Eve, the protagonist of Stellar BladeShe is a very sexy woman. So sexy that discussions about her appearance came to overshadow conversations about the mechanics and other elements of the game before its release. I talked a little about this in my review.but I decided to leave most of my opinions on Eve’s design and her sexualization for a separate article.
Well, here you have it.
All about Eve
The protagonist of the game is a warrior member of the VII Air Squadron. She was created in a space colony and trained exclusively to fight the naytibas: grotesque monsters that dominate the Earth. Her goal is to find and eliminate the supreme naytiba and thus recover the planet for humanity.
But shortly after their arrival, the Air Squadron is decimated by the Naytibas. Eve watches as her companions and her leader, Tachy, are killed. She only manages to survive thanks to the help of Adam, a human who rescued her before she suffered the same fate.
Despite that terrible experience, Eve’s goal does not change. She is determined to fulfill her mission to find and eliminate the supreme naytiba. Along the way she meets other survivors and discovers terrible secrets about her enemies and about humanity itself, but nothing changes her goal. First of all, she must avenge Tachy and complete her mission.
At first glance it seems that Eve belongs to the well-known archetype of the faithful soldier. No matter the obstacles, she will always move forward with her duty. In good narratives, these types of characters are often used to both celebrate and criticize military zeal. It challenges the soldier’s beliefs so that he evolves as a character, either by strengthening his conviction or discovering his error. There is none of that in the protagonist of Stellar Blade.
When Eve discovers the big secrets of Earth’s past, she simply doubts them and moves on. When she confirms that what she believed is false, she continues anyway. She doesn’t have a character arc or any evolution. There is nothing attractive about her beyond her appearance..
Eve naked
But what has made the protagonist of Stellar Blade be so talked about is not his personality or his history, but his body. Eve has big breasts, a voluminous butt, long legs, a flat stomach, and an angelic face. When she jumps or attacks, her breasts sway and when she runs she crouches lower than necessary to ensure the player’s vision focuses on her shapely buttocks.
Eve is designed as a normative beauty ideal. That’s not strange at all. We can say that the vast majority of video game characters are designed to be attractive. But this case is a little different from what we see today. It is reminiscent of the designs seen during the 2000s and early 2010s. Those were times when the majority of female characters had designs focused on highlighting their figure to attract the attention of an audience assumed to be male and heterosexual.
While that trend never completely went away, it now seems mainly confined to niche ‘anime’ aesthetic games and ‘gacha’ titles for mobile phones. Criticism from feminist groups, the diversification of audiences and greater diversity in developer teams meant that since then we have seen much more varied female characters. Now, the appearance of sexualized characters—like Bayonetta and 2B, of Nier: Automata— is usually an important part of their personality, context, world and themes.
But the sexualization of Eve in Stellar Blade It has nothing to do with the world to which it belongs. He doesn’t say anything about his character and doesn’t change his relationship with the others. Despite his sexualized appearance, he is a practically asexual character..
There must be a reason for a character to be sexy?
The truth is, no. There is nothing wrong with a character being sexy simply on the whim of its developers or because it reflects their tastes.. His appearance doesn’t have to play a role in the narrative either. But in this way an enormous potential is wasted and it is left open to very fair criticism.
Stellar Blade It gives so much importance to the female figure of its protagonist that it borders on parody. The costumes all seek to highlight Eve’s butt, sometimes placing the lighting directly on it, and in the video sequences the camera desperately searches for her breasts and thighs. This occurs even in dramatic moments of combat or when there are revelations that should upset the characters.
We are always grateful when a game has a wide variety of cosmetic options (and especially when it does not ask us to pay extra for them) because it allows us to express ourselves through the way our character dresses. But in Stellar Blade We can’t express ourselves through the nanosuits, earrings and glasses we put on Eve. They all follow a sexualized line in which we rather feel that we are looking for a specific fetish, the clothing that excites us the most when we look at it..
A missed opportunity
Would Eve have been a better character if she were “ugly” or less sexualized in appearance? No, that’s not what I mean either. What I would have liked is for its design to be consistent with the rest of the elements of the game.
Stellar Blade is a post-apocalyptic game in which the few remaining humans have a very difficult life. What does it mean that there is a person as beautiful as Eve among them?
Initially I thought this game was going to try something similar to Nier:Automata, in which the YorHa androids are differentiated from the others by their striking appearance. After all, humans refer to Eve as “an angel.” But that is not the case because on Earth there are already women like Kaya, Enya and the guardians of Orcal who have a similar appearance.
So could it be that the design is intended to create an attraction or sexual tension with other characters? Neither. No one shows sexual interest in Eve. This look also doesn’t fit her personality (or rather, her lack of personality) and many of the outfits we can wear don’t suit her—she would never wear that sexy bunny outfit or the cheerleader one—they just look good in her body.
What does beauty mean in this world? It does not mean anything. The most notable romantic relationship between two NPCs is between a person who has no human face and another who is missing body parts. Why then was a body like this chosen for Eve? Does it have anything to do with her name, the same as the mother of humanity for several religions?
This game is full of biblical references that, in the end, do not contribute as much to the themes or the plot as it seemed at first. The least subtle of all is in the name of the protagonist and her most important companion. That they use the names Adam and Eve for them implies many possibilities (even more so taking into account that the third of the team is called Lily, a possible reference to Lilith), but they are completely wasted.
The reason for these names does make a bit of sense in one of the game’s endings, but the lack of a deeper relationship between them makes it feel forced.
Even with her lack of personality, Eve was a character who could say a lot about the world of Stellar Blade by design, but it doesn’t. It’s beautiful because its creators simply wanted it to be beautiful, and that’s not bad, but it’s disappointing.
So what is the problem?
Under normal circumstances, there shouldn’t be any problems with Eve. After all, the landscape of female representation in video games is much more varied and inclusive than it was a decade ago. A character like her is more than welcome as long as we don’t stop having more interesting characters with more variety in their designs..
The problem is that There are groups of very unpleasant gamers who were waiting for a game like this to use it as a flag.. This year we have seen the return of GamerGate—a group that unleashed a wave of harassment and threats against developers and journalists in 2014— attacking consulting companies for “ruining video games”.
They have taken advantage of Eve’s design to celebrate “the return to the values traditional the videogames” and to continue your harassment campaign. They celebrate the arrival of Stellar Blade and the sexualization of his character as “a victory” against trends they don’t like.
This is not the fault of the developers or the game they intend to make, but it is an unpleasant side effect of the terrible ‘gamer’ culture that we have not been able to fix.
But really the developers share none of the blame?
The Korea Effect and Shift Up
Before the release of Stellar Bladethe Korean studio was mainly known for Goddess of Victory: Nod. This is a ‘gacha’ game for mobile phones in which we form a group of robotic soldiers known as Nikke to face an invasion of mechanical creatures called Rapture.
This game is infamous for the highly sexualized designs of its characters and focusing on the movement of their breasts and buttocks when shooting.. The narrative follows the influence of ‘harem’ type ‘animes’, in which all the female characters are hopelessly attracted to the protagonist.
The environment in which these games were developed is quite toxic. I’m not saying this because of the Shift Up offices, but because of the situation in the country. South Korea has been in the midst of a serious ideological division between men and women for several years. due to a sexist and violent rejection of feminist movements and anything that “looks like” feminism. One of the most famous cases is that of game fans who demanded the firing of a studio employee because a character’s swimsuit design didn’t seem sexy enough.
Although I can’t directly relate this situation to Eve’s sexualized design in Stellar Bladeif we have to remember that there are accusations against Shift Up for supposedly harass and eliminate the job of an employee and for firing employees who allegedly demonstrated support for feminist causes on the Internet.
In conclusion…
Nothing I said here means you should feel guilty for enjoying yourself. Stellar Blade not even for thinking that Eve is sexy. I must insist that I really enjoyed the game and that I found the protagonist very attractive. I highly recommend it to action game lovers and those looking for something ‘souls’ type but less dense.
What I want is for us to consider everything behind the design of a character—the personal tastes of its creators, cultural influences—and everything that this can affect the world they created for the game. Eve is nice to watch, but she adds nothing narratively to her world. In fact, she contrasts negatively with him. I don’t want her to stop being pretty, I want her beauty to be part of her, not her only characteristic.
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