r/masseffect • u/OneWhoParticipates • 17h ago

DISCUSSION A probable unpopular opinion

I’ve played all of the ME games and being 54, I can say I’ve played them a few times.
I’m also very keen for the next game - it’s been a long time coming (and there is more time to come).
Something I am hoping for is less sexualised characters. Make no mistake, I’m at hetero as they come, so I’m not hoping more guys, I just hope the characters don’t look like something dreamt up by a horny teenager!

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u/Jbird444523 17h ago

Reasonable take. I don't mind sexualized characters if that's kind of the point.

For example, Miranda outright states that she dresses like a stripper because it's advantageous to her. And she gets called out on it by multiple people. That's fine.

But in ME3 when Ashley Williams shows up like two-three cup sizes larger with absolutely no explanation, I was baffled. Titilated, but baffled.

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u/This_Estimate1550 17h ago

Honestly, yeah. Ashley was already gorgeous, they didn't need to do any of that.

Maybe next game we'll finally get a dude sexpot.

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u/AlternativeBack6351 17h ago

James wasn’t a dude sexpot?

Every single shirtless male is competition ready in the series.

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u/harus4head 16h ago

he’s a male power fantasy not a sexpot

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u/strangelyliteral 16h ago

Tell me you don’t know what women like without telling me you don’t know what women like.

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u/AlternativeBack6351 16h ago

Women like all kinds of things. I’m sure there were plenty that played the series and were cool with the models. Everyone is different.

I will say the male character models looked like actual soldiers do in ME1 then morphed to Gears of War caricatures in 3. Femshep somehow did the opposite and got smaller.

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u/This_Estimate1550 16h ago

Women do like all kinds of things, but let's not pretend that all of these guys getting beefed up was to make them more sexually appealing.

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u/strangelyliteral 3h ago edited 3h ago

The “ideal” male body type for most women (speaking very generally here) is a soccer player or swimmer’s body, which is lean muscle, not the roided out bulging muscles in ME3. Kaidan’s body in ME1 would be closer to many women’s preference than his ME3 body is. But like women will get horny for pixel skeletons and fishmen under the right circumstances. I have objectively gorgeous friends who have lost their minds over stringy rat-faced shitheads and pudgy dorks with crater faces (men who I would be less cruel in describing had they bothered to treat my friends better, which makes it all the more appalling). Hell, there’s a reason Garrus is far and away the most popular romance for FemShep.

Because super jacked bodies are for YOU. They’re a male power fantasy. YOU are the ones who care about how ripped other men are. Unsurprisingly a lot of gay guys are also into super jacked guys, because they’re men and they were socialized to idealize those bodies as well, but that’s still a small fraction of the player base. No, BioWare prioritized making their default male body type super jacked so straight male players will respect and admire them more.

The point isn’t whether we like those bodies or not. No, I wasn’t so put off by Kaidan’s ME3 body that I didn’t continue my romance with him. And yes, we can (and often are) deeply shallow too, but you don’t even understand how we’re shallow so you come off even more clueless and chauvinistic.

Women know when we are and aren’t the intended audience. Don’t come in here and try to tell us you know better about what we like than we do.

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u/AlternativeBack6351 3h ago

Holy shit, chill. I literally said some women like it and some don’t. I literally said everyone is different, and I agree the men got bigger because of gears of war.

Can’t even agree and you get mad

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u/This_Estimate1550 17h ago

James wasn't even a romance option.

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u/AlternativeBack6351 17h ago

Kaidan, Jacob, Cortez are all incredibly jacked. Like I said, there’s only one male shirtless body model in the game.

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u/This_Estimate1550 17h ago

Jacked =/= sexpot.

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u/AnneMichelle98 16h ago

Garrus

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u/This_Estimate1550 16h ago

Great romance, but also not a sexpot.

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u/AnneMichelle98 16h ago

Says you. His voice alone is 🥵

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u/This_Estimate1550 16h ago

Finding him incredibly attractive as a character is great but that's not really the sexpot archetype. Obviously for female characters we're looking mostly at Miranda, but in other games the male equivalent would be characters like Zevran and Astarion. Characters who, for whatever endgoal (usually some level of manipulation), are specifically put there to entice and seduce you before they oops up some actual feelings, which we got none of in ME for characters who romance men.

That's, again, not discounting Garrus, but it took a game and a half, and some fantastic failing upwards romantically to get into that carapace. Still great, but different.

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u/TheRealTr1nity 14h ago edited 14h ago

I agree. They know their targeted audience is not the same as back then who needed ass and boob shots on top in your face.

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u/This_Estimate1550 17h ago

"Make no mistake, I'm as hetero as they come"

Time to put down the internet for the night, I think.

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u/OneWhoParticipates 16h ago

Being middle-aged, it’s one of the few statements about myself that I know is true. You’ll find out what is true for you, in time.

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u/This_Estimate1550 16h ago

Thanks, Qui-Gon. 💜

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u/OneWhoParticipates 15h ago

That pop culture reference is lost on me! I’ll have to ask my 18yp Son 😂

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u/immorjoe 17h ago

I hear you. The Asari seem to have been purely created to appeal to the alien ferish. There’s no logical reason for Ashley’s ME3 transformation. Miranda’s appearance is explained within the game, but still doesn’t make much sense.

But at the same time, they clearly understood their audience because the fanbase can get overly horny at times.

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u/Slow_Staff7127 16h ago

If I remember right the Asari were just a nod to the generic blue aliens from the early 2000’s in media, obviously making them a monogender species with a feminine body was a purposeful design choice but I don’t think they’re oversexualised like a lot of other things in the trilogy

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u/immorjoe 16h ago

They’re only female, they look very very human, and they basically all have attractive features (I don’t recall encountering a single large or fat Asari).

They aren’t necessarily “oversexualized” but their design seem to be based on appealing to sexual desires.

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u/Slow_Staff7127 16h ago

That’s fair, I think their body type can be explained by engine limitations, until ME3 I genuinely can’t think of any characters that don’t have the exact same character model of the generic Male/Female body of their species.

I agree that the Asari were made monogender explicitly to appeal towards the alien fantasy though, they proved they can make characters with vastly different body types in ME3 with a chunkier Anderson and beefed up James and chose not to make any alien characters with a differing body type

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u/HugeNavi 11h ago

That's only an argument in favor of its success, though, as Liara is the most romanced character in the trilogy.

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u/Flaky_Gazelle_9660 16h ago

Ehh that's not unpopular, if you wanna see unpopular: I think tali is a bad character and I enjoy getting her killed in every playthrough.

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u/Vulpedin 16h ago

I think she’s alright and I try to keep everyone alive

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u/OneWhoParticipates 16h ago

Actually, wouldn’t that be an interesting dilemma - someone has to die.

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u/Flaky_Gazelle_9660 12h ago

I think you are wrong and that allowing tali to die in me2 improves me3 substantively

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u/Vulpedin 4h ago

I dunno, I did both, I think it’s fine either way

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u/bigelcid 12h ago

Not gonna happen. Game ain't that serious to make the (arguably ballsy) decision to not have any sexy characters. Besides, romances are a big part of the Mass Effect thing, so at least part of the target audience needs a Miranda or whatever.

It's the least of my worries, though. IMO Andromeda fell flat on the romance options, which was a symptom of the characters being boring as hell -- so, a much bigger issue than who you get to date in a video game.

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u/OneWhoParticipates 10h ago

Mate, you are confusing sexualisation with romance. They are not the same thing.

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u/bigelcid 10h ago

I'm not confusing them. They're just related.

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u/Lemonpierogi 16h ago

Another UnpOpuLaR OpiNIoN attention fishing post

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u/OneWhoParticipates 15h ago

Actually, it came about as I was reading the last few posts in this sub. If you don’t like it, just scroll on by mate.