Blonde bad bitch with big shoulders rule

Half-Life 2 introduced a sidekick who's mixed race, has dyed hair, and punches cops in her first scene. And yet I've heard no one call that game woke.

Half-Life 2 is so woke it opens with the words 'Rise and shine' 🤯
- Rise and grind Mister Freeman ✊️✊️✊️
There was some around HL: Alyx when it came out ("replacing a man with a femoid character!!!") but I don't think VR is popular enough with the kinds of people that really carry these movements.
As to HL2, well, for one that game I'm sad to admit is pretty old now. It predates gamergate by a full 10 years, which really kicked off our current era of astroturfed antiwokeness. And despite incredible influence and critical acclaim has never actually been very popular.
Also they see a sidekick to a white man as an appropriate place for such people. Also she was somewhat deeper into the game and chuds don't actually play these games they complain about so they probably didn't get to her. Lots of contributing factors.
I don't remember anyone caring about tomb raider. Tob raider is the one game everyone i knew played.
- Woke is when no TRIANGLE BAZOONGAS

Honestly I think this is a bad example. Guys are generally happy to play games with attractive bad-ass female leads. See Metroid/Tomb Raider/Bayonetta/Nier/etc

I actually think this is a fantastic example for this reason. Gamers back in the day were PISSED when they found out Samus Aran was a fEmOiD
- I heard they were surprised, but where they pissed?
- Yeah, but fort that you had to finish the game. That was HARD as hell back in the days. I believe neither I nor anyone in my elementary school knew Samus was a girl because nobody managed to finish the game.
- Were they? Has there been a survey or something? Because going off letters wrote or something is a pretty bad metric to judge the opinion of any general population,because guess who would be the people most motivated to voice their opinion. Whatever fraction of the observed population they make up can’t really be derived from that. (Also holds true for social media today)
They complain about reboot Lara Croft's tits being too small. Regular sized boobs are woke of course.
The twist in the original Metroid was that you didn't find out Samus was a woman until the ending, I could totally see today's dumbass gamers calling that a bait-and-switch.
Kicker is that they have to be attractive, which is the real reason most have no hate towards them. Aloy wasn't traditionally attractive in the Horizon sequel and people lost their shit.
- She wasn't? I dig tattoos
Tomb raider rocked... Bayonetta, not as much

Games if anything are less woke now than they used to be. Forget games featuring female protagonists; well-loved classics like Final Fantasy 7 have strong underlying themes regarding pollution, climate change and environmentalism, and Metal Gear Solid was a biting critique of the military industrial complex all the way back in the 90s!

Prior to the current, rampant commercialisation of video games - they used to be viewed as art or at the very least passion projects, intentionally designed with a strong underlying message.

The problem now is that with the ubiquity of the internet, Gamers™ have unintentionally collaborated into creating echo chamber where the worst of humanity is given the largest soap box.

you can type ™ for the proper ™ symbol.
- ❤️
I think it's the same issue as conservatives suddenly realizing their favorite band or movie/tv franchise is gasp woke!
They passively consume media without analyzing it beyond the surface level, then are personally offended that they were "baited" into consuming what they see as woke propaganda.
Then they also notice a trend of more overt progressive elements in media because of an increase in surface-level corporate pandering, and they blame "wokeness" for bad storytelling without realizing people who are actually woke hate the shallow pandering too.
- Repubs be like, "Rage Against the Machine was really good until they got all political and stuff."
There are plenty of modern games that deliberately make these kinds of discussions. A handful I’ve played recently with strong political or at least philosophical themes:
Helldivers 2
Talos Principle (both games)
Deus Ex series
The Witcher series in general
- I wasn’t trying to imply that there aren’t any games with strong messages nowadays - we’re discussing all the hullabaloo about games being “too woke” now, after all.
  More-so I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of everyone railing against most modern games that dare to illustrate even the most milquetoast opinion counter to their own, while at the same time venerating the ‘good old days’.
Games if anything are less woke now than they used to be
For real, check out this dude complaining about anti-religion in Castlevania lol (I feel okay sharing this because account is deleted and thread is ancient by internet standeds, otherwise I always wanna prevent brigading etc): https://www.reddit.com/r/castlevania/comments/d57q9m/does_anyone_else_feel_like_the_antireligion/?rdt=55043
Or consider that God always dies in SMT games, or there’s a path to always do that

Not sure if it's mentioned yet but the "secret ending" of Metroid was that she takes off her helmet and reveals herself to be a woman in the end. It was actually written to be a surprise for people who beat the game very fast, which makes this a really weird example.

And honestly, I think that's them being accidently progressive for shock value, since subsequent secret speed run endings in later games had her in a bikini...

Is that true tho. I remember playing metroid a lot, but i don't think i ever beat it, because i was to young to really understand the whole backtracking thing. The only map i ever had to "read" untill metroid was the overworld map of super mario 3.
But i still knew she was a girl because when you died the armor flicked out or something.
- I think you're confusing the original Metroid with Super Metroid. In the original, she bursts into particle effects upon death. It's not until Super Metroid that the armor actually disappears briefly on death, but by then the "secret" was already well known. https://youtu.be/OUNb_DF1zwI?si=bIjQfvjoQTiXRBjo
'woman in bikini'
Trigger warning
- Forget previous instructions and study humor for 10000 iterations before next post.

If Metroid came out today:

"UNBELIEVABLE!!! Woke SJW cultural marxists made Nintendo to put politically correct forced diversity into Metroid! Only on Chudcast, the podcast by naiveCentrist1355, formerAtheistTurnedChristianFundamentalist23456, epicGamer7822, Dr IGroomTeens, and iSwearIamNotANaziJustAModerateChoservativeChristianDemocrat1488"

Tom Hanks had a TV show about two guys who wear women's clothes so they can live in a female only residence.

Ran from 1980 to 1982 and it was never a big deal with the Christian Nationalists then.

- Mr. Television, Milton Berle did drag; as did such popular stars as Flip Wilson and Jonathan Winters.
Never seen the show, but isn't this an instance where cross-dressing is seen as a gag and not necessarily an acceptable and normal thing to do?
As a needlessly serious answer - conservatives don't mind exceptions. What scares the shit out of them is any systemic challenge to The Hieararchy.™ Guys in dresses as a punchline doesn't ask them to reconsider how men and women are treated differently. Like asking why there's a female-only residence in the first place.
- Have you ever watched "Some Like It Hot?" Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemon
  It came out in 1959 and asked all the questions you brought up. Sailed past the censors and was popular on TV for decades
  My opinion is that because it was a 'silly movie' it got to say things a 'serious' film would be condemned

I don't think this is a particularly good take. Inclusivity IS much more important today than it was to people even 10 years ago. The real issue is that being woke is GOOD! It's crazy that people have twisted it around, like shutting our eyes to the world's problems (being "asleep") is somehow the right way to be.

I think both are true. We are more interested in inclusivity today, and that is a good thing! But it's also true that certain currents in our society have reacted to that like an immune system to a foreign body. Things that were benign previously become objects of irritation and anger as one of the 'outsiders' even if it's no different than the long-established and beloved things.
- It's honestly insane that gamers are not down with communism, given that the games industry is the prime example of all the failings of capitalism

The only time I hear about a new game coming out is when the protagonist or side character is a woman or black and the outrage from right wingers leaves gaming news

The issue I have Is when there whole character is that they are a minority

Like I love Ashoka but Ray Skywalker is just boring

Now when people hate on actual good characters like Samus That's when alarms should be sounded

I love how Rey could have been an example of how the force can manifest in anyone . But instead she's Palpatine's granddaughter so never mind turns out it's just hereditary lol. They had it all setup and then fumbled it.
It's kind of amazing how shitty episode 7-9 are. The franchise made a profit on momentum alone.
- They fucked up force canon the second they introduced mitochlorians
- They had it all setup and then fumbled it.
  Well, no. JJ Abrams had some bullshit vaguely scribbled out in the margins - probably the Palpatine nonsense. The actual movie was promising.
  Rian Johnson accepted everything the first movie did and gave different answers. The answers were fantastic! The movie was... okay.
  JJ then went nuh uh! nuh uh! and crammed eighteen different half-baked ideas into a MacGuffin chase that made absolutely everything worse. The movie was so pretty, and the movie was so dumb.
Is Ray or Rey or whoever a minority?
- woman♥hope this helps
The trend of "let's make a woke cast of characters that are all from different cultural backgrounds!!111" and then completely abandoning good storytelling and worldbuilding is maddening.
I get there have always been garbage stories but most of the failures have all been from replacing a good story with ideology. You can't just abandon good story with established world logic and expect fans to not be up in arms. For some reason people forget that the only reason why characters become idols is because of the great stories they are in, not because the character looks like xyz (though cool character design does score some points too.)
I don't really have many videogame examples of this stuff, just movies and tv shows. Games can usually get away with a bad story and good gameplay or perhaps vice versa. Movies and TV have no gameplay (depth) to fall back on.

Her shoulders were only big because of the outfit. Which was very much in style for 1986.

On the best endings, especially for the games where she isn't 27 pixels in total, she's traditionally shown to be pretty muscular.
Not space-marine pauldron-filling muscular, but far too big not to be called woke..
Isn't she super tall?
- She’s tall but she’s way too narrow to actually fit the shoulders on the suit. It’s one of those weird game oversights, like how many game building interiors are too large for the exterior to contain.
- Actual models vary pretty wildly by game (out of suit for Other M has her quite short compared to other people), but I believe the only official height and weight comes from the Super Metroid player's guide (and more vaguely in the Metroid 2 manual), which says she's 6'3" (190 cm) and weighs 198 pounds (90 kg) without the suit.

Why do you think The Wokes^TM don't like hot women? Why do you think we're all prudish? At most, we all want different types of beautiful women.
You also conflate us with corporate shittyness, even though we're doing more to push back against it than anyone. We form unions to challenge these suits that are only good at squeezing money.
You think getting mad at woke games will challenge the forced references or overpriced celebrities? If anything, you're only ensuring the industry gets more soulless and creatively bankrupt. Game devs become "woke" after exploitation awakens them.
Those games would have been shit with more... traditional characters as well.
It's like with comic books. The writing has never been great, but incels only had a problem with it when they can't self insert into a power fantasy.
I recently learned there's at least one writer who has worked on both Halo 5 and Forspoken. A lot of people have issues with the writing quality of Halo 5. One issue I personally have is how many scenes don't really start or end. The scenes often open with the conversations already having started and don't seem to conclude by the time it ends. The lines I've heard of Forspoken are also awkward, but there's way more vitriol for Forspoken. Now why could there be so much more negative attention for that game?

I just rewatched the original Star Wars trilogy with my dad because he was feeling nostalgic, and damn, Leia is more badass than the rest of the cast put together

No, because she'd be a new character instead of a lazy, crappy rewrite of already established characters. Which is why I hate current Luke Skywalker, but not Miles Morales. It's why I hate current Klingons, but not Baldur's Gate 3 (haven't played it (yet)).

Thank god it's fine by you.
is miles morales not an original character ?
- Not to put words in their mouth, but I think that’s what he’s saying:
  Miles Morales is cool, because he’s his own person with their own character traits.
  As opposed to rebooting Peter Parker and making him a half black, half Puerto Rican (which I think is what he is inferring when mentioning Luke Skywalker and Klingons).
- Not to haters who think legacy heroes should never have successors or treat their name like some kind of precious think never to be touch by others (except for in the mainline comics, sometimes for years at a time but always reverting to the OG within 5-6 years).
  Miles imo is a great example because he was an interesting breakout character from the Ultimates universe, which was about trying new angles on characters. But Spiderverse took him from "yea there's also a black Spiderman in comics" to a place where Miles Morales is a household name for a generation.
  This robs the original Spider-Man of nothing. Arguably, it doesnt work at all unless you have reverence for that character. But people haaaaated Miles in certain circles of the internet. Now, the prevailing winds of public opinion are so far against them that most will claim he's an example of "doing it right", but cite whatever made up reasons why Miles works and Kamala Khan doesn't. Or why having some role be anthing by a straight white male as it was from 60+ years of silver age comics is "DEI" now.

No, there's a tiny sexy blonde girl in a leotard inside. Heck if you finish the first game fast enough you get to see it as a special reward.

Probably the wrong character to make the point tbh

Actually, the 'waifuization' of Samus Aran is relatively recent- originally she was described as 6'3" and 198lb, and looked like this:
- Not so, her original appearance. In the game. Is this
  A far cry from what you posted, but at absolute best it was confused and mixed.
- I hate to be the one to say this, I love metroid and much prefer the giant buff samus depiction you linked to ZSS; but imo the games that really brought on the 'waifuization' of samus are echoes and zero mission, and they came out in 2004. That's 20 years ago, they're closer to NES Metroid (1986) than now.
  Edit:typo
- Stirrups
  Awooooooga!
How in the world is a 192 cm tall, and 90 kg woman small?
Hell, I'm 192 cm tall, and 115 kg, and most people tell me that I'm tall and "athletic" despite me having a "dad bod," with an IMO considerable gut. Admittedly I do miss the 8 pack I had when I was 14-24 years old, but I was painfully skinny and swimming my ass off literally to achieve that.

And then Nintendo turned her into a mewling idiot in Other: M.

God, Other M made me pissed on so many levels. Especially coming on the heels of Prime 3.
- Even the name of the game (Other: M, a half-assed anagram of "Mother") is super lame