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I put critics in quotes because the people complaining about Hades 2 likely haven’t actually played the game yet. Instead, they’ve seen its diverse cast that heals the shortcomings of the original, the queer community championing the game’s representation, and Supergiant Games’ devil-may-care attitude to hot characters that aren’t overtly sexualised. They’ve cast their sweeping judgement on these alone.
Before Hades 2 launched into Early Access, Kotaku’s Senior Editor, Alyssa Mercante, was being harassed online for an opinion stating “Hades 2 is the kind of hot we need right now.” Their article landed a week before Stellar Blade came out, and shortly afterwards was criticised for seemingly polarising views.
It’s clear that critics of Kotaku’s opinion, alongside critics of Hades 2, didn’t take notice of what the article was saying:
Hades characters’ sexiness is woven into their personalities, as much a part of them as their wants, needs, and emotions–and their bodies, however scantily clad or salacious, are not in motion, they cannot be manipulated or posed or peered at from different angles. Instead, it’s like you’re looking at statues or paintings of these gods and their eternal, infinite sexiness.
Kotaku
This is an important point, so when Mark Kern tweeted that Stellar Blade doesn’t “bend the knee” as Hades 2 does, he got it wrong entirely. Hades doesn’t cater to diversity and representation, instead it tells an important story with the hedonism and sexuality of its Greek gods woven into it carefully. Stellar Blade, on the other hand, bends the knee in favour of its misogynist fanbase desperate for low-down camera angle shots of Eve descending a ladder. The fact that the former Blizzard developer then begun a petition demanding to undress Eve even more is a bit of a self-own – asking the Stellar Blade developers to then bend the knee to its horny community.
Take this tweet, for example, which says that the “people who made Hestia just committed a crime against nature.” (Note, I have corrected ‘comited’ to what I presume the original poster attempted to spell.)
In Hades 2, Hestia’s character design opposes the typical expressions of the figure. Rather than borrowing from Caucasian statues, or the heavy-chested anime interpretation, Supergiant’s version encompasses an alternative hearth and homely version of the God that we haven’t seen yet. Grandma Hestia is affected by Vitiligo, a condition in which skin pigment is lost, causing white patches.
In what sense is this a crime against nature? I sometimes wonder if the people writing this type of drivel even believe it themselves, or they’re just playing on the emotions of the so-called culture war to drum up followers and engagement on whatever social platform they’re poisoning.
What’s clear is that none of these complaints have any validity, spawning from the hatred spewed by Mark Kern’s gaming Twitter, a community I can only imagine was inspired by Trump’s America.
Like the petition to remove Stellar Blade’s censorship in favour of overtly sexualising women, the anti-woke hatred for Hades 2 comes from a pathetic mindset hellbent on ensuring that a heteronormative, patriarchal, and oppressive status quo is maintained.
That can f*** right off.
