Reign of Gaming

The thing about the passive-W interaction is that it's unnecessary on smaller creeps, which die to the base damage of W before the bigger creep regardless of Frost. Using Q to apply Frost is unnecessary. 

I have to disagree here. Straight guys enjoying it or no, that's still sexualization, at least to me. A LOT of people like big hunky guys, and LoL has droves of them. Not all people that like guys like beefcake, but you can't discount those who do.

I am a gay man and I love me some beefcake, but that's not what that is. The kind of exaggerated musculature you see with champs like Tryn and Olaf is much more in line with the kind of dude you get in a Warhammer setting. Pentakill Olaf is a great example of this - you look at the splash art, and he's just incredibly buff, but there's nothing sexual or inviting about the picture - he's buff for the purposes of looking intimidating, not for the purpose of being sexually attractive.

Also, there's a small contradiction here. You say that there is a lot of variance in character design, but at the same time they are always incredibly muscled (with a number of exceptions, ofc). Imo, male being the "default" gender for monster champs is an entirely separate problem. So much so, that it probably deserves its own thread.

I genuinely don't think it is a separate problem, I think it's inherently tied to this. Male champion design is incredibly varied because you can count the monster champions, all of whom are masculine by default. Even if you limit yourself to human champions, that still leaves you with champions like Taric, Ezreal, Zilean, Gragas, Yi, etc etc. None of whom fit the traditional beefcake look. Meanwhile, the human female champion palate is pretty monochrome with regards to young, fit, generously boobed attractive women in their mid twenties.There are some variations but not nearly to the extent of the male champs. Men are the default. Female characters are ancillary and have to be attractive, or what's the point of the character being female? So goes the thinking.

Saying that Edward Cullen is a male sex icon is like saying Ke$ha is a female sex icon. I'm sure some will continue endorsing their inexplicable popularity, but the rest of us will be here gagging :X

I'm sorry, but hell no. Edward Cullen made a worldwide sex symbol out of Robert Pattinson in a way that Ke$ha could only dream of. My point is more that, when you look at what makes a male sex symbol, you're not looking in your local hardcore gym - you're looking at boybands, Bieber, movies like Twilight, books like 50 Shades. None of which appeal to me, but I'm an adult gay man and have had sex in the past (and hope to again). Women tend to need a narrative, a reason to crush. Men tend to just need a pretty girl with boobs. Again these are huge generalisations and apply mostly to younger audiences, but hey, guess what? The majority of the LoL fanbase is males under 25.

An interesting theory. To whom is it attributed? Could a parallel be drawn between the male character archetypes?

All theories in the post above are my own except where I've read shit and forgotten about it and can't remember who to credit. It's interesting though that you bring up the point about male character archetypes though. In media predominantly made by/for men, male archetypes tend to be much more varied while the women fit nicely into one of those three categories, but in media made by/for the opposite tends to be true. Dudes are dads, brothers and various archetypes of boyfriend. Women on the other hand are allowed to be, you know, actual characters. You see this all over the place in shows like Gossip Girl, Sex and the City etc. Women are their own characters with their own motivations and plots. In shows like Big Bang Theory, the girls are girlfriends and exist to complement the guys.

Aside: I know the second I mentioned Sex and the City 90% of the people reading those words rolled their eyes. Think about why that is. I am confident saying to 90% of you - you are a young, straight male, and you are populous in this game. This game is made predominantly by young, straight men. This is not an accident or a coincidence.

Ofc I'm speaking from the perspective of my Elo ie. low counter-jungling, low invasion, fairly safe 1-4. I'm also all about the Nautilus play, which is another example of a jungle tank with a terrible early game but amazing late game.

I think the only change I'd make to Sejuani would be to keep the slow, but to make it radiate in an AoE similar to the cleave effect of Tiamat/Hydra. 10% single target slow is undeniably weak. 10% slow in an AoE cleave suddenly becomes a whole lot better, not to mention distinct from Gangplank's passive. It wouldn't significantly speed up her clears, but it'd feel more intuitive and it would make it so much easier to deal increased damage with W and slow with E in teamfights. SO MUCH EASIER.

Or does Sejuani not kinda rock in the new jungle? Admittedly her early clears are still iffy, but that's nothing a big pull doesn't fix and she ramps up much more quickly than before. Besides which the buffs to Liandry's have made it even tastier (new Liandry's is B-A-N-A-N-A-S) on Sej, making her a high damage health stacking tank with amazing initiation in a meta that favours all of those things. 

What do you guys think?

So any media product made mostly by heterosexual men (who make up the majority of the tech sector so I'm guessing this is the case with Riot) tends to enforce a heterosexual male perspective. As such, when designing characters, these characters mostly tend to appeal to straight men - both the male and the female characters.

Men are idealised. They're muscular and athletic, regardless of profession or occupation. They're frequently shirtless because shirtlessness emphasises muscularity which denotes strength, power and toughness. Often they wield improbably huge weapons because of Freud. Male characters tend to be badasses, because that's what straight men (in general) aspire to. At the same time, there's room for a lot of different designs here because straight men are much more familiar with men than women, and thus respond more readily to variety. This familiarity tends to mean that men also become the "default" - any character that's not identifiably human tends to be male, or at least have masculine characteristics and be referred to using male pronouns.

(As an aside, this is also why any argument of "But Tryn/Olaf is shirtless therefore sexualised!" is bullshit. You want an example of a sexualised male? Go read 50 Shades of Grey, or watch the Twilight movies, from which I've learned that what really gets straight women going is broodingly handsome tortured souls in need of someone to fix them. Straight people are weird.)

Women are also idealised. However, because men tend to be less familiar with women than other men, this means they tend towards one of three stereotypes - the sister, the mother and the slut. Sisters are smaller, spunky and cute. Mothers are wise, caring and beautiful. Sluts are provocative and sexy. Almost all the human female characters boils down to one of these three stereotypes, and as a result, female character design tends to stagnate.

Any deviation from one of these three stereotypes results in speculations of lesbianism. Any time some idiot talks about Ez and Taric being gay, someone's always quick to chime in with Poppy or Sejuani being dykes - the reasoning being that straight women want to appeal to men, men don't find aggression attractive, therefore any aggressive women must be lesbians. And there's so much wrong with that I can't even begin to cover it.

So then Riot releases Quinn and the male player base is confused as hell. Here's an ostensibly pretty woman with an attractive voice... yet she's wearing armour? Her hair is covered? She's not immediately sexualised? But... where's the fanservice? Straight male player thinks, what's in this female character that's for me?

And the answer to that is... well, nothing. Wearing armour reduces her outward appearance of femininity, but it's not an expression of masculinity so much as an expression of "I don't want to die". And that's fine. She's dressed like someone who's going to battle, and that's only a problem if you think women are incapable of going to battle, or if you think female armour should amount to a strip of chainmail around the boobs. 

My suggestion to you would be this - this is a character. Her femininity is besides the point. She is a ranger, she is a soldier, she wears armour, she has a honking great bird and lots of interplay with it. If you cannot relate to a female character just because she's not your sister, your mother or your girlfriend... it might be you that has the problem.

And then Olaf's jungler ganks, and because Olaf is a good champion they get a kill on Fiora rather than just worrying her or burning Flash. You see how that works? 

If you pick a weak champ like Fiora it is not my job to bend over backwards to accommodate you. Other lanes exist, I have to farm, there's counterjungling to be done. I did not pick my role because I want to hold your hand through yours.

Re: 2 - also if I had a penny for every time some douchebag laner bitched me out for last-hitting his lane while he was dead (aka "ERMAGHERD DON'T PUSH MY LANE") I would have precisely £4.67.

Re: 5 - This is the one takeaway point I want everyone to pay attention to in this article. Your lane is YOUR LANE. The reason I cannot win your lane for you is because there are three of them and shit man, I can't be everywhere at once. If you're not warded and die to a gank, that was your fault. If you ARE warded and you die to a gank, that's still your fault. The only time it would ever be my fault would be if, I don't know, I'm playing Blitz and I grab them into you when you're at 5 HP. I can help, but gank opportunities don't always present themselves and sometimes I'm busy elsewhere. Bear in mind that the more you're a whiny little bitch to/about your jungle, the less inclined we are to help.

It's funny actually that you bring up Ripley since her character was never intended to be seen as a tough action hero. She's a ship's pilot, totally ordinary person in the first Alien. Her gruff demeanour is the result of professionalism, not badassery.

Besides, Ripley and Taylor Swift is a really bad comparison. Quinn is a young woman, obviously skilled and highly confident. in that respect, her VA is a perfect fit. You might as well say that Lux's joke, in which she explains the science of a double rainbow, is thematically inappropriate because she's not wearing a lab coat.

It does if that's the character. You find it jarring because you have these tropes set up in your head about how men and women should be. Real life doesn't always fit that. Why should fantasy?

Women don't have to become men in order to be soldiers.