MAX MCGEE'S PROFILE

@WetMattos: Yes, quite arcane, I find your jargon and terminology rather impenetrable. Also keep in mind that philosophy grounded in radical feminist and racial theory is not like...fact. It is academic material created prolifically by a very insular academic community and a very specific subculture and is very self-referential and incestuous. (I took a single gender studies course in college and spent the entirety of it disagreeing with pretty much every single thing the professor taught.)

I am not interested in reading about "Feminist/Gender Politics Theory XYZ" because I don't believe it has value and it is not worth my time. However if you were to unpack yourself how a character can be hegemonic, in natural language, that is something I'd take the time to read and try to grasp. But "read author xyz" or "look into theory xyz" is not something I have time/energy for.

If you don't have the time to break down these ideas, obviously that's fine. Just saying, that's something I'd be definitely be willing to engage with. But if understanding this stuff has "reading and accepting all theories produced by academic feminism and gender studies" as a prerequisite, that is never going to happen.

@Yellow_Magic:

As a professional writer I realize that this resembles mystical thinking, but to me, characters have an inherent truth to them. So no, white is not the "default" race for a character I think of. The default race for a character I think of is whatever race they are when I think of them. This is not something that I don't think about, exactly, but it's also very much not something that I plan ahead of time.

When my mind creates a character, it does so holistically. That character then has a race, a gender, an identity, maybe normative, maybe not, but in any case part of that character's holistic truth. I realize that this is...not a perfectly clear explanation. But thinking that anyone is anything by default is...kind of antithetical to the way I make art? Likewise, so is planning to have a "diverse" and "inclusive" cast...that's anathema to the way I create too. Characters don't exactly come from my brain fully formed, but they do come out with the basic shapes, race, gender, and so forth. There is no default.

The fact of thinking of a character that is a minority is not offensive to me, it's natural. It's the idea of planning in advance that X, Y, Z of your characters will be X, Y, Z minorities for the sake of being perceived as sufficiently "diverse" or "inclusive" to bow to political correctness that I find abhorrent, because it seems very dishonest.

That said, given about 80% of what's written in tumblry circles as critique of works that depict minorities, I totally understand why writers would want to sidestep the entire minefield of an issue by just writing people the same color they are. There doesn't seem to be any way of portraying female characters or whatever, minority x, that won't offend at least an overwhelmingly vocal minority. Look at arch-feminist Joss Whedon getting screamed off of twitter by a frothing mob of rabid radfems.

I think that any interesting person's demographic identity (their race, gender, sexual preference, and so on) is the least interesting and least relevant thing about them.

The kind of diversity that interests me and that I value is diversity of opinions and viewpoints, not demographic diversity as represented by stock photographs of smiling racially diverse yuppies as appearing on corporate tech and finance websites. Give me 10 people all the same color who think differently over 10 people of different colors who all think exactly the same.

F_G's infographic

Well....at least America isn't the VERY worst of all countries? "USA, USA, USA!"

e:
Liberty, you should check this out.

So why do people see a small change in her character as a reason to go on a flamewar?

A lot of people are assclots. Pardon my french.

And do characters really need to be designed to be "fuckable" first and foremost (as this term was used by those people)

I don't think anyone here is saying that.

The problem was not that anyone here thinks there is a big difference .. in fact, we can all agree there is nothing to complain over. They just added a little bit more of a stylistic direction which pissed people off for no good reason.

As FG pointed out, people do hate change. But unless I misread, the OP described old Fiora as "hegemonic" and new Fiora as "non hegemonic". That's specifically the piece of language that I'm trying to decode/understand.

Let me put this another way: I think that the few jerks on the Riot forums who said transmisogynstic things about the new character design are reading something in the character's visual update that is not there. I am asking if it is also possible that the OP is reading something into the character's visual update that is not there.

I'm just participating in the topic. WetMattos asked questions about how I would handle certain game design challenges, so I answered them. Then I discussed the portrayals of LoL's Fiora in question, and asked why one was considered "hegemonic" and the other "non-hegemonic" in this context.

I don't see why or how answering questions, or asking them, is breaking things.

it is my solemn hope that reactionary gamers will eventually boycott themselves into a tiny corner of the gaming community and leave everybody else in relative peace

I fundamentally agree with this, but I'm thinking of a completely different group of reactionary gamers when I wish for this.

Anyway...

Can someone meaningfully explain to me what is "hegemonic" about this portrayal of the character?



Can someone meaningfully explain to me what is "non-hegemonic" about this portrayal of the character?



SERIOUSLY GUYS...WHAT? I see very, very little difference between these two images. Personally, I see an attractive woman and a...very slightly different portrayal of the same attractive woman. The biggest difference I see is that she is no longer holding a main gauche in her off hand. I am positive that the second image does not depict a trans woman, and I cannot see why anyone would say it did other than the correctly aforementioned people being creepy assholes on the internet. Second image also doesn't look particularly old or ugly or middle-aged to me. The art style is a bit cleaner. And she doesn't have bangs. That's the biggest difference I see.

Bangs = hegemonic, no bangs = non-hegemonic??

WTF?

(Are people that are assholes on the internet sometimes assholes in physical spaces? Sure. But that's usually irrelevant because you will never have to share the same physical space with them. Just the same internets.)