1258 So Many Pixels.

I’ve never actually made a female character in Mass Effect. I’ve played that way in Dragon Age and KOTOR, but never even bothered to try in ME. So, I don’t really know what the limits of character creation are. I’m guessing, based on my recollections, that you can’t have a tubby adventurer wheezing through space. This scene is actually more like what you can do in Saints Row 2 (I think) which is pretty much anything. (I basically made a character just to test the limits, played for ten minutes, and quit because I didn’t like the gameplay.) In actuality even regular Carol would be straining the limits of character creation in most games. Middle age Carol would go so far beyond those limits you couldn’t even get close. Most games just try to scale up the generic breast, which is typically not how breasts grow, and is really off putting. Leaving them however they start is about as good as it’s going to get, so a lot of the time I don’t bother with customizing a character at all. My Shepard is straight from the tin. This is partially because he’s the face of the game in the game media. In KOTOR they never show the player character in promotional stuff, so I didn’t go in with preconceived notions. That made it easier to build a character however I wanted. Basically by making generic Shepard iconic it discouraged me from experimenting.

I tend not to even try to change body types in games where you can edit your avatar because fat characters tend to look really weird. The framework of the player character is usually built around the idea of the nebulous ideal. That tends to mean the statue of David for men and Barbie for women, assuming the option is there at all. I used to play WWE games from time to time and female characters in those are historically terrible. I haven’t played a modern one, so I don’t know if that issue has ever been addressed, but my guess is no. On the n64 the men weren’t even much more than a series of squares, but they did manage to make relatively decent fat guy bodies, surprisingly.

In The Godfather you could make an okay fat dude, because some of the main cast were fat, so they had to make the framework function properly anyway. (I assume.) So I actually played through once as a pretty accurate representation of myself.

In Fire Emblem: Awakening I played as a female avatar more times than not because one of the face choices looked enough like Carol that I couldn’t resist. She’s on the thin side, but still has an aura of what my mind recognizes as Carolness. My Animal Crossing Mayor is also molded after Carol, although it took a while before the options became available to get it done. AC makes you work for customizations. I also have spike hair Thomas, Jo, and Nina (Who looks the least correct…) I played Dragon Quest 9 as Brooksie, Carol, Nina, and Reggie, because those were the best analogs I could make in the character creation. Basically I leave characters alone if I’m presented with a “standard option” if not, I try to make them look like a character from my comic. (Which speaks of a sad sort of obsession that I observe in many webcomic creators…)

In any case, Carol is not one of those people who thinks she will remain young and thin, relatively speaking, forever. For someone who kind of hit the genetic lottery the future is not all that bad, especially if the traits your mate likes are the ones that tend to expand over time.