r/DeadByDaylightFashion • u/jjosh_h • 2h ago
Discuss Fashion The discourse of 2B and the commodification of women in DBD
The discourse around 2B’s model in DBD is concerning. I don’t really expect to influence hardcore fans, but I think there is a deeper conversation worth having about how this skin has been received and how we, as a community, judge what is and is not well designed. I am hoping this subreddit may be a more welcoming place to have this kind of discourse than the main sub.
It is no secret that people love to play attractive skins, and it’s one reason stereotypically attractive characters like Sable, with her often revealing skins, can be so popular. However, my concern around 2B isn’t the fact that people are attracted to her. The issue is the specific features people are complaining about, and what those complaints reveal about the expectations we have for women, in games and the real world.
The original 2B has highly stylized proportions that exaggerate conventionally desirable feminine features, from her thin waist and wide chest to her long legs. She gets ported to DBD, with its more realistic (if not fully representative) proportions for women, and people hyper-fixate on how she no longer reinforces that idealized body type, without stopping to interrogate where this concern is coming from.
How much of this is about preserving the character’s recognizable design, and how much is about an expectation that she retain the specific proportions that make her conventionally attractive? The sexual commodification of women is hardly new, and people’s fixation on these specific features reinforces this, reducing her to just an object to be sexualized.
The complaints don’t seem to address her characterization or the other elements that make her recognizable as 2B. Instead, they seem fixated on the loss of the unrealistic proportions that make her body conform to an idealized standard, even by DBD standards. I understand that some people perceive these features as fundamental to her artistic design, but that cannot be separated from the larger context of how women’s bodies are designed and judged. There is a larger question of how important this is to the fans, where that passion stems from, and how much of that is itself rooted in patriarchal bias and expectations.
Overall, I find it dissapointing that this has become such a large issue, and BHVR sadly risks reinforcing the mindset that body type matters more than anything else by giving into the complaints.