Thank you thank you thank you for this post

I agree with almost everything you said, Especially about Nami
SHE LOOKS LIKE SHE CUT OPEN HER OWN SKIN AND PEELED IT AWAY FOR THE SAKE OF SHOWING OFF HER BREASTS. And it creeps me out SO BAD.

So many of the splash art reworks, I felt, were just there to make the female champions even more sexy. it's infuriating. Take Lux for example, her new artwork would actually be really great, IF HER SPINE WEREN'T BROKEN TO SHOW SOME T&A.

Does riot forget that they actually have FEMALE players?
Female players already have to deal with general harassment in the gaming world because it's mainly a boys club (scratch that, the industry has gotten to the point that it's a men's locker room now). If you ask the normal female gamer (not counting those of our kind who pretend to be geeks/nerds for attention, we're talking about REAL female gamers here) chances are she will say she won't talk at all in game, or at least reveal that she is female. Because as soon as the rest of the room finds out you happen to have ovaries, it suddenly ONLY becomes about that.

Back when I first started playing, I happened to be carrying a game with a really foul mouthed enemy team, and the enemy trynd player spent the entire game writing in graphic detail in /allchat how he was going to rape me and my mother (it was back in the day you couldn't mute people, or at least I didn't know how to) because my friend in game taunted them with "You're being beaten by a girl!"

Continuing to over sexualize female characters, hurts the female demographic of their players. It adds to the idea that females in general are only around to be decoration, look pretty, and have se-x with. So even if you're talented, powerful and smart champion. You have no value because you are not perceived as attractive.

I'm a marketing major, I understand that se-x sells, but so does innovation. I would like to see riot put a foot in the right direction towards normalizing the blatant over sexualization of females in the gaming industry, by daring to put out unique female champions. They have the extra resources, and it's not as if putting out ONE unattractive female champion is going to suddenly put them in the poor house.

I'd like to end this rant with a screenshot I took the other day of a Game almost entirely identical to LoL but made for the iPad (Heroes of Order & Chao) I caught a glimpse of this amazingly unique support character named Lathier.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me...5jdvo1_500.png

She's Ugly
She's Fat
But she doesn't give a ****, she'll still kick your sorry ass.
AND I WOULD PLAY THE HELL OUT OF HER

I know s*x sells. I know it all too well. However, as a heterosexual male, I can barely understand how this kind of sexy artwork appeals to most people. This is the exact same problem I have with the character design in some fighting games (the Dead or Alive franchise, mostly) : the female characters' sexual features are so accentuated, it becomes ridiculous. I don't think watermelon-sized breasts are attractive at all, it just looks unnatural and silly.

It's like every single character designer on Earth has the exact same idea of what an attractive female is, but every single male on Earth does not necessarily share that idea. What about people who prefer small breasts (yes, those exist)? What about people who think a female is much sexier when she's muscled? Scarred? Wearing plate armor?

It's bad enough to see every character designer seems obsessed with creating sexualized female characters, but to me, it's even worse that there's only one version of "sexy" to these people. If they really want to draw sexy female characters, then I wish they could cease to associate "sexy" to "american playboy model with fake breasts". There's more to sexual attraction than that, people. If we want to take down that sexualized idea of women, I think we first have to accept other definitions of "attractive".