The Four Color Media Monitor

I'd thought of writing about this earlier, but it's another item of interest that slipped my mind until now. Yohei Shimbori, the main director overseeing the production of Dead or Alive 6, wants to tone down the sexiness of the prior games because he apparently thinks Marvel's editorially mandated social justice path is supposedly an acceptable step. He told Famitsu about 2 months ago:

“The reference we used for the imagery [in Dead or Alive 6] comes from American comic book films. In the old days I loved American comics.

“In the old days the female characters in American comics emphasized and highlighted the sexy lines of their body.

“Nowadays, there’s a change in the works to present [the female characters] with a sharp and cool design.

“In this way, I thought about [Dead or Alive 6] and the character appearances, and how to depict them with variety.”

It's not entirely clear, but it does sound like he just took a superficial look at what Marvel was doing artistically in the comics themselves, and not how it resulted financially, which was nothing short of disastrous for stores who honestly shouldn't be carrying Marvel and DC's books if they're going to spite their fanbase and lead to sales losses for the stores in turn. The "sharp/cool" design he speaks of is more like turning the women masculine and androgynous looking, which only alienates quite a few of the women they supposedly wanted for an audience. And even today, some smaller companies like Aspen and Dynamite are still wisely avoiding SJW-pandering, continuing to highlight the sexy lines of the women's bodies.

To make matters worse, Shimbori even said the following (also via One Angry Gamer):

“The boobs are smaller as opposed to before because we wanted the girls to appear more human. We don’t want to reshape them smaller or larger just on a whim,”

Did he realize he was insulting women with big breasts as not human? My sister-in-law's chest is large, and she'd be very mad to hear about that one. Now that is one embarrassingly bad statement he made, not to mention...dehumanizing. And all because they supposedly want the game to be accepted in e-sports so badly. But I've never watched an e-sports broadcast, and don't think I ever will after this idiocy.

Worse still is that the game now has a more noticeable focus on bruising effects, which makes it decidedly less appealing, much like any American comics that made similar mistakes with focus on jarring violence (i.e-Geoff Johns-scripted garbage).

Shimbori supposedly said there were "fans" telling him they were embarrassed to play the DOA series because of its sex appeal. But while these words - possibly from an IGN interview - may have been put in his mouth by dishonest interviewers (it sounds all too reminiscent of Gretchen Carlson, now facing a backlash over how she's handled the Miss America pageant and Cara Mund), it's still apparent he drew "inspiration" from all the wrong sources this time around, and while they've been trying to do damage control lately, it's too little, too late, and the fighting game franchise could easily wind up going the way of Virtua Fighter, which hasn't seen a new entry for nearly 7 years now. And why did Shimbori tell Kotaku, another of the shoddy sites formerly under the Gawker umbrella, that this was all done to match "world trends"? Because here, there's Japanese video games like Soul Calibur 6 and SNK Heroines coming out that aren't adhering to what he claims, and most people are more enthusiastic about those. The man sounds like he's living in a bubble, which isn't good business practice if he only looks at one side on the surface.

There's a lesson to be learned here, and it's that audience and accompanying financial reception have to be taken note of before you decide to draw "inspiration" from a misguided direction in the comics medium that's only been costing it big time, especially for the Big Two.

Labels: marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics, sales, technology, violence