Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5276165" data-attributes="member: 15538">Well, I object to most depictions of women in women's magazines, too, so I suspect I and your polling demographic may have different ideas as to what is healthy to women's self-acceptance. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I am not against sex or nudity, nor do I object to breasts or buttocks in fantasy art. I just want to look at the context and see something positive. When I look at Seoni, and this is just my reaction, I think, "Glue pot, scoliosis, implants, eating disorder." If I think about it for more than a fraction of a second, I recall that the D&D player's handbook heroes didn't manage to produce a human female for several sets in a row. What does it say when all the women adventurers are exotic non-humans? Now, I'm sure there are real, all-natural women who bear more than a passing resemblance to Seoni, and I don't want to denigrate them or women of any kind of physique or feature, but Seoni's appearance was not chosen by accident. Further, her appearance does not represent anything like a universal ideal of beauty. Wittingly or no, she expresses cultural values that transmit a powerful thin ideal, exoticism, and fetishism. If fetishism is defined as the opposite of utility, Seoni's dress embodies it. It's unlikely her dress could keep her breasts in, much less warm or protected. She would have trouble walking down a Hollywood red carpent in that without showing some nip. I'm not denigrating fetishism, itself, either. Medievalism is a form of fetishism. I can deal with weapon fetishisim, elf fetishism, leather, boobs, whatever. But in Seoni, I see fetishism for weakness, vulnerability, and objectivism. In isolation, I don't have a problem for that, but in a fantasy character, supposedly not in a highly sexualized context, it is impossible to ignore the larger context. She's not a bad creation, she is simply a case study in a larger phenomenon. I don't think staring at dwarves in plate armor is going to stop any young man from running for Congress, but I think Seoni is an unfortunate object.</blockquote>

Verification