Me, five hours into explaining what a film is, the existence of Hollywood, the existence of a country over the sea called ‘America’, the internet and what woke means: “ok so basically, in the year of our lord two thousand and fourteen there was this thing called ‘Gamer Gate’ and single men who couldn’t have sex would harass women for criticising video games”
Medieval serf with like seven different intestinal parasites : “wtf is a pronoun?”
It was the norm for most female characters (if there were any at all) to be sexed-up waifus in most games up until the PS3/Xbox 360 generation where things started changing. It was partly because the developers themselves were largely horny dudes and partly a cynical marketing ploy because it was assumed the audience consisted largely of horny dudes. This was the era of publishers promoting video games by having nude renders of their female characters in Playboy, “Cybervixen of the Year” type awards, booth babes at E3, etc.
These things going away causes deep existential angst to the specific type of straight guy they were intended to cater to
It should also be noted that during this time, lots of other areas of culture were cleaning up their acts and getting rid of a lot of this immature booby-ogling content. Gaming was the last holdout since it had a large proportion of its fanbase as nerdy shut ins and an overwhelming male majority (due to women generally avoiding the gross gaming culture of the time). Hence, a lot of gamers felt like they were losing a culture war and had to make their final stand for boobies. That’s where a lot of the gamergate persecution complex came from, they thought “this is the one remaining space we can still act this way, why can’t they be happy having everything else”
Yeah, it isn’t just about weirdos wanting to jerk off to polygonal boobies, but about the cultural values those polygonal boobies represent to those weirdos