It's pronounced "Sen".

pisswater:

slimmeroo:

andante-ace replied to your post: What advice can you give in making good female character designs?

In which Slim gives a nice reminder that character design should not (or at least not incredibly) be based on gender.

YEAH it’s always hard for me to talk about this because I mean

I don’t want to say ~gender doesn’t matter~, because it does, if only because stories do not exist inside a vacuum, and yet… it really……

This is really funny, because it sounds similar to a drawing men vs. women guide I have laying around half written. Of course its half finished. Everything about me is half finished.

But it was constantly evolving as I was learning and thinking and just jumping into the subject.

And then I realized something…

Basically, in the very essence of sex, (at least when clothed) there is nothing that all of one sex has that the others don’t.

Men and women come in all shapes and sizes with different features and details. There is no magic rules that apply every time. We as creators take the differences we personally see and inject them into our designs.

And I found out why all other “drawing men” or “drawing women” guides had failed me. They rely so much on stereotypes that it becomes sickening.

But back to my point… after all that nonsense, it comes to that it really doesn’t matter. As long as the audience can tell gender (unless of course you were aiming for androgynous, which is a-okay), it doesn’t really matter how male or how female they look.

And I think that goes hand in hand with what you are saying. It doesn’t matter what the character is or what they look like as long as the audience reads it the way it was meant to be read. The scary characters are scary. The sexy characters are sexy. The ones to relate to are easy to see as themselves. Gender doesn’t really matter unless it is important for the story.

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me during IGF “yeah it’s great we have a nonstereotypical female main character, but you need to give her bigger tits or no one will know she’s a girl,” I would be a very wealthy Txen.

Wow golly gee. Turns out all we needed to get people to start calling our androgynous sprite “she” instead of “he” was some informative text in the intro cutscene calling her Mackenzie. /Not/ bigger tits.

(via slimmeroo)