Can we have a non-pregnant Jade skin?

[Pneumanoultra]

While I think having the original Jade be pregnant is interesting for the story of Jade Shadows, having the version of Jade we build as players being perma-pregnant is a strange decision if nothing else. This gets downright disturbing when you consider that Jade can be subsumed into the Helminth. I was going to build a second Jade specifically for that purpose, but now it just seems wrong. I signed the petition, hopefully we get a toggle of some form.

Edit: OK, I just saw a Jade in the Sanctum Anitomica using the Excalibur Zato Noble animation set. In other words, she was smoking. While pregnant. Uncomfortable. Y'see, these are the type of awkward things that come up when you make one of your playable characters perma-pregnant. PLEASE fix this.

Edited June 22 by Pneumanoultra
In game observation.

[SaintAlfi]

31 minutes ago, Pneumanoultra said:

While I think having the original Jade be pregnant is interesting for the story of Jade Shadows, having the version of Jade we build as players being perma-pregnant is a strange decision if nothing else.

This really calls into question how building a frame works, no? I mean, by the time we get Jade's blueprint, Sirius/Orion have been born, and Jade has passed. You could make the argument that Hunhow had the blueprint before her passing (the creep), but even then, what exactly are we recreating into our own Jades? Another unborn fetus orb? An inert energy ball? It certainly (and unfortunately) does bring more questions than answers.

[PollexMessier]

7 hours ago, hyzmarca said:

I can understand where you're coming from. I can also understand why DE made the decision they did. Jade's condition is a major story spoiler, and no one likes it when marketing material spoils major plot twists in a movie or a game. It is something that they had to dance around until the quest came out, because it's knowledge that would lessen the quest's impact.   

So wouldn't it have been an intelligent decision, to not have the playable version of her keep the pregnant belly? Then they wouldn't have had to go through all the effort of hiding it.

[Pneumanoultra]

11 minutes ago, SaintAlfi said:

This really calls into question how building a frame works, no? I mean, by the time we get Jade's blueprint, Sirius/Orion have been born, and Jade has passed. You could make the argument that Hunhow had the blueprint before her passing (the creep), but even then, what exactly are we recreating into our own Jades? Another unborn fetus orb? An inert energy ball? It certainly (and unfortunately) does bring more questions than answers.

It hit me after I made my first comment that her being pregnant is probably why she has two aura mod slots. One is hers, the other is the child's.

[0bsi]

1 hour ago, PollexMessier said:

So wouldn't it have been an intelligent decision, to not have the playable version of her keep the pregnant belly? Then they wouldn't have had to go through all the effort of hiding it.

THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[LazyBunnyKiera]

We'll probably get some alternative skins sooner or later.
As for me, i love the preggo look. 

I think it would be sweet if the energy ball thing could pop out and shoot enemies on it's own. 'Like a sentinel.

 

[Shinoyami65]

1 hour ago, Pneumanoultra said:

It hit me after I made my first comment that her being pregnant is probably why she has two aura mod slots. One is hers, the other is the child's.

Why doesn't the child come with a full extra mod page then? 

[Vaz2017]

On 2024-06-20 at 7:38 PM, mxcarma said:

 Don't play her

Don't play her and never join a public squad again, huh? Such helpful advice! /sarcasm

[WanderingJoe]

Her appearance makes me uncomfortable. Maybe some would say I'm learning something unpleasant about myself but Ive also had no issues with pregnant women in the kind of settings you'd expect to find one. I'm just really not sure why someone felt that in a game about lethal super ninjas that one needed to have a pregnancy aesthetic. Like, what were they expecting? Its not like pregnant women are seen often in other shooter games. Ill be honest, I'd be a lot less uncomfortable if she was either an npc (not like we haven't had ghostly happenings before in this game) or had a way to appear like what being a soldier would require you to look like, an appearance that makes sense and doesnt pull people back into reality because there's such dissonance between everything that would be logical in this setting and not something that looks so disingenuous that if someone drew her a month or two before her release the community would have looked at the picture and wondered why someone is being so weird as to push such a niche interest in pregnant women onto anyone who looked upon her. This feels like a bad faith joke about feminism: "We should put a pregnant woman into warframe!" Its like she's the oc of someone who wanted to focus more on her being pregnant than Jade actually being a warframe. 

Seriously, for the people who are claiming that people being uncomfortable about this are the ones with the problem, tell me one shooter or scifi series that the pregnant super warrior motif would fit into.

Edited June 22 by WanderingJoe

[DudeleeG2]

Has DE even seen these concerns? I don’t really see them having a good reason not to offer an alternative skin for people. Fair enough if they want to keep the default skin as is, but at least show her from the front at some point before you actually have paid for her. And then give us an alternative skin.

The spoilers argument doesn’t make a lot of sense because you can get that same spoiler by just buying jade before doing the quest.

And we DID do our research. We looked at all the drip marketing, concept art, the animation of her second ability that was shown before her launch. None of it revealed the pregnancy belly. No-one would be thinking “i’d better check if this warframe is pregnant”.

 

Saying “they didnt specifically market her as NOT pregnant” is just silly. I mean come on. That’s like trying to prove a negative. There are an infinite number of things that you could say that about.

[PhiZero]

4 minutes ago, DudeleeG2 said:

Has DE even seen these concerns?

Just chiming in,

They definitely have, DE just has a tendency to remain silent until their internal discussions have a clear direction.

We may see some talks about it as early as next week, possibly next devstream, or not at all. How everything steers is up in the air as it has been for a decade, and best not rushed without a plan.

[DudeleeG2]

Fair enough, would just be nice to get a “we’ve seen this. We’re not making any commitments but we recognise the concern”

[Alaena.]

yeah it would definitely be nice to hear something, I've managed to exposure therapy myself enough to use jade but I still can't use her animation sets with her because seeing them just hurts, a skin would definitely help (also removing the second idle from her noble set with the skin)

[CephalonCarnage]

Its not that easy though.

DE knew there would be issues with the story, hence the disclaimer at the start.

Trouble is, even if you decidedd not to play the story for that reason, you're now bombarded with pregnant Jade models everywhere. I had 2 of them taunt me with the pregnancy in game before I had played the story (They were being $&*^s, obviously, but I think were more trying to spoil it). I've played it, didn't have a problem with the quest, but I do think it crosses a real-world emotional line with many people who will be uncomfortable with the model. (obviously, I've seen the other forum threads)

As a result, a toggle would have to change the model on a viewer basis, not the warframe player. That's a bigger problem, one that can only be solved with a rework to the base model itself.

[Pneumanoultra]

7 hours ago, Shinoyami65 said:

Why doesn't the child come with a full extra mod page then? 

{Shrugs} maybe it's too small for that.

[Shinoyami65]

1 hour ago, Pneumanoultra said:

{Shrugs} maybe it's too small for that.

I think assuming that the buildable Jade is actually carrying a fetus is just a can of worms which I'm not sure that DE wants to open (what happens if you feed your Jade to Helminth, or she dies in a mission? Is your buildable Jade going to give 'birth' and just disappear within several months?), not to mention that the wording of the passive suggests that it comes from Jade herself rather than the fetus.

Edited June 22 by Shinoyami65

[Pneumanoultra]

11 minutes ago, Shinoyami65 said:

I think assuming that the buildable Jade is actually carrying a fetus is just a can of worms which I'm not sure that DE wants to open (what happens if you feed your Jade to Helminth, or she dies in a mission? Is your buildable Jade going to give 'birth' and just disappear within several months?), not to mention that the wording of the passive suggests that it comes from Jade herself rather than the fetus.

That's fair, but I think they already opened that can of worms when they decided to release a frame with a pregnancy motif. Regardless of whether it's a fetus or not, the imagery is there and people are going to talk about it as if it is a fetus. Featuring pregnancy or fetus imagery is always a dangerous game to play due to the topics it can open up. Consider the controversy that's been floating around the game Earthbound for years over the game having a final boss that only bears a passing resemblance to a fetus. Even though the game does not talk about said boss as being a fetus, just having 1 sprite that roughly resembles one has had people insisting that the entire fight is essentially the protagonists performing an abortion. They may has well have named this frame Pandora instead of Jade, because Pandora's box is well and truly open.

[AL_aegir]

5 hours ago, DudeleeG2 said:

The spoilers argument doesn’t make a lot of sense because you can get that same spoiler by just buying jade before doing the quest.

You don't even need to do that, just play pub squads, sooner or later you get a Jade doing a V-22xAC-130 with everything on full display (Makes the whole "Please don't spoiler" even more useless IMO, when she literally can be seen in pub squads with her bulge on full display)

[(XBOX)AnnabelleNewell]

As much as you have my sympathies for your loss, I respectfully disagree. If you and your fiancée cannot handle a frame that WAS pregnant, and no longer is when we build her ourselves or buy her, just don't use said frame.

We likely won't get a skin for at least a year for her. I also don't think a toggle option will happen. There was nothing misleading about marketing. DE hid the belly because it was a major spoiler to the quest.

No one is forcing you and your fiancée to play Jade. You shouldn't push DE to make a skin for a frame that was just released either. Its a silly thing to get upset over even though I get your frustration, as a woman myself, it surprised me, but I'm not going to let a videogame character affect me like that because it is not that deep.

[(XBOX)AnnabelleNewell]

4 hours ago, Pneumanoultra said:

Consider the controversy that's been floating around the game Earthbound for years over the game having a final boss that only bears a passing resemblance to a fetus. Even though the game does not talk about said boss as being a fetus, just having 1 sprite that roughly resembles one has had people insisting that the entire fight is essentially the protagonists performing an abortion. 

Resident Evil: Village is calling.

[(XBOX)AnnabelleNewell]

11 hours ago, WanderingJoe said:

> Her appearance makes me uncomfortable. Maybe some would say I'm learning something unpleasant about myself but Ive also had no issues with pregnant women in the kind of settings you'd expect to find one.

> Seriously, for the people who are claiming that people being uncomfortable about this are the ones with the problem, tell me one shooter or scifi series that the pregnant super warrior motif would fit into.

My guy, you over here contradicting yourself 😩

[(XBOX)AnnabelleNewell]

On 2024-06-20 at 9:38 PM, mxcarma said:

 I understand that your fiance feels tricked, but a lot of the people who agree with you on this matter don't care about you're fiance's trauma. They think Jade's body is ugly which is the worst possible reason to change her. If your fiance would like to have a meaningful discussion about it, why not send an email to DE or go to a woman-centered gaming forum? You are not going to have a meaningful, good-faith discussion in a place like this that is mostly comprised of young men most of which i doubt even understand where babies come from much less the grief of a miscarriage. 

I'm sorry for her loss, I know it hurts. And i felt it too; my heart dropped when I realized just how much motherhood-centered this warframe was. But now that she's here, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Don't play her or embrace the grief and work through it but please consider who is agreeing with you when you have this discussion and what it would mean to add your voice to the chorus of those trying to pressure DE into toggling her belly. Send a message to DE to try and open a discussion about how they can better deliver sensitive content, but don't demand that it stop just because they didn't approach it in the manner of your liking. Consider the broader context and what exactly is happening in the world in regards to those of us with uteruses and our rights. Consider how women's bodies have been talked about, how we are constantly represented in video games. 

 

This. All of this. Respectfully.

[(XBOX)AnnabelleNewell]

16 hours ago, SaintAlfi said:

This really calls into question how building a frame works, no? I mean, by the time we get Jade's blueprint, Sirius/Orion have been born, and Jade has passed. You could make the argument that Hunhow had the blueprint before her passing (the creep), but even then, what exactly are we recreating into our own Jades? Another unborn fetus orb? An inert energy ball? It certainly (and unfortunately) does bring more questions than answers.

Are people truly this uneducated about pregnancy nowadays? 

In the real world, the pregnancy belly DOES NOT GO AWAY AUTOMATICALLY AFTER BIRTH.

Jade that we build is not pregnant.

[ChangelingRain]

19 minutes ago, (XBOX)AnnabelleNewell said:

Are people truly this uneducated about pregnancy nowadays? 

In the real world, the pregnancy belly DOES NOT GO AWAY AUTOMATICALLY AFTER BIRTH.

Jade that we build is not pregnant.

[Citation needed]. She has the exact same glowing orb in her belly as she does in the quest, that, in the quest, leaves her belly when she gives birth. So the simplest explanation is that the Jade we build is still pregnant.

[WanderingJoe]

27 minutes ago, (XBOX)AnnabelleNewell said:

My guy, you over here contradicting yourself 😩

And you, madam, are practicing selective reading, ignoring context clues.

Your posts seem disingenuous in nature. The people who have a complaint about this situation are entitled to their opinions and if DE values their consumer base, they should be willing to at least consider the voices of some of their customer base if they have an issue with an update. For every new mother that loves the idea of sharing the figure of a new frame there are those of us who do not relish the though pf playing a warframe that will permanently look pregnant, despite your attempts to misconstrue the conversation by say pregnancy bellies don't go away immediately. The argument made for saying "she's not pregnant, she just looks like it" contradicts your point as it acknowledges that Jade will continue to look this way in perpetuity if this slowly building into a controversial topic is not addressed. She will always look pregnant unless her appearance is updated, so the argument of how an irl body changes over time does not apply to digital assets.

If you want people to listen, don't simply tell them their opinion is stupid so they should just go away and not play the game. Talk reasonably. Genuinely approach the issue and perhaps you may persuade some here to your position. Perhaps you will find yourself persuaded as well. We are open to discussion like reasonable people.

At the very least, recognize that if our attempts to talk about this are as futile as you say they are, then surely this thread is harmless as it wouldn't produce results. We hope otherwise. 

Sincerely
     a Wandering Joe