I've long been a defender of aesthetic beauty. It can come in various forms, but at the end of the day, beauty is beauty.
In an article I wrote in 2023, I highlighted that the radical left has been waging an intense war against beauty, and for a reason that doesn't seem immediately obvious. Beauty often reflects uniqueness, especially in things like architecture. It gives one a sense of place and belonging. It conveys a specific kind of identity that is distinct from others.
And for the radical left, this is a horrendous thing, because if you want to conquer a people, one of the worst things they can have is a sense of identity that is all their own:
Compare that to the modern basic concrete and glass structures of today. Most are featureless eyesores and their ugliness is reflected in their treatment. There is no desire to upkeep them and many fall into disrepair. Trash and litter are often a feature, as well as drunks and drug addicts sleeping in its crevices. The most colorful parts about them are the graffiti on their walls.
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Things without an identity can have that filled in by anyone who wants to take advantage. They can be demoralized and their need for a direction manipulated.
Beauty is inspirational. It gives direction, causes self-reflection, and can tame wildness. Witnessing beauty has the side effect of causing personal growth. It develops taste and develops one’s personality. It creates identity and characteristics, not just in its landscape but in the people who see it and live around it.
All of these are dangerous traits to a person or people with authoritarian whims. Beauty is worth fighting for and the last thing an authoritarian entity would want is for people to fight them. So stripping them of beauty and encouraging ugliness makes people easier to dominate and direct.
Read: Why Does the Radical Left Hate Beauty?
One of the most attacked forms of beauty is feminine beauty. In the modern age, conventional attractiveness in women is considered to be something close to taboo. There have been a myriad of attempts to rewrite what "beauty" is in modern culture, from calling transgender people "beautiful" no matter how hideous they look to "beautiful at any size"; mainstream culture has done everything it can to avoid calling conventional beauty "beauty."
But there is objective beauty, despite mainstream tastemakers' attempts to pretend like it doesn't exist.
One thing that's been clear is that we've been seeing a sort of return to sanity in the culture, and you can see this in many ways; however, conventional beauty for women has been one of the last holdouts.
Read: Beauty Trends Change, but Ugly Will Never Be Beauty
This is seemingly changing as well, and if you want a great indication that woke is losing ground, you can look to the video game industry. It's here that one of the largest battles over beauty has taken place in a very public-facing way.
In fact, it's been so public-facing that it's cost developers and publishers millions of dollars and covered an incredible amount of culture war territory. Western game studios have become so well-known for actually uglifying characters, even when the models they base them on are quite beautiful, that it's become a meme.
The feminists and leftists of the West are so obsessed with making sure attractive women never see the light of day in video games that when Eastern developers release a protagonist who has any attractive qualities, they lose their minds.
Read: Women and Girls Are the Most Targeted People in the Culture War
One game, in particular, has been at the center of this display of "un-beauty." It's the upcoming game "Fable," a sort of reboot of a classic game from the original Xbox era. For ages, the game's frontwoman has been someone who has been called "average," but if we're being completely honest, there's nothing average about this protagonist. She looks like the typical Gen Z woke artist's avoidance of beauty in almost every way, down to the masculine mannerisms.
The character has been fronting the game since its announcement, and it prompted a mass backlash. Of course, the complaint that modernity had, once again, crept into another game was met with the typical "gamers are sexist pigs" argument, and that misses the point. This wasn't just a complaint about a beautiful woman; it was a complaint that, once again, we're getting an ideology shoved into our face that was never asked for or wanted in the first place.
This ideology calls men all sorts of names just for appreciating feminine beauty, and this character was a finger-wag just as much as it was an attempt to bend cultural standards. It was a wordless lecture.
Then, fast-forward to today, and suddenly the marketing that had focused so hard on this "woman" disappears, and we get a new frontwoman.
Fable has shared a new gameplay teaser clip ahead of Gamescom.
— Pirat_Nation 🔴 (@Pirat_Nation) August 23, 2026
Apparently, they have changed the face of the female character from the first trailers making her more appealing, looks like Asha has listened the complaints of fans pic.twitter.com/m5YpcES1gz
Now, this could be a marketing strategy to try to win back the fans who said they weren't playing the game because of this ideological intrusion, and if so... then it's a good move, but it signals something else.
A year ago, this wouldn't have been allowed in any capacity. The marketing team wouldn't have dreamed of doing something so sinister and wrong as showing an attractive woman. The thing is, the culture shifted. The old Xbox CEO was pushed out, and a new one has come in, one who said she'd listen to player feedback.
I guess she did, because now we have a beautiful woman in a game that rejected beauty consistently and openly.
This seems like a small thing, but trust me, it's a big deal. The cultural tide has turned so much that one of the most woke corporations just displayed a beautiful woman for the purposes of marketing a game from a woke developer. The "chuds," as they call us, have won again.
