I am not gonna lie, Horizon Hunters Gathering looks like complete dookie, and Geoff Keighley’s stamp of approval is essentially a confirmation of that. However, the gaming community is really forcing me to stand up for this uninspired doodoo at this point. Instead of discussing the lack of creativity or soul in this live service slop, gamers are more concerned about the game being “woke.”
Apparently, the real problem with Horizon Hunters Gathering is that the women are not conventionally attractive. Not the overdone art style. Not the lame gameplay. Not the desperation to keep an IP relevant. No, it’s because a character in the trailer was obese.
And once again, gamers feel they are being attacked and targeted, being forced to accept female characters they can’t jerk off to. Gamers are truly the most oppressed race at this point, being given female characters with short hair, stomachs, and peach fuzz. I can’t imagine that level of torture at the hands of Big Gamer.
“They’re hoping to wear us out by inundating us with this garbage. They want us to feel like this will never end, so we just give up and give in,” said one struggling gamer who dared to speak out against his oppressors, Guerilla.
It’s a tale as old as time. Or well, 1982, when a woman appeared as a protagonist for the first time in video game history. While men can be massive, repulsive ogres, old men with missing limbs, deformed, wretched monsters, and fat, female characters have largely remained conventionally attractive.
In fighting games, you have female fighters wearing no armor, breasts jiggling all over the place in flimsy bras, as they fight for their life or for their family’s honor or whatever. Many fighting games even have a mechanic where clothing falls off the more damage you take. Tekken 8’s design team just kept using the same face and body for every female character until a few people complained. But they couldn’t help but note that the size of a woman’s breasts was something they definitely consider in the design process. Like yes, there are hot guys in the roster too, but there’s also a bear.
Overwatch has been continuously criticized for its largely boring female heroes while we get evil old men without shoes, a monkey, a hamster, a guy that’s 3 feet tall, and an obese, shirtless dude in a pig mask. Again, there are some hot guys, too, but they have a lot more variety. The women largely feel safe. Some even considered Mei fat when she came out, and she’s barely larger than the other female heroes.
Meanwhile, whenever games do try to explore various female character designs that don’t revolve around boobs and butts, male gamers have a mental breakdown on X and Reddit. They go into a rage, ranting about the “woke agenda,” trying to force ugly women into their games, and what’s so wrong with women being sexy, and why can’t they just watch their Overwatch porn in peace!?
With men even hyperventilating about a post-apocalyptic cave woman having some peach fuzz, it’s no wonder games are scared to break the mold and give us any variety of female designs.
In response to the obese woman in the Horizon Hunters Gathering trailer, men started showing off their anime waifus from Japanese games, saying the East is soooo far ahead of us. Look, they let us stare at boobies! It’s not fair! Their underage characters are wearing skimpy clothing; they get all the fun!
The comments on Reddit are horrifying, comparing her to every large item and animal they can think of, accusing her of having various health conditions, and being openly fatphobic in every way imaginable.
“This is their idea of realism: a morbidly obese Redditor who’s also athletic,” said a nicer, non-gendered comment. But most of them are very clearly enraged that this is a fat woman, calling it part of the “woke agenda” being pushed on gamers.
Gamers claim female devs are pushing “woke agenda” into their games
This coincides with another tweet I saw earlier in the day, which pointed out that many of the Guerilla staff are women-presenting. I honestly couldn’t find the origin of this photo and was unable to see who was on the development team for Horizon Hunters Gathering on the Guerrilla website, so I couldn’t figure out if this is an accurate representation of the team behind the game.
However, male gamers believed it immediately.
Come to find out, the image was from an old International Women’s Day post from Guerrilla that only had its female staff in the picture. These are not the only people working on Horizon Hunters Gathering; some of them are probably not even working on this particular game at all.
However, this just goes to show how fast people were to believe that women were behind a game they hated and were trying to push some agenda on them.
“It’s almost like women are trying to prove to you they can’t run things in this world.”
“I can smell the pronouns from here.”
“By their own rules of engagement, I can only play games that represent me now, right? I am not represented, so I’m out.”
And these were just the tame ones. But the point still stands: men truly believed that only women made Horizon Hunters Gathering. And they were willing to start attacking women immediately for making a game they felt had ugly female characters in it.
It’s just tiring, alright? The game looks bad. I think it’ll be a huge flop with a very similar fate to Concord. But I don’t think it’s bad because that woman is fat. And I don’t think it’s bad because some women helped develop it.
There are plenty of games with overly sexualized female characters for you to look at. Even Marvel Rivals has basically accepted that gamers largely want to see female characters’ butts in their face while they play. I’m not sure how one crappy game having a fat woman will destroy the sanctity that is hot women in games. I feel there will still be plenty of that to go around.
Nobody wants every hot woman to be removed from video games. They just want variety, just like the male characters. The fact that there is such fear and rage over an obese woman with a peg leg in a game nobody will play is incredibly telling that studios shouldn’t move away from the stereotypical hot female designs or risk getting canceled.
Meanwhile, the open and widely accepted fatphobia and sexism in our culture remain horrific and should be far from normalized. Get off X and learn some empathy.