If you’ve ever thought that the idyllic farming fantasy of Stardew Valley was too easy, there is a mod just for you. “Hardcore mode,” as it’s called, changes nothing about the game itself but will delete your save file if you use the Stardew Valley Wiki, the most useful community resource on the game.
For the record, I do not own a PS5, so I am unable to play Stellar Blade, but I’m here today to talk about the discourse surrounding it, which can summed up as “If you like sexy women, you are a creep.” All you have to do is look up the comparisons to Hades 2 that can be summed up as “hotties for straight men bad, hotties for woke weirdos good.” But I am going to focus in on an article by Gamesradar entitled, Stellar Blade puts Eve in some incredibly stupid sexy outfits that hurt the game’s story, but despite the forced sex appeal I actually love her detailed design. It can be summed up as “Eve is a well designed character, but since she exists to appeal to the male gaze, she is bad.”
The author of said article about Eve from Stellar Blade, Austin Woods, is an asexual male who has spent his life unlearning the male gaze. That’s not me talking, that’s him talking:
Oh it gets worse:
This article is not about me, but I should explain where I’m coming from. For me, romantic and sexual attraction are not only foreign but utterly undesirable. So more than with your average person, games like Stellar Blade bark up the wrong tree when they assume that I, as a man, am eager to gawk at and fantasize about characters like Eve. She’s hot! I like her! I’d consider myself sex-positive, but I truly, from the pit of my gut, do not care. I’m not put off by Stellar Blade’s ham-handed sexiness or its assumptions about me, but I am sensitive to and critical of tone in storytelling, and Eve’s treatment undeniably hurts the game’s voice.
Austin Wood, quite simply is the end result of Feminism’s attack on male sexuality, which can be seen through the fact this discourse over Stellar Blade’s Eve even exists at all(and is a diatribe that’d take up longer than we have here). Austin hates his own sexuality to the point he buries it and calls himself asexual. You can see that in this paragraph:
I like loads of details in Eve’s design. She has incredible brows and lashes. I love the little baby hairs by her ears, the subtly imperfect texturing of her skin, and the pores on her cheeks. I love that she has some natural belly fat while being slim. She’s a great-looking character, and it’s genuinely fun to put her in the many outfits, accessories, and hairstyles that Stellar Blade offers, some of which are plenty fashionable. I mean, of course it is; customizing characters is a video game staple. For my money, Eve is sexier and cooler in outfits that actually have enough material to embellish and accentuate her. She absolutely rocks a leather jacket and jeans, and that’s just the start.
He knows Eve is sexy. He even praises her sexiness, but he buries it and then proceeds to call it bad.call it bad because its divorced from the story or anything else.
The problem is that Eve’s sexiness is totally divorced from the rest of the game and her personality, and Stellar Blade wants to be taken seriously despite how strangely this comes across. I think this is why a lot of people don’t like how Eve looks. Characters like Bayonetta own and flaunt their sexiness, and games like Hades are inextricably sexy from corner to corner. That’s partly why they’re so beloved – this stuff is hard to pull off convincingly, and memorable when done well. Everyone being horny in, and for, Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to mind. But Eve’s amped-up sexiness is a weird outlier. She has next to no interest in her own appearance or sex appeal. At most, she mentions her hairstyle one time.
I read the rest of article and honestly, his argument only makes sense if Stellar Blade’s Eve’s sexuality is bad because it only exists to attract the male gaze. But Aphrodite from Hades 2 looks like this and is just fine because its the right sort of hot:
I looked up Austin Wood but could find little that wasn’t on his Twitter Profile. But I’m venturing to guess Austin went to a liberal arts college where was brainwashed into hating himself. He even more or less admits it in the article(“Unlearning the male gaze.”) I, on the other hand, am not a self-hating man. I like looking at attractive women. It pleases me. It is hard wired into my lizard brain. Male sexually, in fact, is partly how we got to eight billion people on Planet Earth. Reminds me of an online exchange I read once somewhere where some guy was like. “Nobody want to see my grandmother naked,” and someone replied, “Someone wanted to see your grandmother naked, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” That’s right, men being attracted to women creates babies!
In essence, Austin is grasping at straws to justify Stellar Blade’s Eve being bad because he thinks male sexuality is bad. Eve was created to appeal to the male gaze, and that is bad because reasons. Honestly, who cares if she’s sexy? If people want to play sexy characters, let them. But games journalism is infected by woke people, like Austin Wood. They must adhere to the message, even if it doesn’t make much sense with any scrutiny. For example Austin praises Bayonetta, but her design was criticized heavily for being pure male-gaze.Why doesn’t Eve get that pass? Is it because its the current thing? Probably.
In conclusion, I know that if this blows up, I’ll be called a creepy incel pervert. But am I? Or am I just a self-aware man who doesn’t hate his own sexuality like Austin Wood obviously does. Male sexuality good, woke weirdos bad!
The post Stellar Blade and the Hatred of Male Sexuality appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.
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