Thread by @MOOMANiBE

you know what, fuck it, I'm going to post a whole thread about how skeevy and gazey as FUCK the third shantae game is because it bothers me every damn time I see ppl rah-rahing that series

https://twitter.com/MallowyGoodness/status/1147221669532119045

So first of all, here's an early-game puzzle. You have to light up an inscription on some ruins. How do you do that? Well,

You make a creature drool so that you can trick a bunch of women into taking off their clothes and bathe in the drool, thinking it's a hot spring

later in the game, you acquire some "X-Ray Specs" from a boss, who pretty extensively makes it clear he was planning to use them to peep on women

what do you do with them? Why, you casually hand them off to literally the only major male character in the series, of course.

This isn't interrogated at all, bc the assumption is that the target audience - horny men - will 100% understand the implication.

And of course SHANTAE doesn't think about it bc, like every female char in this series, she's written by men and therefore oblivious to the male gaze

Later on we have a sequence where every female character in the entire series, supposedly all hypercompetant action women, get kidnapped and put in slave leia outfits.

EXPLICITLY slave leia outfits.

Reminder shantae is canonically 16.

this sequence ends with the women, all of whom are ABSURDLY THIN, bickering about each other's weight, because as usual men can't envision women talking about anything else

And then, immediately following this scene we get.... ANOTHER weight joke, delivered by the man who kidnapped you!!!! YAY!!!

I want to stress that this is all just THE SHITTY PARTS I REMEMBERED OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD, FROM ONE GAME IN THIS SERIES

I'm sure there's plenty more if I decided to subject myself to another playthrough

So yeah. Shantae isn't rah-rah women. It's not even representation. It's just another skeevy pile of fanservice written by, and for, men.