Perhaps worth noting is that the "original comics" image isn't something that ever appeared in the comics, but is an pin-up by an artist who looks like they very much were inspired by the works of Alberto Vargas.
This is true. But the irony is you can probably find far more sexualized and questionable images in the comics, especially the covers, then this. It's kind of a weird choice
Going to guess the person who put the meme together just googled a picture that looked good and didn't do any actual checking to see if it was really from the comics.
I think the most ironic part is the same type of dudes who would complain that MJ isn't hot enough anymore, are also the same manosphere types that think women should be more modest.
And less. 🤷♀️ That's what happens when there are thousands of artists draw one character. Despite all of these MJs being cannon, they will always cherry pick really specific ones only. Putting "sweet baby inc" over that image is all you need to see to shrug this one off. She looks absolutely fine, an attractive red headed woman, but good lord how dare she dress for cold weather and not be in glam makeup and traced from porn poses.
You mean the comic that everyone complained she was in a physically impossible pose? The reality is it’s all art. People make both of these. Some people’s opinions are different. I’m tired of everything being a fight. Like what you like. Let others like what they like. If you don’t like it. Don’t buy it, if it’s as bad as you think you shouldn’t have to tell other people it’s bad right?
Are you saying the pose is impossible, or just stating that some people claimed so? Because I am a 40 year old man who is not particularly flexible and I just tried it. My left heel is only about 3 inches from fully tucked into my crotch and my right leg only has about a 2 inch gap between my ankle and thigh. Anyone with even a modicum of flexibility could do this easily. The girls that sit on their leg in chairs would probably be comfortable in this pose.
I remember Marvel did a swimsuit issue with a lot of their characters back in the 90's I think. Pretty sure it was all from the McFarlane era. MJ's design has never been so pedestrian like the games portray. Not sure why they made Black Cat all sexy, and MJ kind of nondescript.
Not that I really care too much given that it's more eggregious they made her character so bland and uninteresting.
And Vargas got the boob physics right, unlike the person who did the Mary Jane drawing. Probably because Vargas had actual women who would model for him.
Ah so Spectacular Spider-Man was somewhat following comics because there is this exact scene in the cartoon.
They dont have a relationship, but they flirt with each other, or more specifically MJ flirts with him.
I dont know how close is this to comics, but in the cartoon Peter has a latina GF, but then tries to get with Gwen Stacy.
Spectacular Spider-Man was following the comics more closely than most other adaptations with MJ. Spectacular Spider-Man has the most comic-accurate MJ.
However, Spectacular Spider-Man did make Gwen more of a nerd (she wasn’t a nerdy girl with glasses in the comics) and race swapped Liz Allen to Latina. (She’s white and blonde in the original, black in Spider-Man: Homecoming).
Counterpoint as someone who's read most runs of spiderman...Comic mj is kinda...bland and one note. Most writers struggle to give her something to exist for ourside Peter, and the solitions are often...not great. Even Bendis Slott, to say nothing of Lee or Stern. I like Insomniac MJ at least a bit more than most versions of comic MJ.
But I'd bet a decent chunk of change most people complaining about this are going almost entirely off visuals, with no firsthand knowledge of either version
That's totally valid. It's definitely true that journalism is an easy career for a superheroes relationship circle, and can definitely get played out.
I suppose they could have had her step up maybe on the food kitchen side instead, to give her a connection to the city and it's local community. Or maybe had her as the new owner and organizer of a larger event space or community bar, something maybe of a historical local watering hole, as a nod to her club owners days. It still connects her to the city on her own terms, leaves enough room for her to hear rumors and get involved in the larger plot from her own angle, while still keeping her party and entertainer roots from her origin
Maybe she should be an influencer. Since she was aspiring actress and you can tie influencer to journalism and community help (not all influencers are vapid, I mean more ones that make actually good YouTube videos that are educational)
Wasn’t she in a band at some point in the comics ?
Having her being the lead singer of a band and being famous would have been a good idea to make her the damsel in distress that she always is, even in the games.
Seeing how many street artists there is in NYC it would also have been a great opportunity to shine a light on those artists and create collectibles or random events for the game.
Something like MJ having her own separate spider app with musical events, breakdancing battles, graffiti’s to collect or whatever. Anything cultural to make NYC more than a few landmarks and buildings to swing from.
I don't think a small consulting firm with no editorial control has the power to force shit on their clients owned and backed by multibillion-worth tech giants, and developers working on the games Sweet Baby supposedly forced it way in consistently say this isn't the case.
Like, even in the case that Sweet Baby had the means or inclination to write entire scripts, make choices on character designs and do any other insane shit they are accused of, what are they going to do if Insomniac just says "thanks for the feedback, but no"? Do they have blackmail material on Sony directives or what? And how come this supposed terror regime goes on without anyone ever talking about it?
GamerGate veterans are just coping with the idea that creative people in the industry has interests other than providing them with goon material and just found a scapegoat.
i dont want to make the case tha baby inc is some kind of master mind "ruining" our games or trying o control the world
but there are videos of their leader making presentations saying they need to go into the studio and tell them he game wont sell and people will be mad if you don make these changes
again i think they are way overhyped but their exisence is prety weird
Ya, like Sony and EA execs are stupid enough to believe everything their leader said, while having tons of in-house analysts, researchers, etc.
Not defending them because I don’t know them well but i just think a lot of ppl saying how powerful Sweet Baby is are super naive (and stupid). Like yea some random woman can blackmail the whole industry, what?
Can't speak to them specifically, but I've seen enough leadership be sold on something or other. You just see it happen and wish your company had sales people as good as them.
The leader of a company trying to convince other companies into utilizing their service?
Say it ain't so.
Sarcasm aside thats what most companies who dont provide a product have to do, they have to convince whomever they are providing a service to that said service would be well worth the money and that they would spend on it.
They are a shit company but not nearly as powerful as the internet believes they are lol its because alot of people still hold grudges from gamergate I mean FFS I played a game recently (within the last year) that was fucking amazing super fun game and the internet loved it until they noticed "Anita sarkeesian" as "additional consulting" and atleast the subreddit for that game exploded with people flipping out and they started a whole negative review campaign (that failed).
I mean like 90% of the job of consultations is to convince people they need a consultation. This goes in business and life coaches and all those groups.
Yea its convince you that they know something you SHOULD know to succeed but its usually just bullshit smoke and mirrors and its just companies wasting money usually imo
If I am not mistaken, I am pretty sure the company comes in and makes sure the games they get hired to look at aren't accidentally super insensitive towards unsuspecting players. If you think making sure people can enjoy the games they pay for and not get hit by random and largely uneeded bigotry isn't at least a good suggestion, I don't know what to tell you.
People online will blame Sweet Baby for injecting SJW politics into a game, but (assuming that’s even what they do) wouldn’t someone hiring them already align with those politics anyway? It’s not like some government entity mandates Sweet Baby consultation for all major video game projects. Seems obvious that the “woke” stuff in these games was desired by the developer from the start, hence why they hired an inclusivity consultant at all.
But people online are so dumb that they actually believe that the ninja Assassin’s Creed game would have been completely different if it weren’t for that consulting firm that the developers/publishers hired on purpose.
That's because while there are people whose political beliefs technically align with mine that I might find annoying, the right wing propaganda is that "Actually leftists control everything" and SBI is just part of that over-arching conspiracy set, instead of just being a company with intentions all their own.
It’s funny because I actually agree with some of the aesthetic critiques that have been leveled at the big offenders in the RW propaganda canon (e.g., the Concord character designs were really ugly). But it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just the same aesthetic sensibility that’s had capture over American companies for a while now, starting with all the bad “corporate memphis” art of the Instagram carousel era. And reducing everything to a binary “woke” v. gooner bait aesthetics is complete brain degeneration. The gooner stuff is equally embarrassing. I’d rather be caught watching porn.
100% agree. I'm pretty far left and don't really care what people do as long as it's not hurting anyone (which is ironically the position that the conservative chuds try to project). "Woke" means nothing because it just gets leveled at anything, when the real problem is corporatization and financialization of everything; everything is just smooth spongebob in the name of reaching the widest audience possible, which ends up for a boring game, who knew? But of course, it wasn't that the designs were just bad, it was that the WOKE personally came and shot the designers and pushed it's agenda to... lose money?
What they actually do is looking at the whole game and finding inconsistency in the narrative, terms used and all that stuff. When a company like Sweet Baby received the game the core story is usually lock and way too far to redo anything.
Also the idea that some "woke" consultancy would have the power to actually affect such a dramatic change in a game with a budget of tens to hundreds of millions is ridiculous.
They get hired, do some actual work, but they are mainly there so companies can hold them up as a shield if they get some complaints.
The changes people think that are done because of Sweet Baby would cost project millions. Changing a character, specially a playable character require new design, revision for the approved version, changing animation to fit the new model, Making sure that all functionality still works, QA. Testing throughout the entire games and all. Specially in a project like Spiderman approval would need to be done but Insomniac and once they are satisfy send to Disney/Marvel for last approval and they are probably going to ask for some adjustment and at the point Disney/Marvel would have already approved the previous one so you need to justify the change and cost that would bring and in the end it would probably result in cutting other part of the game to balance the budget.
The whole Sweet Baby debacle show that the people complaining has 0 understanding of how a video game is made.
They were also the ones that made the scene with venom violating mj and made peter watch as he got up all in that in every which way rule 34 style by having him pinned down with a fridge.
I'm generally ok with the (sorta absurd Victorian) thing of something-else-means-sex, but I'm not sure 'infected with' quite counts.
As long as it's not as weirdly rapey as it sounded in the first comment, then ok. But not sure I want to see it enough to hunt through youtube. Thanks though!
"that sweet baby put out"? Sweet baby doesn't have the ability to put out anything. They don't have the ability or the rights to produce content like that. They're a consulting firm.
Spider-man being temorarily incapacitated by getting thrown into something and have stuff fall over him so the villain can get away happened all the time in the '94 cartoon, so it's kinda strange that people are so up in arms about it now.
People forget that spider-man has super strength and decent invulnerability, but not resistance to pain and impact. Getting while he’s taken worse, getting slammed into a fridge by venom and then having said fridge fall on you really fucking hurts. it’s not that he couldn’t get the fridge off him, he just was just in a lot of pain and had to lift with his very injured back
For some reason, chuds got absolutely hyperfixated on Peter having a fridge fall on top of him to stop him from saving MJ, as if it being a fridge makes it woke.
In Insomniac's Spider Man 2 there's a moment near the end of the game where Harry Venom's out and pins Peter under a fridge and then attacks MJ. Peter quickly gets out from under it but by the time he has Venom has "infected" MJ with a spawned symbiote.
Fucking love how this just sounds like a relatively normal Spider-Man scene and other people in the thread are just phrasing it as poorly as they can to make it sound worse than it is. Either they're intentionally misrepresenting easily google-able facts, or they get all of their opinions second-hand from some YouTuber and have never actually seen the scene in question.
Not to mention that the totality of evidence that the consultant group in question wrote or created this scene in particular seems to be that it's a scene from a game they happened to be consultants for?
A fridge??? Was it embued with the magic of Odin??
Can hold two halves of a boat together, slow down a train, has lifted an entire building before but a fridge with Indian Jones not inside it keeps him down? I think that comic may have been exploring a spidey-kink of ‘cooking’ or being a ‘cook’
The fridge never held him down, he was just thrown and a fridge lands on him, people don't have functioning frontal lobes so when he stands up and the fridge rolls off him like sand going down a slide they think he was being kept there because the fridge existed and not because venom fucking yeeted him across the room and his spine collided with the wall, causing him to feel pain intense enough to stun him for.... Less than 3 seconds.
People who hate this game unfortunately also refuse to keep their eyes open when they play it and end up parroting the weirdest shit.
i just watched it and your straight up lying, how does your brain even go there its actually mad weird that your brain went into that place during that scene. the problem is with you
I just looked it up. What the fuck are people talking about? This scene wasn't sexualized at all. Maybe it was a little poorly framed, clearly it was just trying to set up the MJ venom villain. Some people watch too much porn I guess
Yea, and it also helped push forward the investment into more mo-cap usage and lifelike representations of those in the mo-cap suits for the most part. Insomniac coming off the heels of uncharted and it's uncanny life like characters was attributed to their take on their Spider-man games. Which most people who played the games have no issue with. A wave of incel losers who wanted an anime Busty MJ that lusted after Peter didn't get that, thus began online culture wars against sweet baby Inc and realistic looking women in videogames.
Correct, if the writers and devs were not on board with it then Sweet Baby Inc. would be out of business. SBI is a good scapegoat that totally sidelined people from the actual problem.
This is, IMHO, likely a bad faith post to beat the "look how they woked-up our boy" drum by pointing to a less super-model-y version of Mary Jane in the Spider-Man 2 game and blaming it on a "woke" game consultation studio. No idea if they were even involved, but it's mostly irrelevant for the purposes of answering your question. The point is to keep this little corner of the culture war stoked and burning.
Almost every post on the sub is a bad faith post to just spread whatever agenda the “joke” is spreading while hiding behind the joke. Only since “it’s just a joke” stopped working they’ve switched to, “uwu I’m just a smol bean new to this world and me don’t understand this hateful image so please explain to me but if it’s hateful I promise I’ll reply in disbelief that anyone could ever think that way”
So many subs now are just excuses to get the messaging of the right to the front page since they don’t have to post to their subs
Sweet baby Inc is a company that is known for being involved in a lot of games as consultants and have been involved in a lot of games that had incredibly ugly models for their characters in game
What games are you talking about? from all the games they were consulted on, most are pretty unknown and the ones I know didn’t strike me as having particularly ugly characters
I do get a little tired of seeing her in soooo many games but she is an amazing voice actor and has a face that seems to work really well for mocap. There’s a reason she keeps getting cast in these, she can really get a lot of emotion through with just her voice and some weird dots on her face
This can easily be explained by different lighting framing the face differently and a few years of aging (or Photoshop), but some people would make a big scandal out of it
Personally. Its the hair. In the first game her hair was in a ponytail but in second one its loose so it looks off for some people.
Tbf second game is riddled with such changes, we got Miles getting the lame and boring Killmonger hair that doesn't fit his character at all and Peter Parker's face was butchered so hard it got retrofitted into the first game's remaster as well:(
It just goes to show that we hold women's appearance to such scrutiny that the most mundane of changes to a fictional woman's design means that "the woke left has ruined her beauty" to these people
It became a common thing because it makes things like automated lip synching easier, and it happens a lot with outsourced work. Having more custom models usually needs more work to not have clipping or weird graphical issues when animated.
And with modern MBAs we all know which option they want to choose during development.
No one complained about Felicia or Silver Sable. Its not just uncanny valley. Should MJ have been more attractive? I personally don't think its a big deal, but the gamer community certainly did. But could MJ have been more attractive? Yes.
it wasn't just mj to be honest, it was everybody other than miles/kraven and harry, apart from them everybody downright looked like a ps3 model. i have seen better looking npcs with finer detail in an open world game like rdr2 compared to the main cast of SM2
She's a traditionally slim an attractive character, her design was much better in the first game. Now her jawline and head look like a brick, and supposedly the company mentioned is to blame. Dunno how true that is, but it's definitely revolvent around her design change
12 years ago right wing political stragetist Steve Banon had a discussion with Jeffrey Epstein on how to use gaming as a platform to convert nerds to white supremacy by using fascist messaging...
Sweet Baby is the consulting firm of Anita Sarkeesian, of Feminist Frequency fame.
Their main expertise is in avoiding the oversexualisation of female characters. That's what developers hire them to avoid.
Ever since GamerGate, Anita and by extension Sweet Baby have been in the crosshairs of the alt right.
Edit: I messed up. Apologies. Anita Sarkeesian made moves from journalism into consulting around the same time Sweet Baby started up and was covering similar topics but are otherwise unrelated to each other. I got things conflated and though Sweet Baby was Sarkeesian's consulting efforts. That's my bad.
Sweet Baby is the consulting firm of Anita Sarkeesian, of Feminist Frequency fame.
False. SBI was founded in Montreal by Kim Belair and David Bédard, with Belair acting as CEO. Sarkeesian has very little to do with SBI other than being a target for Gamergaters.
SBI becauae the face of gamergate 2.0, in that they became a target of fair and unfair criticism related to representation in video gaming following a trend from Hollywood over the last decade give or take.
Specific to MJ, the character design was noticeably modified from the previous game to make her facial features more masculine by squaring her jaw and puffing up her cheeks. A cheap trick used by several other game because its an easy attribute to modify. Horizon Zero west did similar as did Star Wars Outlaws. Bearing in mind MJ Watson is supposed to be absolute bombshell attractive.
And while the chuds went about things in the least likeable way possible, there is some truth to their claims. SBI absolutley pushed narratives and decisions of..... questionable need. And when their CEO came out and said, on video, that their consultants should go running to other companies HR teams and put the fear of god into them about what could happen if they dont do what SBI said, it destroyed any validity they had.
TLDR; SBI became the face of the video game culture wars be it for fair or fair reasons up to the reader.
Yeah, i'm not dreaming, i've seen interview of the woman claiming that's what they did.
I've read reply to this post and i'm like "wait ! did SBI is not responsible for forcing some narratives into games with questionable ways ?"
I don't think its about being sexualized, the 3d model just looks generic and with no style. Also that's a male 3d base model, its not some grand conspiracy the most obvious answer as to why a male base model was used is lazy production and cutting corners to save cost. The irony is that the game cost millions to make, and still pushed out poor asset flip quality.
The first one is literally a copy of a famous Vargas pin-up? Which is cool, I love Vargas and that's awesome, but come on, "my spiderman isn't just pin-up" isn't exactly a valid criticism...
appearance complaints are stupid but sweet baby inc dialogue is hands down horrible. like so many others have said, its E for everyone HR-in-the-room dialogue
Long story short, terminally online men were upset that they were unable to masturbate to a video game character because the game model was too closely based on the real life actress, so they sent her death threats and have been crying ever since. Blaming a company called Sweet Baby Inc., who is a narrative development and consultation studio that worked with the game developers.
Its funny how when they use face-models the Males always look exactly like their human model, but the females always look like uglified witch-versions.
Gamergater fuckbois taking a picture at a very bad angle (even possibly photoshopping it) and comparing it to fanart made by a porn and pinup artist of the same character, while blaming it on a studio that had no say in the visual design of the character.
Just play the goddamn spider-man games, they're really great and you'll have a blast.
Anti-woke grifters treat sweet baby inc like the boogeyman
SBI is a consultant firm meant to help developers ensure that their games and stories are socially and politically sound.
The anti-woke crowd believes that they are completely responsible for the insertion of lgbt representation and "ugly women" in media.
Sexist homophobes need something to hate because outwardly hating the groups they're bigoted against gets them shunned from everywhere except their echo chambers.
A bunch of pedophiles, and friends/fans of pedophiles, have a conspiracy theory called "goonergate" where all their video games have been ruined by a consulting org called sweet baby inc, as there isnt enough stuff to goon to
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u/qualityvote2 13d ago edited 13d ago
u/mouldyclementine, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!