One of the strangest complaints I’ve seen in the history of video games was when gamers were mad that Aloy had fuzz on her face. Not a beard, not an unsightly cavewoman monobrow, not the black prongs of an unwaxed top lip (which surely at least some women in her society should have had), but regular peach fuzz.
Almost all humans have hair almost all over our bodies. These white, wispy hairs are near invisible until you get up close and see them in a certain light. It should have been praised as a commitment to photorealism, but instead many gamers, apparently ignorant of basic biology, were enraged by it. It’s deemed unacceptable for women in games not to be beautiful, as the recent swathe of mods for games like Baldur’s Gate 3 have proven.
Related: Baldur's Gate 3's Combat Shows Dungeons & Dragons Can Evolve
Within a few days of Baldur’s Gate 3 launching, a mod was made that claimed to make Lae’zel prettier. BG3 is being praised for its rich writing, character development, and branching storytelling, but some just can’t lose themselves in the narrative if the women don’t look like supermodels. There’s even a mod that makes Shadowheart prettier, despite the fact she already looks like a supermodel.
It offers up a strange standard that I’m not sure anyone can be happy with. It’s a problem in itself that you can’t experience Lae’zel’s story for what it is, but objectively Lae’zel is not a beautiful creature. Shadowheart, however, is a conventionally attractive woman. To look at her and instantly think of ways you can fine tune her into the perfect woman shows you see not only video game characters, but women as a whole, as commodities.
This is not just a problem in Baldur’s Gate 3. Any game that involves significant interaction with female characters quickly devolves into Build A Bitch, and if you need a woman to meet impossible beauty standards in order to connect with them, it suggests these connections are only skin deep. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Cyberpunk 2077, and Tomb Raider are just a handful of examples.
It goes back to the outrage around Aloy, where the game was criticised for being hyper-realistic when it came to imperceptible hairs on the face. But Aloy (and Lara Croft, and dozens more video game women living in wild conditions) are always shown without leg or armpit hair, despite the fact that they would definitely have some. Developers already make hundreds of decisions aimed at making women more attractive, and these are just taken as standard.
If Guerrilla really wanted to make a woke statement with Aloy, it could have. We’ve seen both Julia Roberts and Rachel McAdams sport unshaven pits on the red carpet as a feminist statement, while Emily Ratajkowski and Miley Cyrus have both embraced hairy legs. Both of these are far more noticeable (and far more of a statement) than peach fuzz, but logic doesn’t apply. All that matters is that digital women are practically perfect in every way, or else it’s impossible to care about them.
The Last of Us Part 2 is an interesting case study here as well. Many had objections to Abby’s ‘unrealistic’ body, despite the fact she was modeled off an actual female athlete. Others, meanwhile, complained that the game had deliberately made Ellie less attractive in the sequel, even though she was a young teenage child in the original outing.
I know you could argue there is a double standard afoot. There are many mods across many different games that make men shirtless. We also tend to celebrate when a mod makes a character available for a queer romance, but criticise when a mod changes a queer character to make them available for a straight romance - see Judy Alvarez in Cyberpunk 2077.
Ultimately, it’s a matter of context. If a mod is made to celebrate the character, then I consider it fair game. There are plenty of mods that dress characters up in outfits they only wear in particular scenes, for example. Both Aloy and Lara Croft have mods that put them in more stylish outfits and in make-up, but these feel like they’re in support of the character rather than objectifying them. Looking at Shadowheart and deciding she’s not quite good enough for you is very different.
The weighting of these mods, the ones that take a man’s shirt off to the ones that contort a woman’s clothes and body and face in any and all directions, is also heavily out of sync, with far fewer shirtless men to be found.
I’ve always taken the view that modding characters in video games should be like fanfiction - extra lore, extra quests, extra scenes, extra costumes. But to write fanfiction, you need to be a fan. If you’re changing Shadowheart because her skin isn’t quite clear enough for you to be interested in her story, why are you even playing in the first place?
Next: How Canada Turned Me Into The World's Best Fly In Time Flies
