By KEVIN KAUMANS
I feel like our society is more focused on a character’s physical appearance than how real they feel. Every time I get on the internet, I see posts of people thirsting amorously over some fictional person from the most recent media. Oh sure, it’s slightly different every time; Sometimes it is a woman, sometimes it is a man, sometimes it is an alien, monster, or even an anthropomorphic animal. In the most absurd corners of the internet, the object of desire is not even a humanoid.
Granted, there is nothing wrong (to an extent) with someone having a crush on a character.
However, my issue is, when it comes to the interior at least, other more interesting things about a character that often get overlooked. We live in a world where hypersexuality has become the norm.
Pornography has been easier to access than ever. It has gotten to the point where children can quickly find themselves exposed to content they should in no way be looking at. Because of this, we see online videos and articles of men talking about how they became addicted to porn to as young as elementary school.
Some of you reading this may be scratching your heads at what it is I am writing. What could these social ramblings of a college student have to do with social media’s indulgence of attractive characters? My point is this: because our society is so hypersexualized, consumers nowadays seem to only care about a character’s looks and nothing else.
Because of this, I worry that future show creators and video game designers will start making all their characters look as attractive as possible and assume that they do not need to add anything else to make them interesting. This is simply not true.
You can have a character that can both serve as eye candy to the audience and be complex. Recently, during Christmas break, I got this new game called “Dispatch”. The game’s extremely popular and has even been making its own rounds on the internet for its alluring characters, one of the biggest being Blonde Blazer.
But here’s the thing: While she is set up to be one of the main love interests, the game writers make sure that there is more to her than her looks. See, Blonde Blazer’s powers are given to her by this amulet that she wears around her neck. The problem with this is that the amulet also changes how she looks, making her feel like no one will really want to know “the real her”.
On top of that, Blonde Blazer’s personality is just as complex as her internal struggle. When she is at work, her attitude is more or less professional. Yet, when the player gets to see her outside of work, we see that not only is she laid back, but also soft-spoken and even funny at times. This shows the audience how she is more than a one-note character.
Another interesting part of Blonde Blazer’s character is her romantic life; Before the events of the game take place, she’s in a relationship with one of the strongest heroes in the world. From a first glance, they seem to have a good relationship. Once they break up, however, the player can choose to romance her. When they do, they find out that her breakup was caused by her feeling like he did not love her real self.
I doubt any big studio would listen to me. Still, I need to get this out somewhere. I fear that bottling up my inner thoughts will lead me to insanity.