I am by no means the grammar police, but I'm just gonna let ya know that this was worded poorly. You're against the idea of more women. You're against the idea of adding more female characters. But simply referring to women as "females" is wrong.
"She looks cool" is a valid reason enough to want a character in, particularly in a topic asking which women we'd genuinely like to see in Smash. Your gatekeeping is unnecessary. From what I've seen, people are naming characters that would bring radically different designs, personalities, archetypes, fighting styles, and/or franchises to Smash. They just so happen to be awesome female characters, and there's nothing wrong with that or wanting more of it. Especially since what we have in Smash is lacking, to say the least.
I think removing cool characters from box art, remodeling games to eliminate them entirely, saying you don't want those characters in games you publish because they won't succeed is disrespectful. Many of the characters we're listing went through extra hurdles to exist, and a lot of extra care was put into them to make them stand out. I think Chun-li's creator had the right idea:
And no one here wants women just because, but there's nothing with that. The fact of the matter is, when people talk about wanting more villains or whatever else, it never draws the kind of backlash we have to deal with.
Gee, I wonder why that is?
You don't, but the videogame industry disagrees with this idea bigtime. Otherwise, we wouldn't have nearly as many male protagonists. And I mean, as a little girl, it'd be a lot easier for me to look up to and identify with Ribbon Girl, than say, Agent 47 from Hitman.
That's... not much of a difference (and the number is going to skew in favor of women, if the mobile gaming explosion continues its current trend). It definitely doesn't explain the industry's marketing tactics (especially since she already pointed out that men are much more likely to swap genders in-game than women, and that that contributes to female characters' popularity and high percentage use when both options are available. But that's getting off topic), and people's general perception of the average person who plays games because of said marketing.
That's a bold statement considering that games with female-led protagonists receive a fraction of advertising budget on average (~60% less), and women were and still are disproportionately represented in the industry.
You can argue sales or whatever nonsense, but even genres that typically draw more female players prioritized male demographics overseas. See: Puyo Puyo and Panel de Pon for reference.
The statement I made earlier about remodeling and/or removing women from games entirely, and hiding or removing them from promotional material was more common than I'd like to admit. Same for publishers dismissing the idea of using female protagonists.
Forreal... you'd think Nintendo would highlight a popular, multi-million selling series that did well in Japan, Europe, and North America like Style Savvy a bit more, but they don't.
Does rewriting Seth Killian into the main villain when it was intended to be Maya Hansen count? Or introducing a founding Avenger member (Wasp) super late because known racist/sexist chairman Ike Perlmutter was apart of the creative committee and girls don't sell toys? Or the fact that it took getting rid of him to make something like Captain Marvel (the 21st movie in the MCU) happen. Even if we ignore the dumb, sexist gags that were sprinkled in every so often and completely unchallenged in-universe, the few women they had were either poorly written love interests, recieved a lot "male gaze", or some combination of the two. There's a reason people joke about early MCU failing the Bechdel test (i.e. two named female characters talking to each other about something other than a guy) more often than not.
