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Shexy Shelob (The Jimquisition)

Arkanius said:
I never understood much of this argument.
Do sexy women repel women?

Or is it the oversexualized man pandering that some females are ingame? (Which is a different problem)

Because my girlfriend prefers her woman characters to be good looking and sexy. (anecdotal evidence)
Like I prefer my male characters to be good looking.
Sexy and good looks sell, across the board.

I find the Sexy Shelob stupid for many reasons, it was uneeded by the way.
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I was more referring to the toxicity of some gamers is probably what pushes some women away from openly enjoying videogames.
 
Warnen said:
Sorry comment came off harsher then I meant it.


As for this video, I don't get why its tagged "Sexy Shelob". Its a women in a dress, its not overly sexualized. In most games she would have some kind of breast enhancing armor or a barley held together dress. If you want to humanize a giant spider, couldn't hardly be done more tastefully. Now for the reason, maybe they want to player to empathize with her. Much easier to do with a Human character then a Giant Spider for most people (save NeoGaf of course).

Now if it was a good choice, I'd have to wait to see the full game.
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They turned a giant evil killer spider monster into a human seductress. There is more to sexualization than just slapping giant tits on something, you know.
 
Good episode. Surprised Broodmother and Medusa from Dota didn't get a shout out. I remember them coming up in the previous Jimquisition thread discussing Primal Rage.

Ana is cool though, even though Blizzard has fallen foul of the same stuff before in Heart of the Swarm.
 
ZeroGravity said:
He's advocating the exact thing people often mock western developers for doing: intentionally designing ugly characters.
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Shelob is a fucking scary spider. End of the story. I'm not a fan of how Bioware butches their female characters on purpose, but this is a totally different thing. The devs just turned a famous scary spider of pure evil into a woman. I'm not against sexy women, it's just not everything has to be sexy women. This game just continues to taint the good name of the original works.
 
This is the first time I'm hearing about this. I mean, seriously, doing this to Shelob of all characters. Fucking Shelob? This inexcusably stupid, but stupid things involving supposedly fearsome female characters is par for the course for Monolith post-Warner acquisition.

also jim don't think I don't know where you got that fem bowser pic you furry trash <3

Nikodemos said:
They could've gone the weeb route and made her something like Rachnera, but a lot of idiots would get all in a huff about "animu trash in muh py00r Western power fantasy".
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Emperor_EL said:
That's what I pictured when I first heard about Sexy Shelob, not sure if what we got is better or worse.
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Eh, the Rachnee approach would still be a fuckton more interesting than what Shadow of War went with, that's how bloody uncreative this 'Shelob' design is.
 
It is an odd choice for a character re-design. It just feels unnecessary.

Not sure how I feel about the primal rage argument though. I keep thinking about the argument, and I haven't ended up in a clear place.

Also: best sign-off ever.
 
You had to include THAT image didn't you? I had almost erased it from memory.

Is there any information about her taking spider form during gameplay? The trailer had a bit of Spidey-Shelob, but it looked like a cutscene. I imagine that animating a spider in this day and age is hell. I'm looking through TV Tropes and there seems to be a drop off in giant spiders in recent times, especially in games with combat like SoW. Not an excuse, but wondering if it might be a shortcut to get around having to animate a giant spider constantly. Maybe having her spider bits be entirely scripted like Dog's combat sequences in Half-Life 2 to avoid having to deal with complex reactions? Either way, it's bland and definitely shouldn't be a marketing tool.

Also, wasn't Shelob's existence based almost entirely around eating in the books/movies?
 
Maintenance said:
A sexy spider that has a mother-like relationship with the player.

1372641158198.jpg


I'm not one to judge but this just doesn't make any sense. I could see Compile Heart or some other japanese company doing this, but a LOTR game?
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To be fair, she often eats her own children.
 
Oh boy, why?

How she was able to control her botomless hunger and be sexy AF. Didnt she ate all her brood?

Is as stupid as giving Mileena lips to be more sexualized.


EDIT: Vertigo is female?
 
Let's reach a compromise and have the giant spider just use the corpse of a sexy woman as a string puppet to communicate with the player. Deal?
 
Sexy Shelob is the dumbest fanfic material to come out of Tolkien adaptions since Tauriel and Kili's crush in The Hobbit movies. Just why.
 
Isn't this an accurate-ish representation of Shelob without the curse? Or am I misremembering The Silmarilion?

Maybe it was Shelob's mother who was cursed and turned into a spider, and then she had spider babies - Shelob being one of them.

Something like that, anyway.
 
nekkid said:
Isn't this an accurate-ish representation of Shelob without the curse? Or am I misremembering The Silmarilion?

Maybe it was Shelob's mother who was cursed and turned into a spider, and then she had spider babies - Shelob being one of them.

Something like that, anyway.
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Shelob's mother is Ungoliant, a primodial evil from very very long ago that allied with Melkor, Sauron's master.
 
Put me in the camp of not knowing about sexy Shelob and thinking "Wait, did they put boobs on a spider?" before watching.

Now I don't know if this or reality is worse.

I don't even know what to say. What's the thought process that starts with "Hey, let's use the giant spider from Tolkien's work" and ends with this? As in, why do you even fucking need Shelob as a basis of this conglomeration of tropes?
 
nekkid said:
Isn't this an accurate-ish representation of Shelob without the curse? Or am I misremembering The Silmarilion?

Maybe it was Shelob's mother who was cursed and turned into a spider, and then she had spider babies - Shelob being one of them.

Something like that, anyway.
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Shelob has never had a human form of any kind, let alone a sexy lady version. Her mother Ungoliant is also a giant freaking spider, so they are literally just taking the fact that Shelob is female and using that as an excuse to put a sexy lady in the game.

It's really insulting to just about every possible member of the game's audience. It's insulting to Tolkien fans for obvious reasons, it's insulting to women because it says a female character isn't worth anything unless she's sexy, and it's insulting to men because it says that we're such stupid fucking animals that we need a sex object in the game to jack it to even if she's actually a spider.
 
Even if she isn't portrayed as "sexy" per se, having her appear to the player in human form, to me, greatly detracts from the weight of this uneasy alliance. Forming an alliance with a relatable, attractive looking human woman in no way carries the same weight from a narrative perspective as forging one with a giant flesh eating primordial evil spawn.
 
Warnen said:
Sorry I don't get that from the trailer, I don't see every one in a dress as a sex object.
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Shelob is a giant spider. She has always been a giant spider. She has never been a human.

What other possible reason do you think they had for giving Shelob this form?

Don't play dumb. "I don't see everyone in a dress as a sex object". Like we're the problem.

Whatever, dude.
 
Disheveled_Zen said:
Even if she isn't portrayed as "sexy" per se, having her appear to the player in human form, to me, greatly detracts from the weight of this uneasy alliance. Forming an alliance with a relatable, attractive looking human woman in no way carries the same weight from a narrative perspective as forging one with a giant flesh eating primordial evil spawn.
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Case in point:
Primordial-Serpent-Dark-Souls.jpg
 
LMAO making Shelob a sexy goth lady. Are you kidding me, devs?

So fucking pathetic and creatively bankrupt.

Kissenkopf said:
I don't think it's that bad. Tbh it seems like no one cares and Jim makes more out of it then there really is.
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I care. Other people (including women) care too. Thank you Jim for this great video.

The most female AND male characters are rather good looking in video games. Sometimes the devs clearly make the female characters WAY to sexy but in this case it is just a boring excuse to make a video.
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And this is just a boring excuse for a shitpost.

psychowave said:
Game devs, please let women be ugly/"masculine" sometimes. Having like one woman in your game who isn't an hourglass-shaped hyper feminine goddess won't kill you and it could do so much for women who don't fit beauty or femininity standards (i.e like 99% of us).
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+1

GlassBurrito said:
Funny that he mentions Gears of War and fails to mention the one of the only female characters in the first game is the Berserker.
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And then the sequel had the "Locust queen" who, you guessed it, a sexy human-looking lady... (nothing quite as bad as this version of Shelob, mind, at least she looks kinda badass, but yeah, kinda convenient)

Disheveled_Zen said:
Even if she isn't portrayed as "sexy" per se, having her appear to the player in human form, to me, greatly detracts from the weight of this uneasy alliance. Forming an alliance with a relatable, attractive looking human woman in no way carries the same weight from a narrative perspective as forging one with a giant flesh eating primordial evil spawn.
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Absolutely and that's one of Jim's point as well. Having Talion ally with a clearly monstrous and inhuman entity would make for a far more compelling narrative.
 
I was expecting a half lady half spider design, but they actually turned a spider into a hot woman. Game developers continue to come up with new dumb ways to insert tits into their games.
 
While I agree that we could use more monstrous female characters, I have to admit that turning Shelob into a sexy lady is an angle I didn't expect WB to go!

I actually think that Shelob using magic to alter her appearance (at least to others) is interesting take on the character we haven't seen before. However, seeing Talion fall directly in league with a giant spider would have been more interesting.

*shrug* I can roll with it.
 
As much as I love hearing Jim talk.....i really tend to zone out around the 6 minute mark.

Kinda feel like he should condense these rants into shorter episodes. He usually doesn't need half as much time as he does to get his point or its backings across.
 
I agree with Jim that this is a shockingly boring thing to do. It's not even a new Idea to turn a Spider into a human woman or some mix. It's so uncreative and unnecessary.
 
I find it weird that some people would justify this decision as for "marketing" purposes considering that Shelob is possibly the most recognizable and famous spider monster in all of fantasy. The Lord of the rings movies, let alone the books, did just fine financially while still managing to make actual monsters look like monsters and not overly sexualized women. If anything, the sexualization just pushes more people away from the game (namely tolkien fans and women) than it does attract people. The people who defend this would've probably still been as interested in the game as they are now if Shelob was a spider instead of a human woman.
 
ZeroGravity said:
He's advocating the exact thing people often mock western developers for doing: intentionally designing ugly characters.
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Not really, he's advocating for character variety. Shelob could easily be the giant spider she originally was as he mentioned. He gives lots of examples of characters that are designed in the way he talks about.
 
What are chances she was made human to avoid having to animate her in cutscenes? It seems easier to just mocap a person than to invent and design convincingly articulate body language for a giant spider lady.

In Shadow of ________'s defense, Mordor did have essentially a genderbent Theoden, both corrupted and uncorrupted.
maxresdefault.jpg

9dPHb33.jpg
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ZeroGravity said:
He's advocating the exact thing people often mock western developers for doing: intentionally designing ugly characters.
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When, in the history of video games, has a game development studio designed a main playable female character to be ugly?

Because I can only think of one instance ever.

B2L9DrSCYAAmBwy.jpg


This is literally it.

truestatic said:
What are chances she was made human to avoid having to animate her in cutscenes? It seems easier to just mocap a person than to invent and design convincingly articulate body language for a giant spider lady.
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Even if that's the case, that's still lazy AF.

moustascheman said:
I find it weird that some people would justify this decision as for "marketing" purposes considering that Shelob is possibly the most recognizable and famous spider monster in all of fantasy. The Lord of the rings movies, let alone the books, did just fine financially while still managing to make actual monsters look like monsters and not overly sexualized women. If anything, the sexualization just pushes more people away from the game (namely tolkien fans and women) than it does attract people. The people who defend this would've probably still been as interested in the game as they are now if Shelob was a spider instead of a human woman.
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Most people don't care about the The Silmarillion and are assuming that the stuff pulled from that is new original content. They can use that to spin whatever they want however they want.

The saddest thing about all this is that there's almost guaranteed to be a moment in the new game where she turns back into a giant spider and you have a big dumb scripted boss fight, making her transformation all the more unnecessary.
 
Mesoian said:
Even if that's the case, that's still lazy AF.
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Oh absolutely. And it still doesn't really tell us why she was made to be sexy. But there's a lot of people who see Shelob being made human at all and ask "why." My first thought was "because it's probably easier/cheaper."
 
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