Remember the comments from games journalists that Eve, the heroine of Stellar Blade, was not a realistic woman because of her beauty? One even said the designer was “someone who has never seen a woman.” The reveal that not only was Eve designed by a woman but was a 1:1 body scan of another woman caused an uproar that eventually made IGN apologize for the comment. But this wasn’t the only suggestion that Eve is an idealized, fictitious version of what men want a woman to be, and you can probably already recite the upcoming negative reviews word for word, inspired by Eve’s shapely form. But self-righteousness is a hell of a drug, and while games journalists are clearly high on it, the comedown is a killer. On X, content creator Hypnotic posted a comparison between Kay Vess, the protagonist of Star Wars Outlaws, and her model, Humberly González:
Western developers be like…
It's accurate bruh!
Lol pic.twitter.com/bwat4vVguK
— Hypnotic (@RealHypnotic1) April 9, 2024
That’s… quite a difference. Admittedly, that’s a particularly bad shot of Kay Vess, but even comparing it to more stationary ones (courtesy of Yellowflash), they don’t look the same:
She looks like a man.
Why didn’t they just use the actresses actual face? https://t.co/c5jmtvh2P0 pic.twitter.com/6oVonHYzu8
— Flash (@YellowFlashGuy) April 10, 2024
Humberly González is absolutely beautiful, and the character ostensibly modeled on her has been altered so that she looks nothing like González. She’s much plainer, and her face is shaped and structured differently; it’s so strikingly dissimilar that you wonder why they hired González, since she clearly doesn’t have the look they wanted for Kay Vess (attractive). And that’s fine; game designs are art, and the developers can do whatever they want to their art. And as I said when I talked about the trailer, it looks like Ubisoft was going for a sort of 80s sci-fi aesthetic when designing Kay Vess. But it’s hypocritical for games journalists to defend altering a model in a game because her looks are downgraded while attacking a game that keeps the model’s gorgeous looks intact by saying it’s not realistic. The latter is literally realistic because it’s a scan of a real woman, while the latter alters a real woman to make the character less beautiful. Again, I think both are okay, but those who champion the changed character while denigrating the one who maintains the model’s looks are only arguing that way because they want a different beauty standard to become the norm. And considering Stellar Blade’s pre-sales… good luck with that.
Hail Eve!