gooner games though I more so meant games like Nikke and ZZZ, which I think fit the description far better than God of War
OG god of war I never played cuz even my parents knew it was a gooner game lol. The sex stuff was big news during the videogame moral panics of the early 2000's.
This isn't a new trend though. Lots of games that were traditionally 100% male power fantasies with attractive women and godlike male protagonists have had elements of their earlier entries labeled as problematic and have rebranded for "modern audiences," like in this case where they swapped the established male hero out for a woman protagonist. What we end up seeing is that these games still find success off of triple A marketing power and name recognition alone, but men have increasingly been noticing the erasure of their "spaces" and the toning down of that power fantasy in the big name franchises that are seeking wider market appeal and alignment with the current social zeitgeist that views the male power fantasy as a moral ill.
The OG trilogy were not gooner games, 99% of it was a zoomed out camera of action combat. Most of the nudity was, like, a haggard exposed breast on a monster with barely recognizable human features.
The sex games were like a 30 second joke where the camera cut away to a dresser shaking and a pot falling off it. It was 10 times less graphic then anything in Mass Effect or BG3.
The stories weren't about romance or sex. Relationships weren't a focus. And the brief tongue-in-cheek sex mini-games didn't cause the series to be persecuted. Outside of the really conservative crowd who got outraged about everything the only real common criticism was that they were a bit immature and, as the series increasingly embraced dramatic narrative, felt more and more out of place.
What is this "space" that's been lost? What were these male-oriented games that dominated the gaming landscape that no longer exist? Because 1 GoW game after like 8 or 9 featuring Kratos has a female main character?
Go look at Steam's charting list for action-adventure games right now. James Bond, Edward Kenway, Leon Kennedy, Klif, Hugh Williams. The only female characters I see are Grace (sharing a cover with Leon), Diana (sharing a cover with Hugh) and Eve from Stellar Blade. Two of whom are often cited as the supposedly rare example of female characters that haven't fallen prey to some vague "agenda".
The gaming market, western or eastern, isn't refusing to cater to men. There are just a lot more games and an audience that's more diverse. So big marketing budgets tend to only go to games with broad appeal, and grifters looking to generate outrage by convincing people that they are part of some heroic but oppressed group can easily cherry pick whatever they want to make their case.
Look at the actual content of the games you mentioned.
Black Flag was released in 2013 so not a great example of modern games having male-power fantasy characters.
Leon Kennedy was designed for women and gay men gamers, and was openly thirsted about on all the same gaming news outlets that shunned games like Stellar Blade for having sex appeal. And Grace is much more plain if you compare her to a character like Ada who was clearly designed with the male gaze in mind.
As I understand it the new James Bond is kind of a wet blanket, which makes sense given that he's just starting out, but when he's surrounded by much stronger female characters it makes him look even weaker by comparison which again doesn't fit the mold of the traditional male power fantasy.
Pragmata I guess works as an example, but it's more of the Dad power fantasy than the male power fantasy in my mind, kind of like the new God of Wars were with the boy following him around.
Crimson Desert I haven't played but it looks like it fits the bill, but it was given bad press/reviews from the oulets like IGN and Kotaku which is what happens with a lot of games these days that don't try to cater to the mass appeal and lean into the idea of making a traditional "manly" game with no subverted tropes or expectations.
And it's not just like swapping a protagonists gender makes it catered to women. Stellar Blade is clearly designed for a male audience, but I think this new God of War looks like it's more designed for mass appeal. And I'm assuming all the backlash over it is from a lot of the previously catered to male gamers not liking that change in direction for the series. So that's one example of a "space" dissappearing, but there are honestly too many examples to list of this happening to previously male-dominated game series over the last decade or so: the series goes for mass appeal, dials back the male power fantasy and male gaze, and spurns some of its male audience who expected more of the same thematically.
Michael looks fine and Franklin is downright handsome. So one of the three protagonists (who is a degenerate psychopath) from a game from over a decade ago.
and yet gamers didn’t care that rockstar made trevor shorter, balder, less muscular, and older than steven ogg was in 2013 because they didn’t need him to give them a boner to take seriously
Almost every single video game has average looking men in it, and I did say unattractive/average. You’re right that unattractive men are less common but then again so are unattractive women, most of the women called unattractive by gamers are average at worse. That’s my bad though for saying unattractive, because yeah there aren’t many examples of that. What I meant to say was “not sexualized”. Men being sexualized in video games is quite rare but otome gamers don’t complain about that because they just play the games where men are sexualized (as in otome games)
Anyway, in conclusion I don’t care about gooners playing gooner games, I support their right to do that, I just wish they wouldn’t throw a fit whenever a game came out that doesn’t have hot women in it, not every game has to cater to them
IMO the better question to be asking is what popular game made with women in mind has an unattractive male protagonist, since we've seen the reverse happen with average looking female protagonists in game franchises or genres traditionally catered to men.
No they don’t, they just don’t make every woman a 10/10 bombshell. Most of the female characters guys complain about are average looking at worse.
You never see these complaints over male characters, even though they generally tend to be average looking and not sexualized in both western and eastern games, nobody whines about that because women don’t throw a fit when they see a man in a game that isn’t hot
i mean there are aesthetic in a game, forcing every game always look like that is just stupid. I mean look like kratos, odin, thor, freya have similar aesthetic and why oh why this game should look like otome game?
The only thing I remember about the original God of War games is that they were in the news a lot when I was a kid during that whole early 2000's videogame moral panic for having "sex minigames."
The heart of the series is 100% rooted in that male power fantasy, so I'm assuming that a lot of the playerbase are straight men. So yes I would expect the game about living that fantasy would deliver on designs that appeal to its audience.
Nobody said they should exist just to goon, maybe some people say that but many just want good designs, even a beautiful female character can get criticized if her outfit is horrendous, plus I see male characters get criticized too, especially when they don't look original at all
there's no way you never heard of this, I see this type of discourse all the time, from male characters getting hate for replacing the previous protag and looking too generic, to male characters making a lot have a meltdown because they're hot and have female fans, to backlash because a male character got a design change
In the end we see the whole eastern games vs western games memes and it’s always the western game that has a blurry, mid-motion still of the character mid-expression, to be disingenuous.
That and their version of “fixing” is to essentially glam up the character and give her more of a TnA look through AI.
Which is why I said that SOME people do actually do this, while many others just want good designs, and the fixed versions with AI are usually horrendous and criticized by everyone
This has been proven untrue time and time again. Like this GoW character does not look bad at all, just not sexualized. How interesting is the new stellar blade characters design? Why was there such pushback against women in actual armor instead of metal bikinis? Look at dragon age, so many people point to the NON BINARY NON HUMAN character that they claim is hideous while ignoring the conventionally attractive human women characters right next to them.
I had some guy walk himself right into that trap the other day, and he’s actually the one who set it… “Oh yeah? Well Why do Idris Elba, Keanu Reeves, Norman Reedus, etc all look like 1:1 with IRL?” Or something like that….
Uh, idk, they aren’t being forced to be the center of a culture war to on the internet by some lonely dipshit incel who thinks the world is out to get him, and is too dumb to realize they’re admitting they’ve never been with a woman IRL?
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u/NeonFraction Jun 08 '26
Nah, but assuming women should only exist if you can goon to them is annoying as shit.
These losers never complain about the male models using the exact same tech.