Summary
There’s been a lot of hubbub aboutStellar Blade’sEve being the face of the anti-woke gaming movement.Stellar Blade in itself isn’t political or anti-woke, but because its protagonist is a hot girl, it’s being portrayed by a sect of players as a return to the good old days, where female characters are unashamedly created to be eye candy and don’t have any real purpose beyond that. That’s not actually what Stellar Blade does – Eve is strong and capable in her own right and drives the game’s sparse story, though she doesn’t really have that much of a personality.
Eve was designed to be conventionally attractive by today’s standards. The focus on character design that emphasises her and the focus on making her especially shapely fits what people find attractive in the contemporary BBL era, but an attractive woman might have looked completely different if this game was made in, say, the ‘90s, when women being unhealthily thin was all the rage. All this to say that she’s hot, sure, but in a very boring way. She’s a tragic victim of Instagram model body.
She’s also not very interesting as a character. I’ve played maybe two hours of the game, and she’s reallyboring, and that makes her way less hot. The tutorial shows her floundering through a dangerous situation, having to be led and directed through the mess by her squad leader Tachy. Here, she seems more damsel in distress than powerful and competent. She can’t get out of her pod without help, she doesn’t seem assertive or certain about anything, and she falls to her knees when her squad dies. It’s only later that she seems able to handle herself.
Tachy, though… Tachy is a woman who takes control of a bad situation. She frees Eve from her pod, tells her where to go and what to do, and shakes Eve back to her senses. She prowls around her enemies and throws herself into serious danger to protect her last surviving ally, sacrificing her literal limb for Eve’s safety. She’s incredibly competent, keeps it together when things get hectic, and protects those she’s responsible for. She’s instantly a more striking character than Eve, purely because she actually displays personality traits.
A strong character does not a hot girl make, but one of the major criticisms levelled against Eve is that she’s boring. Female characters with great bodies are a dime a dozen, but female characters who are hot and interesting outside of their looks are far more interesting, especially to players who are invested in seeing more interesting women characters in games. Tachy and Eve have similar body types, but one is far hotter than the other. There’s no aesthetic reason for this – it’s entirely because Tachy’s more developed.
I don’t know yet if Eve gets more developed over time, but from the reviews I’ve read, she doesn’t seem to. If we’re talking about attractive female characters, just being hot really isn’t enough to make them iconic or appealing anymore. I need some edge from them, some swagger. Eve, unfortunately, is swaggerless.
Stellar Blade
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Stellar Blade is an action-driven game from Shift Up, originally revealed as Project Eve. It follows the aforementioned Eve as she battles the alien Naytiba invaders, in a bid to reclaim the Earth for humanity.
