The internet is hitting back at a video game fan who criticised game designers for animating their female character with a “beard”.
The video game, called Horizon Forbidden West, features a female character named Aloy who travels through a post-apocalyptic western United States. The upcoming action role-playing game is the sequel to 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn, which were both developed by Guerilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Horizon Forbidden West was one of Sony’s most anticipated PS5 releases when it was first announced in June 2020. The game is set to be released 18 February 2022.
The technological advancements of video game design today has allowed for high-resolution graphics, and realistic characters with texture details. In Horizon Forbidden West, the female protagonist Aloy feels real to players, with her striking red hair and light peach fuzz. However, one gamer found the hair on her face to be almost too realistic, calling the attention to detail a “beard”. Now, the internet is mocking the video game fan for never being close enough to a woman before to realise they, too, have hair on their faces.
“Can you explain to me why the hell Aloy has a beard?” the original poster tweeted, circling the area of Aloy’s face with hair. Don’t be fooled, that is no beard. In fact, peach fuzz or vellus hair is a soft, translucent hair that resembles the skin of a peach, and it grows on just about every cisgender woman’s face. Like everything on the body, peach fuzz also has a purpose — to protect and cool the face through insulation and perspiration.
“Tell me you’ve never been up close to a woman, without telling me you’ve never been up close to a woman…This dude will go first,” tweeted one video game fan.
“Someone has never been within five feet of a woman,” said one user.
One Twitter user issued a reminder to the internet that tiny hairs on womens’ faces are normal and common, and if that wasn’t enough for people, they included photographic evidence too. “Every woman has tiny hairs on their face called peach fuzz,” they tweeted. “We have dermaplaners, waxes, hair melting creams, laser removal, etc because it’s something we all have and takes work to get rid of. Aloy doesn’t have time for that nonsense.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Guerilla Games director Mathijis de Jong said that designing the video game around a female protagonist like Aloy is a much-needed break from his previous first-person shooter series. “Like with the series’s themes of restorative beauty, centering femininity in its heroism was an element of the studio recoiling from the loud masculinity of the Killzone games,” he said.
According to a 2021 survey, nearly 80 per cent of video game protagonists are male, and 27 per cent had female characters. However, only 8.3 per cent of female protagonists were of non-white ethnicities.
