Hypocrisy At Its Finest: After Years Of Complaining About Sexy Female Characters, Western Video Game Industry Publicly Thirsts Over Cast Of ‘Hades II’
Spencer Baculi
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In a textbook example of the idiom ‘Rules for thee, not for me’, after years of chastising and decrying the general video game playing populace for enjoying attractive female character designs, the Western video game has responded to the recent reveal of Hades II‘s new character designs by publicly and proudly proclaiming just how much they’d like to sleep with each and every one of them.
The designs in questions were first unveiled on April 17th courtesy of a three-hour livestream of the game hosted by its developer, Supergiant Games.
Therein, not only were players given their first look at the updated appearances of a handful of the Greek gods who are set to return from the first game – Demeter, Artemis, Selene, and Aphrodite – but were also introduced to newcomer Hephaesteus, this incarnation portraying the mythical blacksmith as a portly and wheelchair-bound amputee.
And despite having spent the past few weeks accusing anyone who dared to enjoy the attractive design of Stellar Blade protagonist Eve of being everything from incels to pornography addicts, near immediately after Hades II made its character reveals, members of the wider video game industry – in particular (and unsurprisingly) video game journalists – took to the internet to celebrate just how sexy the aforementioned Greek gods.
“It is very funny that there are chuds out there being like ‘THE WOKE GAMING JOURNALISTS HATE SEXY WOMEN!’ meanwhile my entire timeline is hootin’ and hollerin’ about these Hades 2 character portraits,” proclaimed Lex Luddy, the Editor-in-Chief of the video game news site startmenu.
“How did they make them even hotter,” replied GamesRadar and GamesIndustry contributor Alicia Haddick, “they must be stopped.”
Likewise, The Last of Us II Senior Technical Gameplay Animator Maebe Raines exclaimed, “THEY MADE THEM HOTTER”.
Kotaku senior editor Alyssa Mercante – who readers may know for having authored the site’s now notorious defense of Sweet Baby Inc. – took particular interest in Aphrodite, retweeting her design and questioning, “Mommy? Sorry”
Retweeting Mercante’s post, PCGamer contributor Dominic Tarason mocked, “Gamergaters: The Wokes are stealing all the Sexy from games! Hades 2: Yes, our game is the most inclusive, progressive take on Greek myth ever written and also the maximum hornt [sic] you can possibly get while still somehow squeaking in with a T rating.”
Taking note of the fact that this outpouring of ‘safe horny’ rhetoric was coming from the same industry that almost universally spent the last few years condemning them for similar behavior towards characters such as NieR: Automata‘s 2B, Bayonetta‘s title protagonist, and most recently Stellar Blade‘s Eve, players eventually took to directly calling out those thirsting over the cast of Hades II for the sheer hypocrisy of their “What you like bad, what I like good” outlook towards their media consumption.
In turn, rather than admitting to the glaringly obvious hypocrisy of their stance on sexy characters – or at least to having a bias towards conventionally attractive characters – the industry instead took to making justifications for their double standard.
Penning a piece headlined ‘Hades II Is The Kind Of Hot We Need Right Now‘ for Kotaku, the aforementioned Mercante argued, “Hades characters’ sexiness is woven into their personalities, as much a part of them as their wants, needs, and emotions—and their bodies, however scantily clad or salacious, are not in motion, they cannot be manipulated or posed or peered at from different angles.”
“Instead, it’s like you’re looking at statues or paintings of these gods and their eternal, infinite sexiness,” she further attempted to defend her and her ideological allies’ actions. “There is desire here, sure, but there is also power and reclamation, there is longing because you only get a tiny little taste of their beauty. The concept of ‘look, but don’t touch’ is incredibly sexy—it’s part of why strip clubs, many of which have strict rules on touching the performers, are so lucrative.”
Offering a similar refrain on Twitter, Games Radar staff writer Jasmine Gould-Wilson retweeted a post from fellow user @veedztweets claiming that “Aphrodite knows she’s hot, you can tell by how she looks at you. Eve doesn’t. She’s posed but expressionless. Hades 2 has a wide range of character skin tones, ages, body type. Stellar Blade’s women seem to only look like Eve. Sexy isn’t bad, pretending there’s only one type is,” and added, “Camera angles say it all. Camera angles say it all. Aphrodite is shown from a low angle; she has agency, she is a powerful and intimidating figure. Eve stares blankly at you head-on when you’re not sitting right behind her spandex-covered ass, observing her from above because you have power over her.”
At current, Stellar Blade is getting ready for its April 26th sortie date.
Meanwhile, Hades II remains on track to arrive from the heavens sometime March 2025.
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