If you wish you can PM me. I'm open to any conversation. For the record, I personally do not find the images offensive in any way. But I know what we, the staff as a whole, the other admins, and the owner of Smashboards, would find to be inappropriate imagery for this site. So for those reasons, I enforce the rules we have in place.
*blinks*
Uhhh... You do realize that this image is literally less racy than any given screenshot in any given match of Super Smash Bros Ultimate that contains ZSS or Bayonetta, right? This feels like such a truly bizarre statement from the mod staff that I'm not even sure how to parse it. It's a picture of a fully-clothed woman in a jumpsuit from a game nintendo released a decade ago, and a good starting point for debate.
Meanwhile, as to the actual debate...
How many of you have heard of John Galt? Fictional character from a quite dreadful book (seriously, regardless of what you may think of its merits philosophically, Atlas Shrugged is
terrible literature), but the philosophy espoused by him and a few others in other books from the same author went on to have
massive impacts on society. How massive? Paul Ryan, the speaker of the house of representatives up until his retirement in January, cites Ayn Rand as his largest philosophical influence, and it's clear through his policymaking (low taxes, small government).
History is full of examples like this. 1984 introduced us to the concept of "Big Brother", and distorts the way many of us see "dictatorship" to this day. Animal Farm is a scathing rebuke of soviet-style communism. It could easily be argued that Samus herself was hugely influential in how we see female game characters. So if we're starting from a baseline of "obviously art can affect society", then it shouldn't be hard to find ways in which individual characters affect society - particularly ones which turn out influential. Actually linking this influence can be difficult, but it exists.
(As to the above picture, it's ripped completely out of context, and as someone who recognizes that scene, it's hard for me to interpret it outside of that context, which is "vulnerable and endangered" (excellent essay on that and related subjects
here, for anyone interested).)
Yes, of course fiction can affect people's perceptions on reality, regardless of how self aware one might think they are.
It's not common for a single character to affect the norms of a society though, rather it's usually characteristics that are perpetrated throughout fiction.
This is also true. The key things we're finding in research on how fiction affects us is that it affects our norms, what we see as "normal". Nobody is going to suddenly become violent because they played a violent video game, but after playing Call of Duty, they may take in more subtle things, like the glorification of war, and how war is necessary and often good. It's the little things - like, for example, how many people think Washington DC has a skyline due to movies, even though it doesn't. Or how, if you do everything right, you
deserve to "get the girl". And a lot of these messages are deeply troubling in a lot of ways, and when they become
tropes, when they become commonplace, people get the idea from their media that this is
normal, that this is
the way things should be.
