Well, let’s talk about what I’ve seen around this whole ‘supermodel’ image thing.
It’s kinda funny, or maybe not so funny, how one specific look can just dominate the conversation, you know? Like everyone gets laser-focused on one particular aspect. I’ve seen this happen in so many places, not just in magazines or whatever.
So, how did I end up noticing this stuff so much? It wasn’t like I was trying to become an expert on fashion or anything. It actually goes back to this one job I had a while ago, and boy, was that an eye-opener.
I was working for this small company, we were trying to get this online game off the ground. Super ambitious, not a lot of cash, the usual story. And we got to the part where we needed character designs. Oh boy. The discussions we had. Everyone had an opinion. And it felt like half the team was just pulling images from, like, the most extreme examples they could find online. They weren’t thinking about the game’s style, or the story, or anything practical. They were just stuck on this one idea of what a ‘heroine’ or ‘female character’ should look like. It was always the same kind of super exaggerated stuff.
We had this one guy, let’s call him Dave. Nice enough fella, but he was obsessed. Every time we had a meeting about character art, he’d bring in these printouts of models, and he’d only point out… well, you can guess what features he zoomed in on. It got to the point where the actual artists were super frustrated because they wanted to create something unique, something that fit our game world. But Dave, and a few others like him, just kept pushing for this one specific, very amplified look. They thought that’s what would sell, or what players wanted based on, who knows, some forum thread they read.
It was a real pain because it slowed everything down. We’d have these long arguments, not about game mechanics or level design, but about, like, bust sizes and waist-to-hip ratios. Seriously. It was ridiculous. I remember thinking, ‘Is this really what we’re spending our limited time and money on?’ We were a tiny team, every hour counted.
We spent weeks, maybe months, going back and forth. The artists would present something cool, something really interesting, and then someone would pipe up, ‘Yeah, but can we make her more… you know?’ and they’d make some vague gesture. It was super unproductive. Our lead artist almost quit over it. She was like, ‘I’m trying to design characters with personality, not just assemble body parts from a catalog!’
Eventually, the project kind of fizzled out. Not just because of the character design arguments, there were other problems too, like funding drying up and some really questionable management decisions. But that whole episode really stuck with me. It showed me how easy it is for people to get fixated on a really narrow, often unrealistic, idea of what’s appealing or what’s supposed to be ‘the standard,’ especially when it comes to how women are portrayed. It’s like a mental block.
So yeah, when I see these kinds of discussions pop up, or when certain images get all the attention, I just kinda roll my eyes and think back to Dave and those endless, pointless meetings. It’s a ‘practice’ alright – a practice of getting sidetracked by the superficial instead of focusing on what actually matters. And it happens more often than you’d think, in all sorts of industries, not just the obvious ones.
- We wasted so much precious development time.
- The artists felt completely undermined and disrespected.
- And in the end, we didn’t even have a compelling character to show for all that fuss.
That whole experience taught me a lot about group dynamics and how easily a project can get derailed by people chasing some weird, narrow vision they picked up from who-knows-where. It’s not about ‘supermodels’ per se, or any specific body type, but about how certain, often exaggerated, images can take hold in people’s minds and mess things up for everyone else trying to do good work. Just my two cents from what I’ve seen firsthand.
