Seeing the discourse in this thread get revived for the millionth time and the thread still hasn’t been closed by the mods:
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Because “smash the patriarchy, man bad, man dumb and worthless without woman”. Because that’s this modern lense this incredibly small fraction of the human race sees the world - they are just extremely loud about their twisted world view.
Yet, unsurprisingly these girl-bosses adopt more and more masculine traits, and emasculate the actual men. Lol, its not new - its been around for a while now and is a recipe for failure.
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“This logic” - it’s really just a fact, not some assumption.
And no, the logic of “men have greater physical strength than women and are normally the ones sent into combat” doesn’t naturally lend itself to the physically strongest race displacing other leaders for their internal faction leadership.
A people is still going to want their leader to be one of their own. They might agree to fall under a coalition with a single coalition leader, but the individual races always retain their own leadership, because otherwise it’d just look more like straight conquest, loss of sovereignty. Gnomes will want a gnome leader, to look out for gnomish interests.
And of course, being a leader doesn’t necessarily depend on being the strongest. But in a war-torn world, leaders will often arise out of a military environment, which is going to be much more heavily masculine. Exceptions can exist and can be compelling (both on a large-scale and an individual level), but being an exception means paying heed to the existence of the rule.
I mentioned it before, but an example of a large scale exception that paid heed to the rule was Kul Tiras in BFA. They had it as a plot point that their male population had been decimated by the prior wars, which meant more women filling those roles. An exception on the individual level would be someone like Jaina or Sylvanas. In WarCraft 3, they interact almost entirely with men in a war setting.
I think in older times they’d tell themselves that if there’s backlash, at least it means people are watching it, so it must be garnering some real interest. Kind of a mindset of “hate-watchers are still watching, which means they’re still paying for a ticket / subscribing / whatever.”
But these days people tend to hear takes on shows before watching them, and often will never watch the show itself, but will join in the commentary. Which negativity can hurt those who might have otherwise watched the show. Like what happened with Acolyte. Or Disney’s Willow TV series.
Game writers of course get the additional insulation and benefit that their impact on a game’s sales is really hard to ascertain, especially if it’s a well-established franchise. A totally new franchise probably gets impacted in a much more noticeable way by writers and character design.
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so…whats wrong with all male leads?
They’ll say “nothing”, but you know they don’t really mean that, lol.
To name a few just recently.
Rings of Power.
The Witcher
The Acolyte
House of the Dragon
Dr Who
Just off the top of my head.
They mess around with the story that already had a big enough following to garner a show or movie. Then decide to add their “Modern View” to bring in the masses and end up alienating the original fanbase and the target audience is either too small or isn’t interested enough to hold up the franchise.
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Video games have been considered one of the most male-dominated spaces. You surprised when people voice their opinion about uglified tickbox characters? And putting Mary Sues constantly into leader positions, and portray male characters useless and weak?
Imagine putting fat, ugly males into fashion and beauty industries, then telling women to sod off, we must have diversity!
Besides, I’ve never seen anyone complained about FFXIV, females being in leader roles, now why is that? 
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They’re infecting even more IPs, too.
They did it in the Spiderman 2 game.
They’re trying it with the Warhammer 40k show in development - its why Cavill quit.
Its not enough that in 40k, theres a warrior sisterhood already, nah, they need to make the Emperors guard full of women too now (was never ever like that, ever in 40k lore)
The new LOTR anime? Based on a 2 sentence part of Tolkeins appendices so the writer can make the main character, Helms daughter. The daughter who was not named and appeared in exactly 1 sentence.
A full on girl boss story, the likes would make Tolkein spin in his grave.
But people are finally starting to wake up this nonsense.
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Yeah its getting bad.
You know it is poison when show writers on HotD set out to write two girl boss characters in Rhaenyra and Alicent. But by the end of the this last season most people lament on how well GRRM writes his female characters.
Huh who wouldve thought that the guy who beautifully crafted the world and everyone in it would have a better grasp on how to make a better chatacter no matter the gender.
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I have a beard…and many leather bound books.
I have desks of rich mahogany.
If we look at the major factions, most of the leaders are still male.
Though when the Alliance sends frontline fighters why do they send Humans? Why does the Horde sometimes send the Blood Knights?
It doesn’t matter if the elves want to be led by an elf. They have an elf at home. When it comes time to fight on the frontlines we should basically only ever send Tauren, Orcs, Draenei, Dwarves, and Worgen. Everybody else provides support in the way of intelligence gathering, engineering, or spellcasting.
If you wanna argue “but it’s not realistic” I can unravel pretty much this entire setting even before we get into the topic of what’s in the pants of the leaders.
It’s interesting because they must’ve chose to leave this one up because there was another thread very similar called “The Women Within” which was removed by the mods. Lol. 
(atleast im pretty sure, I cant find it anymore)
Because Final Fantasy has a much better community that you aren’t a part of? Except they also have issues from people with opinions like yours?
I think I speak for a chunk of women when I say:
“Give me that fat boy”.
And rightfully so, the OP made observations that resonate with alot of players who observed the same thing.
If it were a thread about ‘not enough girl bosses in TWW’, I doubt you’d see these people calling for its closure, because having an opinion against that is illegal apparently.
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didnt say there was!
They remove almost all the threads that devolve into culture war BS, except for this one.
At this point I can only assume it’s because they get a kick out of it.
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By marketers, and yet the people actually playing video games were traditionally pretty much everyone under the Boomer age demographic even if they didn’t consider themselves to be a “gamer” as their primary hobby.
And before you start, yes, mobile match-3 games do count as video games.
The female characters as portrayed in the game aren’t Mary Sues.
The male characters as portrayed in the game aren’t useless and weak.
Because online content creators and failed game devs haven’t targeted it as being influenced by the “woke mob” to up their social media engagement.
I’m not sure what argument you’re rebutting in your head, but it’s not the one that’s actually in writing here. I’ve made arguments that:
- Men are stronger and generally make up the bulk of combat troops. Just a clear fact of reality.
- Erasing gender dynamics tends to make writing for any story, regardless of genre, worse. It tends to only work in very limited circumstances where the erasure of that dynamic is itself a major plot point. (That’s why the Night Elves worked, because it was a major plot point that their men go to sleep for hundreds of years.)
The weird point you seem to think someone is making is, “being stronger means that a racial coalition would only ever make use of the strongest physical troops.” Silly. A lot can come into play in any story for what is used and where: different roles (cavalry, infantry, infiltration, bombardment, siege), different gear, magic powers (in a fantasy setting), political goals of individual factions, requirements of contributions, population sizes…
Not one ounce of that undermines the general point that yes, men are stronger than women and will usually have a much stronger presence in militaristic settings, and yes, erasing that gender dynamic is usually a sign of bad, modern writing.
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Well, no one can argue mobile games aren’t games. However, that also means that the target demographic just sub-divides.
If you are making a non-mobile game, it would be foolish to ignore differences between the mobile market and the home console market and the PC market.
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