I’m replaying the first Mass Effect this week.  The very first karmic action in that game involves a locked shed on Eden Prime, a nattering scientist off his meds, and the option to shut him up with a left hook to the jaw.  Was it a feminine punch?  What was the gender of the person in the mo-cap suit taking that swing?  I never thought to wonder because it looks completely natural.  Heck, it’s enough to make you swear off the Paragon path for the rest of the game.

Shepard lounging around the bowels of the Normandy in Mass Effect 2 does not look natural.  It isn’t about the attire.  The Commander Shepard I know would never sashay around her ship in that evening dress, but thankfully there are much more fitting options available.

My issue with that specific scene is not that Shepard looks insufficiently feminine; it’s that she looks insufficiently human.  The pose is out of proportion with the character model so her limbs don’t quite make contact with each other.  She hovers half an inch above her seat.  The original creators of that picture may have criticized Shepard’s unladylike demeanor, but my intent was to criticize the moments where the animation fails to account for the proportional differences between the male and female character models.

Reading through it now, I can see that I didn’t make that clear.  Thanks for the opportunity to clarify!

If it isn’t, the game itself will fail in its narrative arc.

forgive me for delving here, but this is really one of my pet peeves:

As far number 4, though, I feel like I really need to speak up. As hilarious as the demotive poster is (that outfit is dlc and was obviously not made with that scene in mind), saying that a female Shepard acting masculine is ‘goony animation’, as a female gamer who’s ‘canon’ Shepard is also female, irks me.

I can’t help but think of Dragon Age 2. That game had many flaws, but what annoyed me most (even more than the inconstant plot and re-used environments!) was the female Hawke’s walking animation. I just could not take the entire game seriously when this supposedly badass warrior was *sauntering* everywhere, wagging her hips. It felt like a pandering gimmick gone wrong.

The fact they applied a lot of the same movement animation in ME2 is not a slight against it. It makes the fact that Shepard is hardcore Alliance Soldier before she or he is male or female. If you want question It even matches the brusqueness of her voicework and the consistent parts of her backstory across all choices. She is used to wearing armor, that she might forget she has on a tight black minidress IS hilarious but also character consistent. From a programming stand point, obviously the guy that made the dlc dress and the guy who programmed her animation never talked, and it would have been even weirder if they reprogrammed that scene to have her politely cross her legs.

Yeah, there was some goony animation there occasionally. Shepard being ‘masculine’ isn’t part of it.