What's wrong with Sexualized characters?
A character defined exclusively by their sexual characteristics, by itself, shouldn't be anything wrong. It's when most female characters in the industry are sexualized when it becomes a big problem. Their only trait is their sexuality. And, throughout history, that's how women have mostly been seen. As sexual objects. Why do you think half the insults directed towards female gamers are about sex? Because these bunch of idiots have grown up in an environment where that's THE quality of women. That ties back to the idea of "rape culture", which is this to the extreme. If women are about sex, and just about sex, why can't someone just take it if they want to?
Some sexualization isn't bad. As someone said, a game like DOA Beachball or whatever is called isn't the problem. For an example of a developer who actually know what they're doing, Rockstar. The prostitutes in GTA are talked about whenever someone brings up the game, a lot of promotional material depicts them. And it's obviously in a sexualized manner. But it doesn't matter, because they're not really characters, all their characterization must come from the thing that makes them stand out, in this case, being prostitutes, and as such is not a problem. And it's not a problem because their actual female characters do have personalities, and are, as a whole, the less disturbing GTA characters. A prostitute doesn't get any more characterization than a cop, which is why it's not a problem that sex is her only trait. It's a problem, however, when this applies to actual characters, and this happens a lot in gaming. In Borderlands, for example, a game I absolutely love and have completed many times before anyone says anything, in one of their trailers, all the characters had some long subtitle about them, except Lilith, which was "Hot". Couldn't that be applied to Roland, for example? No, because he has other traits. Lilith is Hot. And note that Borderlands isn't nearly as bad as some other examples, and given the way you play there's really not a lot of room for characterization. But the little it is, that's what they do about Lilith.
And finally, there's not a problem with sexualizing a character for a moment. For example, in Thor the movie, you have Kat Dennings and Natalie Portman oogling for the main character. It wouldn't have been a stretch to have either of them doing something sexy to call his attention. Yet, it's Thor the one who gets a completely needless shirtless scene. It's not there to make him look badass to the male audience. It's there to make him sexual to the female audience. He's being sexualized there. But it's not a problem there, since the next moment he's beating up Frost Giants in a serious manner. He's a sexy character sexualized for one scene, but his character isn't affected at all by this. Or, if you want a female example, Sarah Connor does have a sex scene in Terminator 1, but this doesn't affect her as a character.
I don't know if I've explained myself correctly or not.
So you want women who reinforce gender stereotypes in games? That's progress to you? Women are shown in combat and stuff in games because that's pretty much what games are about. Combat. Its simply a way for the player to have the most interesting amount of agency in a given environment. Not everything has to be a judgement on your sexuality.
Yes, that's what I said. Absolutely. Keep it up.
Would Sarah Connor stand out a lot in Gears of War? No. Is she still very much a woman and feminine? Yes.
I'm obviously not asking Gears for deep characterization, and it's good that they at least tried to show badass women, but the "STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER!!!!!!" stereotype exists for a reason, and that is that most people have no idea how to do a strong female character without making a man and adding tits.
