Mya premiering her New Joint Lock U Down @ 106 & Park (2007).

Kelly Rowland 🫶🏽

Happy Birthday 🤎

ZIG

regarding character design in gacha games- if you haven’t played many, I will show examples from some popular ones here. This is for reference regarding confusion as to why incels often play these games. This isn’t to cover everything in these games either, there are games with much more absurd designs and I’m not even going to get into the “sexy little girl” designs a lot of them have. In the future I plan to research more and intend to make a concise post regarding the incel relationship with these games. These character designs and tropes exist across societies and are enforced through many types of media - it’s not just gacha games alone perpetuating them. I think they are however hypervisual in this specific genre mostly due to the huge amounts of money being spent by players in “purchasing” them. again this is just for reference, if you already are familiar with female character gacha design feel free to skip this. I’ll put it under a cut.

gacha games are infamous for typically having extremely sexualized female characters who will usually flatter the assumed male player. Again there are some that designers and writers will dress more chaste or have them give the player shit, but by “winning” these characters they are now “yours” anyway, they are not real women and therefore can’t walk away. I believe a big part of this appeal is due to incel men wanting to control a woman designed for an audience of people like him. The hypersexualization serves both to flatter his idea of a woman’s true place (his consumption) and to create a very rigid and obvious differentiation between men and women during a time when women are fighting tooth and nail for their dignity and equal rights.

Nostalgia and rigid character design dichotomy can be seen in the extremely popular gacha game Fate/Grand Order, I believe a good piece of its success can be attributed to this. There are thousands of Japanese gacha games that take already popular anime franchises and create a money pit gacha with them, it’s been happening for over a decade now. These games usually make bank taking already popular characters and giving them hypersexualized alts and costumes. FGO is an interesting phenomenon to me because it seems like for a lot of fans, the Fate franchise’s cultural touchstone is now this actual gacha game. The game adds popular existing Fate characters of course, so you can see how different the gacha character designs are from the VN/animes:

When you can only watch them/read their stories, the characters are dressed like the above examples. When they are added to the game and you can buy and own them, they look like the bottom examples.

The (rare) depiction of darker skinned female characters in these gacha games is pretty uniform across the board- they are somehow, consistently, sexualized even more than the other female characters, they are often exoticized and sometimes have a “wild” or rebellious looking aspect incorporated. I would consider this something the intended audience expects to see, regardless of the truth, and the gacha game reflects this back to their customers, therefore enshrining this damaging stereotype to its audience. These examples don’t account for everything of course.

As to not offend the delicate male viewer, these games also typically design furry/animal characters by having the female retain the most human-like features (like a small and delicate face) while the male is allowed to actually look like the animal. When a female character has armor that conceals her sex, there is of course a version of her you can “upgrade” where she takes off her armor to reveal a very delicate girl in revealing clothing.

Typically, the consumer will see powerful, sturdy looking male designs that attempt to not alienate the straight male viewer first before adding “sexy” elements. In contrast, female characters are almost always very thin (often with exaggerated tits and ass) and her pose is chosen to show off her body first, before her power. This is an Arknights dual banner that displays this design philosophy well:

some of the biggest incel shitfits come from male designs they see as being sexualized and objectified as the typical female design. these are 3 characters Korean incels have lost their minds over:

In their world, the rigid sex dichotomy is breaking down and the hierarchal system of gender where men are on top is being threatened. they don’t feel powerful seeing lithe and skimpily dressed men, and they aren’t the hentai “femboy” fetish these guys seem ok with either. incels see these games as their playground. when designs like these are included, they see it as their job to rectify this. Lyney’s costume and demeanor is too “sexy” and “gay” for Korean incels, they mass dislike his character trailer and write hateful comments across SNS. Sinclair is shirtless and wearing a collar - Korean incels are furious he’s wearing less than the female summer character and see the collar as meaning he’s a “slave” for the female customer. This snowballs into them targeting a female artist on staff, Vellmori, and getting her fired even though it was a male artist who illustrated the cards. I’ve posted Korean incels comments on the Honkai Star Rail character- similar to Lyney, they are angry he looks “slutty” and/or “gay” since he has a boob window and detached sleeves. This is too similar to how the female characters are made “sexy” and it means women have prominent roles creating for these games, something incels of course hate. Regarding the role women should have in creating these games, a Korean incel wrote (after seeing photos that include many female staff members at Mihoyo) that they should just be there working at the cafe to serve coffee to male employees and look pretty for them.

In regards to how some of these games are marketed, we can again look to the article written by a Korean woman who was a victim of feminist ideological verification.

character designs for NIKKE and Destiny Child:

what the gameplay for NIKKE looks like:

Michelle Williams, 2001

You can put blue lights on black girls

Destiny’s Child

2016 x 2024

Kelly Rowland (2000s).

Houston Finest

Beyonce Carter

myabit / tokkihouse

original tweet

ᴀʟᴡᴀʏs ʟᴏᴠᴇᴅ ᴛʜɪs ᴏᴜᴛғɪᴛ..♡❀✦