salternates:

joanwatson:

season!9 cas should be like THE REVENGE OF CASTIEL: HE’S BACK AND THIS TIME HE’S ANGRY where he goes on a storming grumpy rampage against metatron and rounds up all the fallen angels and they wage war to get their grace back and then he finds god and punches him in the face screaming FUCK YOU DAD!!! and like you know if cas happened to be shirtless and have holsters and guns filled with angel-sword bullets clinging to his limbs during all this i mean i’d be okay with that

grabby hands

fic rec of the YEAR so far - my roots take flight

s4 ar where dean is pulled from hell by heaven to work as a guardian angel for SOMEONE wink wink

best destiel, i promise u, and also sam & cas being bros and hanging out and RUBY and ANGELS and GREAT!!!!!!

i really need to work on my minibang

but

too many ideas

hawkwardly:

psdo:

joopinks:

7nights:

This is the Sorceress from Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown. Lately, this character has been getting a lot of heat, becoming the new icon of sexism in video games. Are you offended by this character? Do you find it sexist? Well guess what, it’s not.

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Taking offense to hyper-sexualized female characters is not slut shaming.  These characters don’t get to choose what they want to wear.  Men choose to dress and pose them in ridiculous physics-defying ways that they don’t choose to do for male characters, thereby making clear the sexist attitudes of the characters’ creators.  Women aren’t choosing how they are being represented here, MEN are.  

If videogames were being designed by women, I can guarantee that there wouldn’t be mountain ranges across the chests of all the female characters, nor would male characters be as hyper-sexualized as their female counterparts currently are.  There wouldn’t be characters with foot-long penises swinging around in Speedos in every game, posing in awkward angles that best display their nether-regions—because it looks ridiculous (see the Hawkeye Initiative).

These present sexist designs spring from the minds of men socialized in a hegemony of patriarchy.  They are clearly created with male consumers in mind, and it’s impossible to rightly say that the designers were trying to “empower” women and not just trying to give men a sexual object to look at.  

Saying that the rampant hyper-sexualization of women in videogames isn’t sexist but sexual and that you’re actually being sexist for thinking it’s sexist is like saying that the offensive stereotypical POC characters in movies and TV shows aren’t racist.  And that the problem lies with people who find these characterizations racist and not in the white people who wrote them.  In the context of the world as it is, you can’t ignore the bigger paradigms of issues that these things contribute to.   Sure there are Asians out there who consistently get good grades, I was one of them!  But when EVERY Asian character on TV has to be smart, a bad driver, and/or knowledgeable of martial arts, it’s racist. 

And also, the hyper-masculinization of the warrior character is not a comparable issue.  This warrior character was created to make men feel power, not to belittle them for not being as powerful themselves, nor to send a message that all men should be chunks of muscle.  This non-effect is clearly seen in the attitudes of the gaming community. Also, these are men creating images for themselves, already making the issue incomparable.  And yes, men are indeed pressured to be masculine, irl and by the media, but that is also a facet of sexism.  Because while the best thing a woman can be is a woman, the worst thing a man can be is also a woman.  

To add to your last point joopinks, OP also succeeds in making multiple false equivalencies. These male characters exist to satisfy a male power fantasy, while the female characters exist to serve a male sexual fantasy.

OP can go ahead open their eyes to the fact that most female video game characters are designed dishonestly, by people with only enough concern for the audience they abuse by perpetuating this BS to craft excuses for their self-serving motivation.

Put another way: Anti slut-shaming arguments exist to help real women, whose autonomy and dignity are compromised when idiots jump to harmful conclusions based on arbitrary things like how much sex they have or how short their skirts are. Applying these same arguments to a fictional image of a women crafted by men means you cannot question the motivations of these men. Motivations which could not be more clearly biased in favor of stoking boners.

There is literally nothing I hate more than characters being at fault, or given autonomy, over the creators. Literally. You cannot view a poorly written character who doesn’t grow and change as being at fault, because a character doesn’t make their own decisions. The writer writes the character acting and growing a certain way. If a character starts off really interesting and falls flat, that cannot be and is not the character’s fault, because a character is a creation of a living human, rather than an actual human with autonomy. (See: Legend of Korra, and all those people who bitch about Korra’s character arc and hate her for not developing in the face of oppression as much as they would have liked. Instead of getting angry at her, maybe you should get angry at the white dudes who clearly don’t understand anti-oppression movements as well as they should.)

The same goes for character design. Characters do not spring fully formed from the minds of creators with their own agendas, despite what the deviantart teenage community would have you think. You don’t argue with a character over what to do in your head. That is your head arguing with your head. And when a designer sits down to create a character’s appearance, they must be held culpable for the choices they make. You cannot say a character chose to dress and look a certain way. Characters cannot choose for themselves. A designer can approach the design with the thought process of “if this character were a real person, based on their personality, how would they dress themselves?” but this is still the designer making the final decisions. You cannot view design in a vacuum. We may call it “world-building” but you are not creating a world with free will.

Not holding designers culpable for their decisions is just like saying boys will be boys and not blaming them when they rape.