[ddarko]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RamenRider

The 1992 animated movie “Porco Rosso” (Full stop, spoilers incoming. Watch the movie first, it’s on Netflix, and its really good), literal translated name “Crimson Pig” of the famous animation house “Studio Ghibli” tells the tale of an ace fighter pilot that has the appearance of a humanoid pig, even though no humanoid pigs exist, and no one makes any remarks about his strange appearance, they only call him a pig. That is because he is a traitor of the army, labeled a pig, thus the movie portrays him as such, even though he doesn’t actually look like a pig in his own world. Only the viewer sees him as such.

In the movie you describe, Porco curses himself, and that is why he appears as a pig as a result of the curse. I see no comparison whatsoever with that situation to what we have here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RamenRider

I fail to understand why not being able to tell the gender of a character makes for a bad design. People were unable to tell if Samus Aran, for example, was male or female at first, given her suit of armor. So was this armor a bad design? Most certainly not.

A good design can tell many things, it can also hide many things. No one needs to be able to deduce a characters identity at first glance for a design to be good.

Now you are attacking a straw man though. The point is not that you should always be able to tell whether the character is a male or female. Obviously, like in the case where Samus is wearing armour, we do not know who is inside the suit. Such a thing is OK because you do NOT have ANY VISUAL cues to determine either way.

In contrast, this Spider-“woman” is bad design because it CONVEYS the OPPOSITE of what the character is supposed to be i.e., have the character display all the cues of a comic book man when it is supposed to be a woman. That is why you have to add that label saying “Spider-“woman”” or any sane person would think it’s a “Spider-man”.

To draw an analogy from your “crimson pig” example, this “Spider-Woman” is like having Porco look like a human and say in the label that he is actually pig. Such a thing would be a bad design!

If you really want to make this work, one way is to say that Spider-Woman lost almost all of her body in a fight and had to replace it with male cyborg parts. Then the design would rightfully try to make her look like a man to service the story. However, such a story is so contrived that then one has to wonder if the writers are scraping the bottom of the barrel.