Well, since you opened that can of worms, I can clarify and reiterate:
For player characters who are treated as an extension of the player's will and/or personality (intentionally or not, a lot of us are guilty of this), you can effectively treat the character as you would a normal person. How they dress, how they act, etc. is the result of conscious choices by the player and, as such, should be treated in that lens.
For characters that are treated purely as actors in a work of fiction, however, things are different. The character is simply a blank slate that has no real choices, only the illusion of choice. It's the creator's responsibility to bring that character to life, including giving them a believable personality and furnishing them with a backstory that justifies that personality. It's the creator that's making all of those choices FOR the character, and as such, you cannot divorce the creator's intent from the depiction of the character.
In short, in the latter case you can't really justify an obviously sexualized design by giving the character a contrived backstory because anyone with a lick of sense can see right through you and understand your intent. Meanwhile, with real human beings they actively chose to dress themselves in that particular fashion and thus it becomes a form of expression. This is the difference between being acted upon and being the actor. Most video game characters are the former. Most player characters (and the players themselves) can be assumed to be the latter.
Now, TERA is actually an instructive example here because, if you choose to play a Castanic, you really have extremely limited options for dressing in a non-skimpy fashion. For players who like the aesthetics of Castanics but don't want to, ahem, advertise all of their body parts to the world, this can be highly discouraging. The player wants to make a choice but that choice doesn't exist in the game world as it stands. They simply have no power over how their character dresses. That is a problem. Similarly, Cidney did not make an active decision to wear that silly little getup, the developers foisted it upon her and she has literally no power to refuse (because she doesn't exist, natch). They can make up reasons for why she's wearing it but the fact remains that they put her in it for extremely obvious and rather shallow reasons.
And that, though not really in a 'nutshell', is why I find Cidney's outfit quite patronizing. You literally cannot justify her leaving her midriff and boobs exposed to hot oil and loads of grease. It detracts from her character to the point where it is impossible to ignore.
Meanwhile, your RP characters can wear whatever the hell they want... that is, whatever is provided to them by the devs, anyway. And I can freely have my character react appropriately, and that's nice. It's a lot different in a video game where you have no way of having one of the characters lampoon the ridiculous clothing some characters are wearing. Some of these outfits are clearly satire-worthy and yet there's not an ounce of humor or self-awareness to be found in the game. At least in my book, that's kind of a shame.
For player characters who are treated as an extension of the player's will and/or personality (intentionally or not, a lot of us are guilty of this), you can effectively treat the character as you would a normal person. How they dress, how they act, etc. is the result of conscious choices by the player and, as such, should be treated in that lens.
For characters that are treated purely as actors in a work of fiction, however, things are different. The character is simply a blank slate that has no real choices, only the illusion of choice. It's the creator's responsibility to bring that character to life, including giving them a believable personality and furnishing them with a backstory that justifies that personality. It's the creator that's making all of those choices FOR the character, and as such, you cannot divorce the creator's intent from the depiction of the character.
In short, in the latter case you can't really justify an obviously sexualized design by giving the character a contrived backstory because anyone with a lick of sense can see right through you and understand your intent. Meanwhile, with real human beings they actively chose to dress themselves in that particular fashion and thus it becomes a form of expression. This is the difference between being acted upon and being the actor. Most video game characters are the former. Most player characters (and the players themselves) can be assumed to be the latter.
Now, TERA is actually an instructive example here because, if you choose to play a Castanic, you really have extremely limited options for dressing in a non-skimpy fashion. For players who like the aesthetics of Castanics but don't want to, ahem, advertise all of their body parts to the world, this can be highly discouraging. The player wants to make a choice but that choice doesn't exist in the game world as it stands. They simply have no power over how their character dresses. That is a problem. Similarly, Cidney did not make an active decision to wear that silly little getup, the developers foisted it upon her and she has literally no power to refuse (because she doesn't exist, natch). They can make up reasons for why she's wearing it but the fact remains that they put her in it for extremely obvious and rather shallow reasons.
And that, though not really in a 'nutshell', is why I find Cidney's outfit quite patronizing. You literally cannot justify her leaving her midriff and boobs exposed to hot oil and loads of grease. It detracts from her character to the point where it is impossible to ignore.
Meanwhile, your RP characters can wear whatever the hell they want... that is, whatever is provided to them by the devs, anyway. And I can freely have my character react appropriately, and that's nice. It's a lot different in a video game where you have no way of having one of the characters lampoon the ridiculous clothing some characters are wearing. Some of these outfits are clearly satire-worthy and yet there's not an ounce of humor or self-awareness to be found in the game. At least in my book, that's kind of a shame.
