#not rlly against zeldas point i abhor the holdsworth redesign with every fiber of my being

[piosplayhouse]

#i also am starting to struggle a bit with the player character faces#the look so... tiktok airbrush filter if that makes sense?#the old ones were charming in a way because they werent stuck with a “photoshoot model” expression#yes the old style was kinda ugly and janky at times but it had personality. now they look so airbrushed all of them. npc and pc

Ok lets not get *too* overboard here. The old pcs were 1000% stuck in permanent "photoshoot model" expressions, honestly even more egregiously because they were exclusively thin white photoshoot model faces from the 2000s with 90s eyebrows:

I'm not saying there's nothing to criticize about the updated models-- I certainly have my gripes-- but it feels weird to accuse the new models, which many people (cough cough instagram) hate because they're more diverse and actually allow for creating player characters of being too "perfect" in comparison to the old ones in my opinion.

I posted about this before but I had to have my character wear a mask all the time because I couldn't stand to look at their face because they looked so much like a white woman model from the 2010s promoting anorexia or something, I can't imagine what it would be like if I played this game as a kid. It just sort of feels sore to say the new characters are too conventionally beautiful when POC and fat people who play the game are already fighting for their lives against fatphobia and racism from the rest of the playerbase because SSE dared to make chubby characters imo. Like it's important we expand the definition of "conventionally beautiful" of course, and obviously leftist ideologies have progressed a lot in that since the 2000s, but you have to keep in mind that there are real people who look like the player characters in game who are currently being told they're not conventionally beautiful enough by mainstream society

I feel like SSO is undergoing almost... a Disney Dreamlight Valley-ification. It's not necessarily to do with the art style, at least not the art style alone, but it's like. The way every character and NPC has to be Conventionally Beautiful. Nice To Look At. Mrs. Holdsworth is an old woman but she can't be fat or have a cane anymore. Big Bonny gets to be weird and quirky and eccentric but she still has to meticulously style her hair and iron her clothes every morning. Every character has a little smile and a friendly twinkle in their eye, except for when they're Evil, and then you have to be able to Tell that they're Evil because they Look At You Evilly. Every character has to have perfectly smooth skin and look no less tidy than maybe "messy bun". idk obviously this is kind of a reduction and there are exceptions (like Anne who gets to look angry sometimes even though she's a Good Guy, though idk if that's really breaching the theme since she's also SUPPOSED to be kind of a rift in the Soul Riders), but I can't help but feel like star stables character design is too close to "perfection" and "beauty" and "aesthetically pleasing" to really be all that interesting.