Marvel Rivals has launched its second season based around the Hellfire Gala, adding Hellfire staple Emma Frost to the game as a new Vanguard.
The conversation about Emma Frost in the lead-up to launch here was almost entirely about the appearance of her (comic accurate) revealing outfits, and really, there has been a longrunning debate about the sexualization of Rivals’ female characters compared to its male characters, which is not exactly the first time this has happened in a game.
Marvel Rivals, however, never fails to be hilarious, and now the game has apparently buffed butts in season 2. A lot of butts, god help us.
The focus of this appears to mostly be on the butts of male characters, taking many from almost completely flat to at least a little less flat in a way that fans immediately noticed, because of course they did. This has happened across a number of characters and skins, among them Moon Knight, Wolverine, Winter Soldier, Star Lord and Mr. Fantastic, to name a few. It’s also possible a few of their uh, fronts got buffs as well.
This is, of course, very funny. Honestly looking at the old models those butts were not good just…anatomically, even for the often unusual proportions of comic character. But other male characters have become butt-based memes, like Venom and his very, very prominent butt which actually spawned a twerking emote based on community memes. Again, Rivals is often hilarious.
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There is a theory that it is at least possible that some female butts were buffed as well, but that’s more up for debate given that, well, essentially all of them were hugely prominent even before this. But some believe this happened across both genders (I think this may in fact be true, judging by say, new Magik and Psylocke outfits).
This may sound goofy but there is a rather loud culture war debate about the “attractiveness” of female characters in games, with titles like The First Descendant and Stellar Blade held up by a certain crowd as the ideal, and games like Concord allegedly failing because of it (there was no butt-related reason Concord failed, of course).
Marvel Rivals is an interesting case where there seems to generally be a lot more agreement that its character designs are fine given how close they are to comics which have featured years and years of heroes in skin-tight outfits, and whatever outfits are arriving, they are in fact usually pulled from comics.
However, we’re heading into an…interesting time period where there are going to be a number of summer skins that will no doubt produce some debates, as yes, there is a portion of the playerbase who pushes back against what they deem over-sexualization (the term “gooner game” is often thrown around) as that crowd certainly does exist. I do not expect any of this to go away, but yes, the important thing here is that was a butt patch this season. Literally a butt patch.
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