Wait, what?Originally Posted by Friyn
No, they treat their females as... characters. You know... characters like any other character. They can be highly stereotyped (see: pretty much any tsundere) but they're not purely "sex objects" unless the show is pure schlock. If anything they should be praised for actually treating their female characters as characters rather than having them serve purely as eye-candy the way Western video games and comic books tend to do.
It's also worth noting that, unlike our video game or comic book industry, anime tends to be aimed at specific audiences instead of attempting to appeal to as wide and general an audience as possible, so of course you're going to have your fanservice ero-kawaii shows alongside, say, a celebration of MMORPGs (Log Horizon), a competently-written series about farming (Silver Spoon), a ridiculously over-the-top action show where EVERYONE IS NAKED (Kill la Kill), and so on.
I find it disingenuous to criticize the industry as a whole in this regard when there's just a few shows designed to titillate and sell based entirely on the visual appeal of their female cast. Those shows are made specifically for that audience, and they don't pretend to be anything else. This is in stark contrast to our local output where, in our video games for example, gratuitous female nudity is the law of the land (good god, Mortal Kombat has got to be the worst example of this in the history of mankind!). There is a huge, outsized difference between having nudity because your series is designed to have nudity in it, and simply sticking it in there because you can (or because "sex sells", as you say).
Speaking of, yes, PSO2 is one of those games (let's face it, a lot of the female outfits have excessively fetishy overtones), but it has basically nothing to do with its anime influences. It's just what they're shooting for, the audience they're trying to court to make money. I honestly have a hard time thinking of any anime where the females are sexed up as much as PSO2's. There are a lot of shows that will do occasional panty and cleavage shots, but PSO2 is a non-stop barrage of partial and almost-full nudity, as the screenshots uploaded to PSO2uploader all the time reveal.
And there's nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when they focus too much on a particular audience as the expense of everyone else, which is a problem for a game designed specifically to make your own characters. But I digress - point is, the anime industry has NOT taken an excessively fanservicey turn, despite however often ignorant pundits like to repeat it in spite of reality. It's about the same as it's always been, with the exception of more censorship being used to drive blu-ray sales.
Oh, and
The only thing ridiculous about the breast customization is the fact that not more games have character creation as robust. Not all women have the same breast size or shape, damn it, so accommodating as many possible shapes as possible is the best thing you can do.
It always amuses me whenever someone blasts a game for having controls for breast size and shape. So, what, does every woman you've ever known have the exact same proportions, or are you just ignorant to how important that aspect is to a female character's look, or do you believe anything even remotely sexual is WRONG (obviously not directed at you, but in general), or what? Doesn't make sense to me. Oh, and then they compare it to DONG SLIDERS, as though they're even remotely comparable (do I get a vulva slider to go along with it?!). Fucking idiots, man.
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