Or offensive in any media.
No, those ways don’t include pseudo-feminist reasons (this article has some counterargument to that), nor any prudish moral outrage reasons.
The offensive ways can include things like using sexual content to try to hide that a work is weak, or thinking that because there is sex then it doesn’t matter if the work is good. This is offensive in the “insulting out intelligence” sense. For examples, there are the films “Barb Wire” and “Showgirls”, which rightfully bombed.
Another way is shoehorning in sexual content even if it doesn’t fit in a work (or it’s a series that didn’t have it so much before), because those making this thing are just treating it as their own personal playground. Then it becomes offensive in the “expecting people to give their time and money to experience the creators’ genius” sense. See “Farscape” and recent American superhero comics (people were rightfully horrified after DC did a major marketing push in 2011, and the mainstream actually got a glimpse of what comics had become).
Yet another way is to diminish other aspects of a work in order to focus on the sexual content. That’s offensive in the “throwing away what people came for in the first place” sense. See Samus being shoved into that Zero Mission suit (especially when she had a perfectly good space bikini before) and again American superhero comics.
This does not apply if sex is there just for honest fanservice and titillation. It was okay to make Mai really sexy in the “Fatal Fury”/”King of Fighters” games because those are good fighting games. It’s okay to have the skimpy outfits in “Onechanbara” because the games are cheesy 80s and 90s B-movie homages (and have more of a problem in acting like they have deep and meaningful stories in all the zombie hacking). It’s okay to have the queen on the cover of “Battle Chess” wear that sexy dress (heck, why don’t some versions have her wear that in-game?) because she’s still in a scene that represents the game. On that note, the cover of “Everquest” has the skimpy elf chick, but she’s clearly a wizard in a fantasy world, so that’s also okay.
It’s not okay to do stuff like shoving characters popular with kids into adult-rated works (what comic books now do, which is as stupid as making an M-rated Zelda game), or deciding the popular women in your series are less important than a former villain who inexplicably acts even more slutty and bitchy as a heroine and deciding her already sexy outfit wasn’t skimpy enough (again, stuff that comic books now do). Did I mention I hate what’s been done to superhero comics?
Anyway, what I’m basically getting at is sex used at the expense of content is bad (unless sex is the content, but this isn’t about that). If it’s just in addition to at least decent content, that’s fine.I think I know what you mean. Many comic book makers don’t know how to write women (or men). They think of sexuality only from the waist down.
I suspect this is due to the writers being androgynous themselves. Androgynous people only perceive male or female through the sex act itself. The only thing they know is to increase the sluttiness.
In the New Trilogy of Star Wars, the ‘romance’ (hahahahahaha) between Padme and the young Jedi is a joke. Terrible acting. Terrible dialogue. The ‘romance’ between Leie and Han Solo of the Old Trilogy was much better acted and written. The ‘play’ between the sexes is rarely illustrated today because the writers don’t possess the power to do. It is like their minds have been fried where they can only perceive of it in the carnal way. It makes much less interesting media.”
Of course, Shakespeare did this dance the best.
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