Poisonpen wrote...
The males are different. They are all toned and well muscled, yes (handsomeness and age are more the domain of a face editor), but that does not change the fact they have distinct, different body shapes. Heavily muscled, standard (albeit muscled), and slim. Just becase they are ripped doesn't change the fact a stranger could pick out each one as a silhouette with a bit of knowledge on each species, something noticeably lacking from the female samples.
I disagree. The dwarf (male and female) do not fit with the stereotypical media presentation of body type. I can refer you to body image scales if you're interested. The elf and human are the same frame - the elf is just more lithe where the human is broad. This extends to the male
and female.
Shoulders that are somewhat less broad and a waste that is relatively less narrow does not make for a much more different shape than narrower waist and larger breasts, as is in the case of the female elf and the female human.
And about the balding fat men argument... where did that even come from? I don't think anyone has made that argument and, as mentioned above, character models outside the racial base are just resource sinks.
I bring it up as an absurd example, but one designed to show what a dramatic difference in shape would be. I have a hard type looking up psychinfo now for the appropriate scale, but when you look at what stereotyping research uses for body image, the difference between the elf and human is non-existent.
The only place where a valid argument can be made about apperance is with respect to the female qunari, who does break with the male trend, because she's a basketball player to the body-builder qunari, but she doesn't have the same figure as the elf/human, if you actually take the elf/human/qunari to represent dramatically distinct body images.
But that is it.
To say that the shapes shown for men are somehow more varied than for women in a dramatic way is misleading, especially when each pushes toward the same stereotypical trend: bigger and more masculine for men (up to the hypermasculine qunari) and smaller and more toward an hourglass (to the lithe, apparently ribless elf).
'Hotness' is irrelevant, also you even say half the sampling (steroid guy and pudgey dwarf) are not traditionally hot (again, this is what that caption at the bottom was going for), so i do not see where this viewpoint is coming from or going at all.
I wanted to avoid being academic about it, but let's.
The stereotypical male image is tall and athletic. The qunari is the hypermasculine version of the male stereotype. Both the elf and human builds are near identical on the body imagine spectrum, with the human being just somewhat larger in the drawin (putting aside issues of relative height).
The females have the reverse trend: they are hyperfemine going from qunari to elf, effectively the reverse of the men, which is precisely what our gender stereotypes are.
The bioware art is a truncated version of a legitimate shape scale you could use to investigate body imagine perception in social psychology.
To say that the men have a different shape is just misleading, because they go from the midpoint to the stereotypical extreme, just as they do for women.
Plus, some of the the hotness is coming from faces (except the human female ~durrr~) cut those off and just concentrate on the discernable characteristics (or lack thereof) on each body. The men have far more distinct features than the women. That's boring, and really, really funny given the 'exploring different standards of beauty' spiel at the bottom.
I wasn't speaking about attractiveness as related to facial features at all, but rather to the frame of body that is attractive.
A fat man is not stereotypically attractive. A woman that is not very narrow in her waist versus her shoulders is not stereotypically attractive.
When we speak about body outlines, we can meaningfully speak about templates of attractiveness, and there is a significant body of research that points to the fact that shape is in itself a measure of attractiveness, independent of any other feature.
Men and women will rate an outline of the human drawing (if we use the Bioware drawing as a reference) as more attractive than that of the dwarf, controlling for height.
As for the females, the thing that gets my goat is that they are all athletic hourglasses. Even the supposedly pudgey dwarf falls into this category, just less track and more field. Why? There is more than one body shape for women, and the men are all distinct, showing they have no qualms about employing different shapes, even ones tradtionally viewed as unappealing. Why not throw in a 'bananna', apple, or pear in there somewhere. (rhetorical, we all know why)
The same applies to the men. Look at their shoulder to waist ratio. There are men that have narrow shoulders. There are men that are pear-shaped.
I agree with you regarding the portrayal of women. I just disagree that the portrayal of men is any better.
Just slim the elf down more, beef up the qunari a lot, muscle up the standard women a bit to further seperate her from the elf, and make the dwarf a triangle upward/pear or something to keep with the 'child bearing' look as others have mentioned. Bam now you're cooking with gas. Now people could look at a line up and say 'well duh, that is the body of an elf!'
Again - I'm not disagreeing over how women are portrayed. I'm disagreeing that men are shown any less stereotypically. Male standards of beauty are much harder to catch in popular media because of how ingrained they are, and how there is a lack of social awareness on pressure to conform to this standard.
I wouldn't generally make an issue of this, but I was helping a friend of mine on his research paper on a similar topic, so it's all fresh in memory.
BUT! I don't mind, even if I do find it stupid. My main point was it is ironic given the caption at the bottom that the women all cater to the same taste while the men appeal to a swathe of tastes. I'm not advocating this is a major issue, but if it were magically changed... well, I would do a happy jig.
See, I agree with you while disagreeing. Again, our point of contention isn't the women - it's whether the men are any bit different from each other.
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) require a higher body fat percentage than men - in fact the minimum they need (when they're not pregnant) is something like 12% (The qunari is the leanest and looks closer to 17% EDIT: maybe it is 12?), so muscle definition isn't really meant to be as apparant for women.
