I am eagerly awaiting Capcoms until now highly praised Resident Evil 4 Remake, but not because I’m concerned with updated combat mechanics or graphical fidelity or any monsters, really – I’ve been thinking about skirts.
Skirts caused one of the remake’s early controversies. Ashley Graham, the blonde damsel in distress who accompanies blonde man of action Leon S. Kennedy most of the time RE4She is wearing a green tartan mini skirt. In the remake Ashley seems to bear instead, a similar-looking skort with gray tights, eliminating the original’s upskirting opportunities forever.
Sexually frustrated fans of the series was disappointed, don’t seem to understand that there are already many websites out there that show them exactly what they are looking for. But I was relieved. I want that RE4 The remake’s changes signal better days for video game skirts and, more broadly, female character design, so both are moving more in the direction of expressive, gender-fluid fashion real women’s clothing was made since 2020. To best assess the possibility, I’ve traveled through the short history of video game skirts.
In the beginning was the upskirt
Video games are very young compared to the rest of humankind’s already tearful history. The physical rock is not.
People have wrapped themselves in the sweeping undergarments since dawn the prehistory; they were worn in Bronze Age ritualsand around the construction of the pyramids. Improvements in men’s tailoring in the late Middle Ages pushed the skirt into a more feminine fashion category, but its status as women’s fashion in the West is only just solidifying the 19th centurywhen breeches became more popular and meaningfuland offered more coverage of the grueling day jobs of Industrial Revolution workers.
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In its many lives, the skirt has been cut and drawn in many ways. It’s been long enough since it’s gone a structured way, like a snail. It was shortened, made asymmetrical, then made it shorter. Its recent social and design metamorphosis — tiny, liftable skirts for women — is what’s usually stuffed into video games.
The first video game skirts appeared the very first video game girls, all born into difficult circumstances; The home consoles of the early ’80s tried to compete with the booming arcade market by wooing girls to their mostly shitty games. Among those sloppy but female-centric games is the Sega game from 1984 girl garden, in which the protagonist wears a triangular, cream-colored skirt; 1987 Sega RPG fantasy star, in which the protagonist wears an asymmetrical pink skirt; and 1994’s dating sim, aimed at a female audience (resp otome Game) Angeliquewhere Angelique wears a raspberry, you guessed it, pink skirt.
These primeval video game skirts might not have been original, but they were overwhelmingly innocent. Thigh-length, usually pacifier pink, a visual shortcut to the blushing youth of her typically teenage protagonists.
That changed when video games decided to market their games predominantly to boys like they did in the arcade days. 90s fighting games like Mortal Kombat helped accustom audiences to seeing attractive but untouchable women in their underwear, and 1997 Final Fantasy VII protagonist Tifa Lockhart got her used to seeing skirts as more of a teaser, a holdover from girlhood, but no longer a hallmark of it. Tifa’s skirt is black, not pink. It ends at the very beginning of her thighs, seemingly as a requirement, not wanting to cover more than absolutely necessary.
games like FFVII recontextualized the skirt as a feminine garment that not only can be worn by women, but can also be sexualized.
Watch it in the following decade: Ashley squeaks and calls Leon a pervert In Resident Evil 4‘s first release in 2005, angling it right, gave the player a quick glimpse of her white underwear. in 2008, GamesRadar compiled Underwear shots from some games including Tekken 6, the devil may weep 4And No more heroes. It urged readers to “prepare the same “but it’s satire” apology we used while putting this feature together” if spotted while reading, but also congratulated the horror game Obscure for “quickly serving a full platter of the finest free-range upskirt.”
In 2009, Brian Ashcraft alerted my city reader to an article in officials Monster Hunter Frontier magazine which taught players how to take screenshots of other players’ underwear. A few days later, Ashcraft pointed out another upskirting opportunity — an erotic game that used webcam tracking to get players to kneel and stare at its characters. plaid mini skirts.
In 2011, a mobile game called upskirt! was rejected by the App Store. in 2012, Lollipop Chainsaw distributed Upskirt Successes. Over the past decade, gamers have found ways to upskirt History of the Seasons Characters, smashed Characters, over watch Characters. And in an act of misogynist innovation, they’ve learned how to molest schoolgirls in virtual realityto.
The future is (slightly) less perverted
You may be wondering at this point how I could hope for video game skirts. Capcom’s decision to change up Ashley’s outfit and have her wear something just as cute without the sexualized baggage is the right decision in my opinion, but it’s a small decision to consider after decades of navigating alienating women – and trampled on girl characters and took their skirts and made them more controversial than they had been since the 19th century.
But fashion, like all art, erodes and reconstitutes itself like sand dunes. The FIDM Museum in Los Angeles has a “skirt lifter”– a spike adorned with a coiled metal butterfly – from 1876 in his collection, not used for tickling but to allow women with their heavy skirts to walk more easily.
Fashion can be defined and redefined again and again. Outside of video games, skirts will again become appropriate for non-female person identifying in 2023 carry. Fashion-conscious women think about what it means to dress themselves The “female gaze” or in stereotypically feminine attire — like colorful glitter eyeliner, lace-up corsets, pink skirts — that prioritize art and romance over sex.
Although the Resident Evil 4 The remake’s outfit change bends out of discussion rather than embracing the skirt as a more fluid, expressive device than the games’ last 20 years have allowed, I can sympathize with that elbow from the boys club is difficult.
But I think video game fashion will change as long as the real world changes. It’s been a long time since video games were only marketed to men. Now we’re all looking. Respectful.
