this is hilarious because…Bayonetta is a fictional character who therefore cannot consent to anything you geeks…she “owns” her sexuality because she’s written that way??…like…yall are really so comical.
I crack up every time folk try to use Bayonetta as a counter-argument against critiques of hyper-sexualized female characters in video games. Like stop, fam.
Bayonetta is literally just the power fantasy OC of the female character designer. The director wrote the original script for a “traditional” witch, elderly, crook nose, pointy hat, shapeless robes, etc. Then Mari Shimaazaki, this lady:
stepped up and basically said ‘okay but what if instead of that dumb thing we used this awesome bitch I just drew’. Bayonetta was not designed by a man. She was directly contrary to the intentions of the men in charge. But once they saw how awesome she was, being a sexy badass totally on her own terms whilst not giving a shit what they thought, they submitted.
Today it’s generally agreed throughout the company and much of the industry that it couldn’t have happened any other way, that only a woman could have made a female action hero as successful as Bayonetta. If she’d been designed to appeal to the audience, that would have been fundamentally contrary to who she is and probably nowhere near as successful. But since she originated as a personal power fantasy, as this woman’s idealized self, that feeling of existing for her own goals and her own pleasure and not giving a flying fuck about how anybody else saw her shone through and Bayonetta became more popular than she ever could have been if she was just trying to please others.
Additional fun fact: all the frankly ridiculous dance moves she uses? Those are the result of giving the mocap actress an open stage and telling her to do whatever she felt like.
the earliest drafts were even shot down for being too overtly sexual for the director’s tastes
Harvest Guardian 