All the discussions in your stream last week about treating "attractive" as a mandatory quality for female characters ring a little hollow when all of your female characters are extremely attractive
I feel you've misunderstood the assignment. Female characters should not have "attractive" as a mandatory quality. And you would be surprised how much that changes the design process.
Whenever the subject of objectification comes up, people always ask the false question of "Well how do I make a character Sexy without being Sexualized?" The problem is that "Sexy" is the first thing on your list and you're not willing to sacrifice it.
This is something that compounds on each other because, as in all things, a lack of diversity leads to inbreeding. It's why anime characters are increasingly shifting into more and more grotesque versions of neoteny and why some game companies think A, B and C Cups don't exist.
The more often "sexy" is the first and most crucial design element for you, the more your designs start to fold in on themselves until you end up with Stellar Blade, where every character is a bug-eyed freak sitting deep in the uncanny valley and only visually appealing to the most incurable weeb in the universe.
Nowhere is this better showcased than with Veilguard, where people were whining that you couldn't make "attractive" Rooks. And when pressed, they clarified their problem was you had to work really hard to make one and couldn't just tweak a preset.
Except, you could. I did it in record time by taking 1 preset and adjusting like three settings.
And yet people kept insisting and insisting and insisting that it was "impossible." And then, people started spending hours in the character sliders or even modding the game to demonstrate how hard it was and what did they have to show?
That's right: More fucking babyface, because of COURSE it was going to be more babyface. These people have been soaked in one specific kind of beauty standard that those beauty standards have metastasized into an almost comedic hyper-exaggerated version of itself.
If what you took from that was "Make ugly characters or you're a misogynist" then you're an idiot.
It's important to remember that toxic beauty standards aren't just about how closely your face resembles an 8 year old's, they also influence characterization. And mediums where beauty standards continue to go unchallenged also have female characters who are rarely ever characterized as anything beyond what the most misogynistic men in the world find appealing.
The central point of this idea is: Are you willing to sacrifice the character's appearance to better serve their characterization (Older, visible jaw, scars, anything that detracts from what incels find attractive), or will you mold the characterization around their appearance ("She breathes through her skin," everything about Bayonetta, 2B being an emotionless doll).
It's not about avoiding making characters look good, it's about making them look good in the context of their environment. IE: Don't give the fucking swordswoman exposed thighs you fucking dipstick, nobody dresses like that at work.
Accept the objective reality that full-plate looks amazing and stop trying to "fix" it.
More importantly when you stop clinging to one idea of "attractive" you'll find you actually have more varied tastes than you were aware of, you'd just been pavlov'd on garbage.
