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Atonal Dreams Weekly Update 23 - Dream Forms & Sexual Objectification

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago2,483 words

More script work! I've planned some sections in which pairs of characters dream together, during which their appearances change based on how one of the dreamers subconsciously perceives themselves and the other. Interesting stuff... though again I've been wondering about the concept of sexual objectification and what people perceive as that.

This scripting stage is taking longer than expected! Last week I said I hoped I could finish the rest of the script by the end of this week... but at this rate, I'm just going to say I might be done with it by the end of the year, so then I can maybe do better than predictions rather than failing to meet them! I suppose it's difficult to estimate how long creative things take in general, but they tend to take a while. There's a reason games can take years to make even with a full team of professionals working at them. I'm not striving for complete perfection, but I also don't want to put out something half-arsed either. So it's taking time.

I've been mentally okay this week and got a fair bit done though, at least, so that's something!



I thought I'd decided on all the major plot points last week, but while getting further into the planning, I realised that all the time I'd spent refining the starting bits meant that the ending bits were now a whole lot less polished by comparison. I've made some more decisions to address that and make some narrative threads run better.

Weeks ago, I planned Atonal Dreams to be divided into three areas/dungeons: an overworld, an underworld, and a drealm section. As I planned more, I decided to include a number of 'elemental mausolea' along the way - tombs housing dead Beyond Ponderer monks, devoted to specific elements - which were kind of like Pokemon Gyms in a very vague way. I initially imagined them as smallish fantasy-tomb dungeons, then revised the idea such that each mausoleum was a single small room with a special altar or bed on which you could rest to enter a dreamworld, which would be the small dungeon you can run around in.

This week, I've revised that even further. Now, each elemental mausoleum contains a double bed/altar, which is surrounded by a circle of special crystals. If a pair of people sleep together on the bed, the crystals will help focus their dreams. These dreams would take the form of a single battle/scene rather than a dungeon; this means I only need to make the battle arena and a music track for each dream rather than worrying about making entire dungeons.

Two people have to dream together because one shapes the dreamworld (the 'dreamweaver' or just 'dreamer', maybe?) while the other keeps them both lucid during the experience ('elucidator'?). I've come up with a bit of lore to kind of explain it, but honestly it's just an excuse for some intriguing story/character stuff.

Characters sleeping beside each other, and lying in the bed before and after, is an interestingly intimate opportunity to explore! Plus if one character is imagining the dreamworld, then that person's (subconscious) mind also determines how both people look during the experience. It's been interesting designing some of these alternate appearances!

The first of these double-dreams involves Collie as the dreamweaver and Savitr as the elucidator, at his suggestion. My first idea for how they might look during this was this:




Collie imagines Savitr as a literal angel with comically exaggerated male sexual characteristics, while she's... a dog. But does she actually see herself as a dog? What does that even say about her? At this point, I was imagining this version of Savitr as significantly taller and bulkier than he actually was, and floating, meaning a different model and animations... but that's just too much work for too little gain.

So I tried again, after doing some more brainstorming:




This time they were explicitly designed as alternate skins for the characters' models (which I literally traced over, hence the very foreshortened-limbed pose on Savitr there which I'd not naturally draw from imagination).

The Savitr concept is similar, but he looks less like a Steele-ish brute and more comically ~handsome~ a la ∞ Handsome Squidward ∞ (I also googled 'hot black guy' for references to get something closer to the intended look for the character). Collie doesn't subconsciously understand that Savitr's horns are his ears, so she imagines this version of him with standard Bold ears. He's still got horns, but they're even more like a halo here than they are in his normal design.

Collie sees herself as a Blight Wolf, as that's what she was for a big chunk of her life (though I need to sort out the timeline to decide exactly how long she was one for...). I'd written/planned a lot for the Blight Wolves, but this is the first time that I actually designed how they might look. I like it! I like the bandanna which extends into wolf-like ears in particular, which I've refined even further now to also resemble horns and a crescent moon as well as ears.

There are six elements, and a mausoleum for each one, but only three have this format, meaning I've designed six alternate forms: Savitr as Collie sees him, Collie as she sees herself, Savitr as he sees himself, Ossoum as Savitr sees him, Pierce as he sees himself, and Collie as Pierce sees her.

I'd show them all off here because I think they're interesting - the differences between the versions of Collie and Savitr in particular - but I don't want to spoil everything! But I'm the sort of person who avoids seeing new Pokemon designs until I can encounter them in-game, while other people eagerly eat up anything that's leaked as soon as it is... If you're interested to see as much of the design process as I can share without regard for spoilers, let me know, and I could post them on Patreon.

Oh, also, each of these dreams results in the dreamer dreaming up a unique monster representing something about them, which they get a personal essence from. This is the aim of the dreams (there are plot reasons, but I won't explain everything here!). So that's been interesting to plan too, as it's got a pet/Pokemon-like appeal to it, though I've not fully finalised any of their designs yet. I like how it turned out because it incorporates a gameplay feature quite heavily into the narrative.

There's a lot of that, actually! There are six of these elemental mausolea, and unlike the elements of Pokemon gyms, their elements actually play heavily into the story rather than just affecting the aesthetics of whatever dungeon you're wandering through like with MARDEK's elemental temples. I'd talk more about it, but again, spoilers!

Sexual Objectification

Something I wanted to touch on because it's been on my mind a whole lot while designing this game is the concept of sexual objectification. I was going to write a separate post about it, but... eh.

I don't particularly like characters who exist purely for the sake of titillation. I remember adverts like this that were everywhere during the MARDEK days, and which I see from googling for images were the subject of memes and mockery because of their transparent appeal purely to sex:




A couple of character designs also come to mind, from the game Star Ocean: The Last Hope (there are better examples, but this is one I've actually played):








I don't care for these anime-esque costume designs full of fiddly details in general since the guiding principle seems to be 'whatever cool details come to mind', and these are both very skimpy purely for the sake of it even though there's nothing about their characters or background that would suggest why they would choose to look that way (I also find it interesting that these were designed by a woman).

Sometimes excuses are made for why a character is extremely skimpily-dressed, like needing to breathe through her skin...




...which are mocked because the excuse is as flimsy as the costume.

But is it possible, then, to have a relatively skimpy outfit which is justified by the character's background?

Here's a less super-deformed version of Collie's Blight Wolf design:




That's quite skimpy. But it's not intended to be sexual exactly.

One of the biggest motifs in the game is order vs chaos, in the sense of restriction vs freedom. The Seraphim represent ordered society, with its moral restrictions and lawful control; they replace the gods who also enforced these ideals. They believe that safety is more important than freedom. The Blight Wolves were formed in opposition to this, by people who didn't want to be chained by rigid judgements and rules. They believe that freedom is more important than safety.

The Seraphim are similar in general attitude to puritanical Christians, while the Blight Wolves are more like hedonistic hippies... or rather they were at first, but as the centuries have passed, they've devolved into bandits because without order, why not just take what you want?

It makes more sense then for the Blight Wolves to be about open, free expression, to be wild, untamed, and them wearing fewer clothes is a way of communicating this aesthetically. Collie here isn't wearing little because she's trying to arouse, but because she's not chained by prudish morality.

They're very similar to the conceptions of barbarians in D&D, come to think of it; this outfit even looks like the female one in this picture that came up for 'barbarian':



It's interesting to me that this conception of expressive freedom vs authoritarian suppression mirrors to some degree the liberal vs conservative (American) political viewpoints... and yet the far left also object to and attempt to suppress examples of perceived (female) sexual objectification. It seems so odd to me, since I'd expect the strongly religious to be the ones making these objections.

I'm assuming it's because it's perceived as misogynistic or oppressive in some wider systematic/cultural sense... but it's frustrating to me because it leads to a lot of double standards. Women seem to be given free reign to lust over hot guys as much as they like, and they should be encouraged, cheered on, but if a guy expresses any lust at all then he's a pig and should be chided for it (unless he's meekly expressing admiration for a TOUGH, POWERFUL, STRONG woman anyway). Anything that could be seen as appealing to male lust should be suppressed because... what, males aren't allowed to be titillated at all? I understand the psychology of it, I think, but I don't like it.

I also wonder: why do so many people think that sexualisation = objectification necessarily? If you compliment someone's intelligence, are they going to get upset because you only care about them for their intelligence and not them as a whole person? Probably not. But if you compliment their looks (and they're a woman), they might feel like you only care about their looks. That annoys me too. Why can't you like someone's looks as part of a full package, as you would any other trait? Can you have a character with depth and nuance and many facets, where one of those facets is sex appeal?

I did some reading about this, and I started ∞ a Twitter poll ∞ with this (crude) drawing:




I was curious to see which one people considered to be an example of sexual objectification. Currently there are 76 votes with the following percentages:

39% - Right
39% - Neither
14% - Both
8% - Left

So it's a small sample size, but it seems to suggest the concept is nebulous and subjective. I'm (pleasantly) surprised there weren't more votes for the left one, though it's interesting how many people said that neither were.

People in comments mentioned that the context was crucial. What I'd say - along similar lines - is that sexual objectification is less visual and more behavioural.

∞ Here's a(n article about a) study which seems to support that ∞. Essentially, it showed people pictures of men and women either fully or barely covered, and posing either neutrally or in a sexy way. They found that people were more likely to feel that the sexy poses - rather than the bared skin - were examples of sexual objectification.

I'm not intending to include any examples of behavioural sexual objectification. I'm not posing the characters in sexy ways or making them present themselves as objects of sexual conquest (though this too seems subjective; Collie poses like a ~doggy~ sometimes for the comedy, not the sex appeal, though for people who equate 'dog' with 'sexy' there'd be overlap there). Though they do occasionally talk about sex, which I see as quite different.

Take Collie, for example, who people have previously commented on with apparent distaste re the sexual aspects of her interactions with Savitr. If she was blushing and posing submissively and saying things like "spank me master uwu" - the kind of thing I see often in anime art and which I'm personally repulsed by - then I'd get how that'd bother people! But if she's the one hinting with verbal innuendo at sexual interest in someone who's unreceptive to that, who exactly is the one being objectified there? Is it even possible for the one doing the coming-on to be the object in that interaction?

(Thinking about this a bit more, I suppose "spank me master uwu" would be a form of coming-on in which the flirter is objectifying themselves... but to assume that all female flirting is necessarily objectifying of the self seems to me to say a lot about the beliefs of the one making that assumption.)

I'm curious about the feminist angle on this. Surely they'd be the ones advocating for women to be able to freely express their sexual desires? How is this not that? The clash between apparent support for that and opposition for things like this just seems so odd to me. What's the hope in objecting to things like this, the intended outcome of it being suppressed?

Ultimately, sex is a huge part of human psychology, which is both why I find its narrative potential so fascinating and why people are so attuned to ways in which it might be tackled less-than-ideally. Lots of complications and feelings people have about it!

I'm not trying to arouse male gamers with what I make, but I also wouldn't see it as an undesirable outcome if I did.