![]() Smack talk is fine and all, but the thing is, the only thing anyone can say about Juliet is that she’s hot. None of the other characters can stop themselves from commenting on Juliet. She’s a Barbie doll for the audience to stare at, and I submit to you that this isn’t exploitation theatre, it’s just exploitative. When you’re building and writing a character, this is the wrong way to go about it Juliet exists at the player, rather than within her own world. Not to mention, every camera angle, every movement Juliet makes, every move in her arsenal, has been designed to show off the maximum amount of skin. Her nonstop energy is charming enough, but then again it’s been designed to be, and it feels processed. It’s not that Juliet is unlikable, she’s just vapid and two dimensional. Oh, and the chainsaw is also a phone, because chicks love yapping on the phone. Juliet flounces around the battlefield, leap frogging over her enemies and attacking them with pom poms and a Technicolor, love heart-bedecked chainsaw that makes them bleed sparkles and pink stuff. The fanservice heroine who’s been trained to fight is a pretty standard trope and I’ve never had a problem with it in the past… It’s just that this time, even her fighting style has been sculpted around the idea of Juliet as a fetish object, rather than a study in internal contrast. You see, Juliet was also trained from a young age to be a zombie hunter, because in this world apparently that’s a thing, though everyone else seems quite surprised at the appearance of zombies. The flipside of this is, of course, her ass kicking side. ![]() Hell, even her walking animation is contrived to raise her hips at an odd angle, just so the player is treated to a perpetual view of her panties as she progresses through the game world.Īlso, this can happen. She burbles and squeaks with idiotic text speak and ridiculous teen idioms, showing nary an ounce of self awareness, intellect or even concern over the zombie apocalypse that she finds herself embroiled in. Juliet is heavily fetishised, in almost every aspect of her character this is a high school girl who, aside from prancing around in the shortest skirt imaginable, also apparently pole dances recreationally, even integrating it as part of her combat repertoire. And there’s nothing wrong with employing cheerleader imagery in this context the juxtaposition of a role traditionally designed solely for sex appeal with an ass kicking character is what this kind of schlock world has thrived on since the seventies, it’s just that Juliet errs too closely to the latter characteristic. ![]() You can build the image up in your mind based on that the blonde hair, the skimpy outfit, the pom poms… You get it. Though the game assures us that she’s eighteen, Juliet is a high school student and a cheerleader… and that’s all you need to know. But she absolutely doesn’t get there, not even a little, and that’s down to specific failures both in the character herself, and the world she inhabits. Now, I can see what she’s meant to be: she’s supposed to be a schlocky fan service heroine parody, like movie era Buffy, in a way. ![]() From Travis Touchdown to Garcia Hotspur, each one has been entertaining and funny… And this is a trait that doesn’t carry over to Juliet. Now, this is a Suda51 game, and if there’s one thing that’s kind of cool about Suda51, it’s that they always have interesting main characters. She’s the centerpiece for the advertising drive, which is… troubling in its own way, but we’ll get to that. Our main character for Lollipop Chainsaw is Juliet Starling if you’ve seen any of the marketing, you’ve seen her. Goddamn it, this image reveals NOTHING about her character! Honestly, we still don’t completely know the answer, although we’ve reached the consensus that it probably is sexist. It was interesting, actually more interesting than the game itself. There’s a lot of elements to consider, and that discussion ended up filling our entire playtime for that night. ![]() Haven’t mentioned that here yet.) could easily answer. It’s not a question the three of us (oh, right: I’m polyamorist. It’s not the greatest game ever, but it’s entertaining enough, even really fun in places.īut as the controller got passed to me during a particularly tedious run of enemy-filled rooms, D piped up with an interesting question: is this game sexist? It’s pretty fun, kind of a Rainbow Brite colored hack and slash game with the usual Suda51 sense of weirdness. Being a fan of Suda51, I bought a copy for the bois and I to play, and on that rainy Wednesday night we loaded it into the Xbox and sat down to give it a spin. ![]()
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