The Times Between

Okay, first of all, if you haven’t seen The Dark Crystal go see it. I’ll wait.

Did you see it? Good. Let’s continue. So Kira and Jen are the last two Gelflings, as far as they know. And they save the world from the Skesis, heal the crystal and that, but who cares? At best they can have kids themselves, but then their kids are fucked. Unless there are at least 20 other breeding pairs left, or incest doesn’t result in goober babies on crystal world. The Dark Crystal isn’t the only movie that has this problem. I can’t think of any others at the moment, but I know I’ve seen them. Some one is the last of the somethings and then they find THE OTHER ONE. So they don’t have to die alone, I guess… There really needs to be something that adresses this problem in storytelling. Can it really have gone this long without anyone thinking of this? Actually no. I already know of a bible story where they adress this very problem. When Lot, and his family, escape God’s wrath visited upon Sodom and Gomorrah his daughters think they are the last people alive and trick him into fucking them so they can have kids. Whic genetically isn’t that bad. The web toed kid thing from first cousins is actually a myth. As long as you don’t KEEP doing it the chance of doodle kids isn’t much worse than random chance. If you keep it up the weak genes start to double up geomertically and then everyone is fucked. Like royalty.

As an aside, in some ways tyrants are stymied by their insatiable desire to fuck cousins. Eventually the family line gets so backwards they become unfit to rule and the peasants can oust their cousin humping asses. The British royal family has gotten wise to this, however. Truly they are the cleverest of kings. Also, I guess countries where they have harems get past this too. The harem is kind of what evolution wants any given man to achieve. Sex up as many women as you can so your specific code gets out as far as it can. You can kill off as many rivals as you want so long as you leave enough for your offspring to get down on. Kings that throw dick wherever they like are the ones who win genetically speaking.

Anyway, whoever is responsible for that bible story already figured this whole “last of our kind” problem out and adressed it, but we seem to have abandoned that wisdom. I’m not saying you have to show other survivors of decemated races, but you might alude to rumors about sightings or something. That was one good thing about The Secret World Of Arietty. They suspected, at least, that there were still other borrowers out there. Then one showed up. Maybe not the best choice for a mate, but Arietty won’t have to safety dance all up on her pa.

In Fraggle Rock, before I saw the later episodes, I thought the Gorgs had this problem because there is no evidence that there are other Gorgs. Eventually you find out that there are, and that the Gorgs you see in the show are FUCKING DELUSIONAL. They aren’t the king or queen of anything and Junior eventually will be able to find a mate. I don’t know how Henson forgot that whole deal between Fraggle Rock and Dark Crystal, but he also forgot about doctors and kind of made it impossible to ask him.

You know what else is odd about Fraggle Rock? You never see Fraggle kids. The Doozers had the whole range of ages, but Fraggles only had teens to the aged. They implied that Fraggles do procreate, but you never actually saw baby ones. I can’t imagine a Fraggle being a very responsible parent, but there were certainly a lot of them. They must have had some kind of care system, or something. I guess there had to be other Boober-esque Fraggles who actually enjoyed tedious tasks, like child rearing. Or maybe they just stuck the babies all in some pit so the strongest ones would survive.

I wonder…

The Graves girls are notorious for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is the reputation of their mother, who all the parents remember… Not always fondly in some cases. Apart from that there are certain personality traits and… physical traits… that the sisters share. Excepting for the two that Carol does not. Not to the degree that her siblings do, including her younger sister Robin, at any rate. Although she won’t admit it she is intensely jealous of her sister’s endowments. This imagined deficiency has made her even more boisterous than she might normally be. When she isn’t blatantly seeking attention, in any form, she is seeking adventure. Which has lead to speculation that her surname doesn’t come from a family history of tending graves, but rather causing them to be filled. She has ventured into the forbidden forest on more than one occasion and returned with varying types of injuries. She has been caught doing this twice, and reported once. Likely because the groundskeeper was transporting a less than legal creature when he spotted her. Between her and the Lincoln twins Ravenclaw seems doomed to come in last for the house cup for the run of their enrollment.

Because she exhibits desirable traits for 3 of the houses it took several minutes for the sorting hat to decide where Carol belonged, seemingly erring on Ravenclaw simply to maintain the family legacy. It did little to maintain the peace of the Ravenclaw common room however. The sisters squabble endlessly over the most pointless things, and god help anyone who tries to intervene. They will round on an outsider like a pack of wolves, turning back on each other only when the outsider is destroyed. In this they are like the Lincoln twins and the whole house fears what might happen should the two groups ever get crossed purposes. It is comforting to know that Carol and Jessica are good friends which should reduce the chance of this ever happening… I think.

In opposition to her outward personality Carol excels in subjects that require nurturing and patience. Although she’s a fair hand with a wand if her dander is up, and generally it is. She’s much more nimble on a broom than her sisters, and light on her feet. Although this is obviously because she isn’t fighting nearly as many gravitational forces. With all that said you’re more likely to find Carol grinning wildly over some new quest she’s found than scowling about anything else.

Okay, so Skullgirls http://skullgirls.com/characters/cerebella/, if you haven’t heard of it, is a 2D fighting game available for download on PS3 & Xbox360. As a fighting game it’s pretty tight. The animation is top notch and everything is fairly polished. The cast is all female, and it seems to be set in a 1920sish crapsack world. I have done very little research about the actual story and setting of the game, so that might be totally wrong. I get this info mostly from playing the demo. Anyway, the people on my periphery are very concerned about how women are portrayed in media, so I’m oddly aware of it while not always being able to parse what is good and what is bad. So I asked people on my DeviantArt if they thought that Skullgirls was sexist, empowering, or a third, more complex, thing. People overwhelmingly chose the third thing, but a few people brought up some points about the character design that speaks pretty clearly to it being overtly sexist. On average the people who took a negative view were the only ones who made salient points about their arguments, whereas proponents offered up vague statements about this sort of thing being okay, and not harmful for the most part. I would like to present some of these point to encourage further conversation. (Try not to make any commentary more adversarial than you have to please. I don’t want to read fighting, I want to gain a clearer understanding about how people view these issues.)

Slave2Karma posited:
Filia- thigh high stockings with a mini skirt, frequent panty shots and seems to enjoy getting down on her hands and knees a lot.

Cerebella- Mini dress and balloon boobs bouncing every which way.

Parasoul- bare legs and booty skirt, panty shots, pauses to pose with her hips out, in the last shot faints into a mans arms.

Ms. Fortune- Cat zombie monster, okay…with ridiculous under-cleavage and is wearing a utility belt around panties.

Painwheel- unholy monster lady, yet still has been dressed in a loin cloth dress to allow for ass and crotch shots.

Valentine- balloon tits, panty shots, and a nurse outfit. Triple whammy.

Double- Another monster lady…who can turn into all the other ladies.

The only one who isn’t sexualized is Peacock, but that’s 1 out of 8. After putting it all down in writing, I’m sort of wondering how this game could be perceived as empowering in the slightest. A lot of the attacks and concepts seem cool:Filia’s demon hair, Ms. Fortune’s extendo muscle fibers, I even like Valentine’s ‘show me where it hurts’ catchphrase. And yeah, some games try to aim for this kind of ridiculous/ironic level of fan service (Bayonetta anyone?) but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s objectifying and alienating for potential female gamers.

Toadking07 had similar thoughts:
I voted it’s sexist. Most of the girls are dressed like strippers, or at least have some rather revealing article of clothing on. I really think stuff like this has become to standard in video games, that people confuse it with “empowering” women, instead of what it is, idealizing them as sex objects. It’s one thing for a girl to dress sexy because she feels like it, it’s another thing for her to be dressed sexy because it will sell.

If you reversed the roles, had male characters looking like that, it’d be one thing, but I don’t think there are really any examples out there of that. I’m talking about male characters, designed by females, to be sexy and attractive. (which is definitely different than a male character designed by males to be a fantasy strong man) And I mean not just one, but the whole cast of a game looking like this. Guys without their shirts on, athletic builds, tight jeans, abs in your face, low riding underwear, whatever girls are into! It’s definitely going to come across differently.

Infinite-Ion added:
I had to watch someone play as each character and yes, I do give the animation a standing ovation. However, what I want to know is why must their outfits be so short? Plus, if we were to think about it, Filla and Painwheel are 15 or 16; yet, Filla looks like she’s ready for some adult entertainment despite losing her entire memory! I wished the bodies were made to be more.. believable? I have a hard time imagining a lot of 15 to 16 year old girls looking like a Filla.

Adding onto that, it said that she was a C cup in biography. I don’t believe that for a minute because that looked more like a D and on up; much like Cerabella, Valentine and Parasoul. » I do, however, like Peacock (even though she can be annoying, at times) and Ms. Fortune since she’s about the only “woman” who isn’t blown up like a doll.

Oh, what I’m trying to say is, “I don’t think this game is empowering because I wouldn’t want any girl to mirror the lives of these women and girls especially Peacock, Painwheel and Marie (though she was the boss, she wanted to do what she could to protect Peacock as she had did for her in the past). I’m not surprised by the choice of outfits and yet, I am due to both Marie and Peacock. I thought they were going to make everyone slutty because age really doesn’t matter, at all! All and all, I think it’s more complex than just being “empowering” or “sexist”.

When I first started looking Skullgirls over I looked to see if there was very much talk of it being sexist, and there is some. Not nearly as much as I expected, but a few people leveled some serious ire at the game. For the most part, however, the game seems to get a pass because it’s so well done in other areas. Particulalrly the animation and game mechanics. Which makes me wonder if overall quality trumps social irresponsability. I actually sort of know one of the clean up animators and I asked him what he thought of the “controversy”. Basically he thought it was blown out of porportion for the sake of getting pageviews, and from what I’ve seen in my search he’s right. For the most part people don’t give a shit one way or the other. On Tumblr Skullgirls has oceans of fanart and general support. Pretty much every site that presents art is the same way. It’s generally well liked and no one is all that concerned about the character design.