Since you often talk about character design, do you have anything to say about the design trend (trope?) of female characters not having scars even if it makes their story weaker?
It's something that personally annoys me but people don't often seem to notice. Like in just fire emblem which I'll mention here since iirc you've played it too I can think of Edelgard and Lysithea (because spoilers) from three houses, Echidna (a skilled fighter and rebel leader) from fe6 and honestly every single female character that shows skin and is stated to be a skilled fighter. Especially ones who are reckless while fighting. And that's only a few examples.
While I know male characters having scars isn't like... Super common either it still happens way more often than with female characters, at least to my knowledge.
(I know that it's down to what people find attractive but I just think that shouldn't be more important than the story)
It's downstream of beauty standards, basically. Women, as objects of art, or aesthetic objects, are culturally expected to provide the service of Beauty⢠to their observers, to the exclusion of almost all other priorities.
This manifests in the very obvious ways, with big tiddy anime gacha waifus flexing toes on an exclusive expensive microtransaction banner to drive sales, but even in media which is otherwise attempting to be more grounded, neutral or even feminist, what you'll find is a distinct, unquestioned and persistent tendency to treat beauty or aesthetic appeal as a primary design goal for female characters.
When is the last time you saw a show where the female actresses have bad skin, for example? And I don't just mean "visible pores on the face," I mean acne scars and blackheads. Psoriasis. Eczema. What's the last show or movie you watched in which women having such physical features is simply... normal? An ordinary, unremarkable part of life, a completely neutral behaviour of the human body which just simply happens to some people?
inb4 yes beauty standards apply to male actors as well, obviously, but we're not talking about men right now
Sometimes, the prioritization of beauty can fall under the umbrella of "empowerment;" there can be a fun and effective feminine power fantasy in pursuing or embodying beauty, or using beauty as a source of power. "I am the most gorgeous, show-stopping, unflappable, perfect beauty badass in this entire room and also in the world!" Think your (early) Tomb Raiders and Bayonettas, which many women love for exactly those reasons.
Obviously, feminist thinkers are divided on whether such a fantasy can ever be feminist or meaningfully challenge patriarchy. I am of the mind that it cannot, for however little my opinion counts here, although of course art doesn't exist just for the purpose of moral education or for demonstrating virtue. It is not a sin for problematic art to exist and to be fun and enjoyable to engage with; our job is to be critical of it, not pure of it.
But I'm running a bit afield here. Returning to the actual question: female characters are routinely denied scars as a feature of their character designs, because scarring conflicts with overriding cultural imperatives and biases that demand that women be objects of aesthetic beauty first, and that all other features of their designs must be subordinate to that superobjective.
A woman being anything other than beautiful is generally treated as a kind of notable aberrance (especially by men, especially by reactionaries) in demand of an explanation, and/or like an extremist political statement, rather than merely a neutral depiction of the sober reality that most people's looks are average. The constant social consciousness of the backlash that comes with challenging beauty standards in any way also creates heavy social pressure against artists even developing a visual language for designing women outside of beauty standards to begin with.
There are industry-leading artists in comics and video games and so on who simply never learn to draw women as anything other than beautiful, and who do not bother to maintain such skills, because they know full well from experience that they will essentially never be professionally expected to be able to perform that task.
It is a systemic bias which is tied at the root to patriarchy, in the west to white supremacy, and universally to misogyny. It is one of the most infuriatingly unquestioned and most aggressively defended biases that exist in culture, and (while this is not even in the top 100 of the worst problems with this bias) it is one of the biggest reasons female character designs end up worse than male character designs in terms of storytelling, worldbuilding, and theme- and narrative exploration. It is why women are so rarely allowed to have scars or battle damage, and if they do, it is not allowed to be unflattering.
tl;dr culture systemically values women as aesthetic objects more than it values them as persons, and that systemic bias shows up in character design.
