He's not wrong though, like at all?
Is not that much about being wrong -and he totally is-, but more about being an hypocrite.
But I appreciate the effort you have made in your post and that it isn’t filled with insults.
In any case, his original idea for women-only virus is plain bad. The examples of "bad" character designs he shows are also good examples of bad sexualisation: Quiet, Cortana are characters who do not need to be this blatantly sexualised, in fact it goes against their role in the respective games! Why would you make a sexy-bikini AI? Why would an elite sniper wear no clothes crawling through the sands of Afghanistan (and no, Kojima doesn't get a skin-breathing pass for just being a perv)? If you want to make sexy female characters nobody would object to - you can still do it but as games move away from being aimed at 14-year old horny boys, and narratives become less Duke Nukem and more Assassin's Creed so the style should move from just hot babes to relatable female characters who engage you emotionally and not just as eye-candy
Note he didn’t said that his original idea was “bad”, he literally said that it was misogynistic.
He says that a virus having an effect only in women is “misoginy”. That’s already a confirmation that his train of thought is fundamentally flawed. And I very much doubt he would say the idea was misandrist if the game was about only men getting infected.
And the puritanism regarding sexuality never ceases to amaze me. Does Cuckmann go outside an ask girls why they dress the way they dress? Wanting a “good explanation” to justify sexualization is stupid, sexualization itself is a good explanation. We are deeply sexual creatures and there’s nothing wrong with sexuality. Males have a more compulsory sexuality and like to see hot females, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that despite those silly theories about the evil male gaze and other puritanesque SJW hot takes trying to make sexuality a bad thing.
Neil is basically saying that his fanservice of feminist designs and tropes is good and the fanservice made for males is bad and shouldn’t be done “without a very good explanation, mister”. It’s hipocrisy at it’s finest.
And the funniest thing is that they are trying to masquerade it as being “more mature”. Which is laughable and took literally from the church 101 book of puritanism and “decency” and no fun allowed.
Naughty Dog themselves have beautiful female models in Uncharted's Helena and Chloe. They can do that cause these games are adventure fantasy escapism and every character is slightly-over-the-top. A lot of AAA games have great female characters, they are just aiming to make sure that they are not unrealistically sexualised if it's not necessary for narrative. But it's not wrong to say that a lot of times the characters are sexualised to please male audience in a way which is not relatable to their function in game
Those characters aren’t Neil characters.
And how are not relatable to their function in the game just because they are sexy?
That’s like saying Ellie isn’t relatable because a 45 kgs girl wouldn’t be capable of fighting an entire militia at all.
It’s a videogame, we all make suspensions of disbelief all the time.
If TLOU is aiming for realism having bikini-wearing hot-ass Ellie is definitely over-the-top and totally unreasiltic. The first game had both strong male and female characters, Tess, Bill, Marlene, Joel. It looks believable because in real world in collapse they behave as scavengers and survivors and their sex or hotness doesn't matter. Nobody had outrages at strong female leadership then. Druckmann made a good choice of driving this for the game which strives for extreme realism. I have much more immersion because both Ellie and poor PSVita chick have much more practical outfits, haircuts and don't have makeup on cause who would care in such society
They are not striving for realism at all, otherwise the game would be much more different and the protagonist wouldn’t be a little teenage girl that somehow makes Rambo look like an incompetent.
In a collapsed world, everything females would have to survive is sex and hotness. In a world based on the survival of the strongest, females would be at the mercy of the far more stronger men. It has happened through history in societies much more civilized than the one in TLOU2.
They strived for the feminist fanservice version of postapocalyptic world. Which is ok, but isn’t realistic at all.