Does Aloy Have A Beard

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb xv, 2022 Updated on Feb 15, 2022, one:34 pm CST

Aloy, the red-haired heroine of Horizon Forbidden West, is no stranger to having her blueprint and advent criticized by (mostly) male person gamers who take issue with a female character whose looks are annihilation short of model-similar perfection. Days ahead of the game's release on PlayStation five and PlayStation iv, misconceptions about women'due south bodies have made their way online again some players are criticizing Horizon Forbidden West for including a item that many women have—a move that resulted in them being immediately dunked on.

Thanks to several factors such as higher resolution and a new gaming console, Guerilla Games—the studio backside Horizon Forbidden West—tin can include more graphics in its characters and Horizon Forbidden W's mail service-apocalyptic America than ever earlier. Equally Guerilla'southward Narrative Manager Ben McCaw explained in a September 2021 weblog post on PlayStation'southward website, that allows them to render and bring that kind of detail to life, with texture details and peach fuzz being merely a couple of the examples listed.

"Each generation of consoles brings extra ability that lets u.s.a. add together even denser polygons to our character models, then we can create finer details such equally peach fuzz, smooth contouring, or effectively texture details and accurate materials expression, to name a few," McCaw said.

For Aloy, the peach fuzz appears on her face, and it'southward light and barely visible. It's an aspect of her facial features akin to freckles or laugh lines—just one of those things that a grapheme like Aloy would accept because many women also take peach fuzz on their face. Just, for some gamers, it appears that the fact that women accept peach fuzz on their faces was news. And then much so that at to the lowest degree one person seemed to think that Aloy's peach fuzz was really a bristles.

If you missed the peach fuzz, the original poster likewise circled the area in which peach fuzz appears in red to draw actress attention to it.

"Can yous explain to me why the hell Aloy has a beard?" the post reads in the English translation. The tweet made its way to other sites, including Reddit.

The criticism over Aloy'due south peach fuzz is in a similar vein to the Aloy fanart that made her look similar a sexist extravaganza concluding year. It'due south highlighting a characteristic that they experience is off or makes the character look less than feminine. Vellus hair, a more scientific proper name for peach fuzz, is something most people accept all over their torso; for cisgender women, that as well includes their face.

https://world wide web.twitter.com/thepaintedbijou/status/1493382232756658178?south=20&t=Yuh32snqkisdQGZjCb2WFQ

While the dunks took many shapes and came in many forms, they more or less had the same theme: That the person who commented on Aloy's "beard" has zero ideas what peach fuzz is and questions whether that person has ever actually met a adult female.

https://world wide web.twitter.com/coil780/status/1493382757023580161

"I'm and then impressed by the Horizon peach fuzz shader that I tin can't bring myself to dunk on the guy who doesn't know how faces work," Mike Bithell tweeted.

Information technology'south incredibly easy to dunk on the person who has an issue with peach fuzz, simply information technology's just 1 more instance of highlighting a rather lightheaded idea born from beauty standards or a narrow thought of what a female person video game graphic symbol should look like. Whether they're digitally removed, physically removed, or just not rendered in graphics (and designing female characters with peach fuzz was probably low on the list), some people may take gotten the impression that women simply didn't have peach fuzz. And while Aloy'southward peach fuzz won't impact the game, information technology's a clear example of just how much some gamers are uncomfortable with seeing characters in a game that await annihilation short of a fantasy.

*First Published: Feb fifteen, 2022, 1:27 pm CST

Michelle Jaworski

Michelle Jaworski is a staff writer and TV/film critic at the Daily Dot. She covers entertainment, geek culture, and pop culture and has covered everything from the Sundance Film Festival, NYFF, and Tribeca to New York Comic Con and Con of Thrones. She is based in Brooklyn.