Are Gooners Ruining Media?!

Emma Papangelopolou (Y10)

If you clicked on this article expecting an in-depth analysis on how women in media are often sexualised and the effect this has on our society, you will be sorely disappointed, because I’m about to go on a rant about an animated pilot on YouTube and why catgirls are not inherently sexual, actually.

Gameoverse is a pilot produced by the indie animation studio Glitch Productions and released on YouTube a few days ago. It’s an action show set in a video game world, where the main characters travel through space to different video games for plot reasons that I will not spoil because it’s actually super interesting and you should go watch the pilot right now. So, what does any of this have to do with gooning?

Well, the main character of the show, Kit, happens to be a catgirl, and the majority of the first episode is set on a beach, meaning she (shockingly) wears a swimsuit. This has the unfortunate side effect of summoning all the gooners to the fandom and reducing many conversations surrounding Gameoverse to what the characters are wearing rather than the actual quality of the show. This ranges from people simping over Kit and another female character, Miss Information (but I suppose that’s inevitable), to genuine criticism of the show for having too much “fan service”. But is it really fan service in the first place? Personally, I don’t think so.

Fanservice, according to Wikipedia, is material in a work of fiction or in a fictional series that is intentionally added to please the audience rather than advance the plot. One of the most common types of fan service is characters wearing revealing clothing or doing suggestive poses to please the gooners (and no, I will not be defining gooners– this is a school article). Now, let’s take a look at the Gameoverse pilot. While Kit and Miss Information both wear two-piece swimsuits, the show frames them as functional rather than revealing, especially for Kit, who still has parts of her gear on. And let’s not forget that they are ON A BEACH. Are they supposed to dive underwater fully clothed? Doesn’t sound very practical for fighting.

Another commonly brought up point is that only the female characters are made to wear swimsuits, meaning that they’re specifically being sexualised. It’s true that Kit and Miss Information are the only characters to wear swimsuits, but that’s only because the rest of the primary cast literally consists of a backpack, a dragon, a dolphin, and a piece of paper. Moreover, Kit and Miss Information are NOT the only female characters in the show! There’s also a giant crab and robotic cat cyclops, who didn’t get much screentime during the pilot but are implied to play a bigger role in later episodes if the show gets greenlit.

So, to wrap up this rant session, because there’s no way people are actually going to read this far, I think the Gameoverse “controversy” is incredibly forced, and people need to stop interpreting everything as fan service or goonerbait. It’s extremely frustrating when cool, unique projects such as this one are released, and people focus on the attractiveness of the (usually female) characters rather than the actual plot. Characters will always be sexualised and simped over regardless of whether or not that’s how they’re presented in the story, and some people on the internet will look for any excuse to stir up drama. This makes it significantly harder to have genuine discussions over pieces of media, but can luckily be avoided by logging off, touching grass, and talking to people in real life instead of the dumpster fire that is X.