Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Frumple]

... having not really played the games, I couldn't say for sure, but if the fairly copious amount of ME fanfiction I've read is anything to go by calling the Asari pacifists is seriously not paying attention to the setting. Empathic race that just happens to produce some of the deadliest special forces in the galaxy and manages to field some of the most vicious power-players in galactic politics? They're a lot of things, and definitely prefer diplomacy over overt violence, but pacifist the Asari are not.

[Neonivek]

Also to my knowledge they don't actually have "Sex" with other races.

They have babies through parthenogenesis (they can spontaneously have babies) but imprint whoever's brain patterns into the baby.

[UXLZ]

-snip-

Well for example, this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://trickingq3.com/misc/games/ME2/MassEffect2%202010-03-07%2003-35-11-68.png
I mean don't get me wrong, it could be a *lot* worse.  I didn't actually notice it until skintight chest armor came up in this thread a while back.  No need to get into Miranda's design.  Or the empathetic, pacifist race which can mate with anything and is... exclusively female.

That armor is absolutely, perfectly fine. It's perfectly practical, what's the issue with it? O_o
It's not like the boobs are oversized, or there's a boob-window, or they're even particularly overtly emphasized. Stop and think of how insanely ridiculous the armor would look if it wasn't designed that way. >_>

That doesn't justify the Asari, though.  Even if the male-only version would be rejected, why make an all-female version?  Maybe just don't tie it to either gender.

Pretty sure the Asari are technically sexless. Also pretty sure that females also consider females more sexualised than males, hence the decision. It wasn't truly 'necessary', but honestly, an empathetic race that could mate with anything that wasn't a humanoid female would make less sense to humans and thus wasn't done. Technically there's no reason why it shouldn't be that way, but... Well, here we are.

[Neonivek]

Sometimes I do feel sorry for women who actually have large breasts because WOW do we demonify them a lot.

Lets say one of the female characters actually DID have rather sizable breasts and needed a suit adjusted to her size. We would probably say nothing but bad things about her and say that someone of her body type only serves to please men.

Mind you, I am not trying to admonish anyone. It is just one of the complexities of handling women in videogames that we need to think through.

But that is why I do the "They're just breasts" test for videogames.

There is always that voice in the back of my mind when someone criticizes a woman for having generous proportions and that is, some people actually do look that way or have some of these proportions.

[Frumple]

That armor is absolutely, perfectly fine. It's perfectly practical, what's the issue with it? O_o

From a functional standpoint, boob plates are literally deadly. They direct force in the wrong direction, i.e. towards your vitals.

Nothing wrong with adjusting armor to fit large breasts, but if you're trying to keep the user alive plates shaped like that is... not how you do it.

[Neonivek]

Indeed, usually it is by making a sort of chest redirection force thing... I don't know what it is called, but that should free up some room.

Mind you I always got the impression that the armor in Mass Effect were more related to the Ceramic family in that they are made with plates made to catch bullets and break apart.

It was just an aside that sometimes I feel we rag too much on women for having large breasts or having sexy bodies over actually being sexualized.

[UXLZ]

However, the stuff in mass effect just doesn't work that way. Bullets are either shielded away or penetrate the armor and go straight through. (I'm pretty sure the armor is basically useless, though I'm not certain on the lore.)

[Xantalos]

Their bullets go at an appreciable fraction of c, but make really small wounds, so yeah armor isn't all that.

[Neonivek]

I was apperantly right Armor is ceramic plating and yes a sort of forcefield barrier thing.

[UXLZ]

Regardless, if it was a medieval game the armor would be less practical. It still looks practical to an uneducated skrub like me, so it's fine. It doesn't look sexualised, basically. It's just armor that fits the female form rather than the male one. Arguably, forcing females to wear male-shaped armor is more sexist than the alternative.

[Frumple]

... the bullets themselves would only be a fraction of the reasons you'd properly design body armor. Forcefield failure mixed with shrapnel would be reason enough, to say nothing about non-bullet combat related stuff. Even stuff that's not combat armor would want to avoid boob plates or anything like them. It's just terrible design from a functional perspective -- does pretty close to the exact opposite of what you want protective outerwear to do

It doesn't look sexualised, basically.

It looks suicidal, which is kinda' the problem. When it comes to the outward appearance of armor, there isn't really "male shaped" or "female shaped", there's "will keep you alive" and not really anything else. Its inner shaping and construction is likely to be different, and the general shape might change due to body type differences, but you're going to have pretty similar appearances otherwise. Keeping killy stuff on the outside is a pretty universal objective, and you pretty much want to keep the killy away from the same places regardless of gender.

I mean, I guess blunt ignorance of how armor and whatnot works changes the way the look is interpreted, but... putting women in functional armor definitely wouldn't be sexist.

To be fair, from what I vaguely recall those sculpted ab armors are fairly stupid, too. Y'can throw those out during the same process.

[UXLZ]

I'm not sure if the shields failing is ever even mentioned in the games. >_>

Regardless, the point I'm trying to make is, yes, while they may look that way to you, that's because you know about armor design (apparently, or at least more than most people). The general public, like me, will see nothing wrong with it and think it's fine.

[Neonivek]

I'm not sure if the shields failing is ever even mentioned in the games. >_>

Regardless, the point I'm trying to make is, yes, while they may look that way to you, that's because you know about armor design (apparently, or at least more than most people). The general public, like me, will see nothing wrong with it and think it's fine.

Without the shields the armor is basically useless as bullets move FAR too fast for any conventional armor to ever hope to block.

[UXLZ]

Which makes the design of the armor pointless.

[Neonivek]

Which makes the design of the armor pointless.

The shields are not "forcefields" so to speak they alter the projectile's inertia.

But armor is mostly ceramic or steel with ceramic. Mostly armor made to break and distribute the force.