Would not hold up in court, trust me
343 Industries makes Halo now and so 343 Industries needs a way to explain Halo‘s Cortana with respect to its own design, intent, and ambitions. Accordingly, Halo franchise director Frank O’Connor offered GamesRadar a new canon for why Cortana is naked (though not one for why she has been more and more busty, with wider hips, with each passing installment).
Turns out, she’s not naked, you fucking pervert! You just think she’s naked because she’s not wearing clothes and you’re a big ol’ horndog wrassling with your wild dick like Steve Irwin atop a croc, you sick fuck.
“She’s not really nude … but that’s what it makes you think of,” O’Connor said. “So one of the reasons she [chooses to appear without clothes] is to attract and demand attention. And she does it to put people off so that they’re on their guard when talking to her and she has the upper hand in those conversations.
It’s kind of almost like the opposite of that nightmare you have where you go to school in the nude. You’re terrified and embarrassed and she’s kind of projecting that back out to her audience and winning intellectual points as a result.”
Of course, this doesn’t jive with Bungie’s original Cortana. In 2003, Bungie artist Lorraine McLees explained:
“It seems that videogames studios are mainly made up of a bunch of guys, and the women in their games are perhaps portrayed in the way they themselves see women. Here, the same 3-D artist who wanted to not portray women as sex objects to be ogled and drooled over, coincidentally, modeled Konoko and Cortana. Never mind that Cortana was basically a naked hologram! For her action figure, it was important that she didn’t look too young, as she did in the game, so she became a little buxom. I’d requested her to not be as buxom, but somehow, the sculptor just didn’t want to make that change. We ran out of time, and there we go. [shrugs]”
And O’Connor knows 343 is just trying to make something up short of skin-breathing, “That’s not why she was designed like that,” he notes. “That’s how we’ve backed into our fiction. But that’s the conceit and that’s why she does it.”
Given Cortana’s ability to present in any way imaginable (like, clothed; or, a man, like most AI) and “her” weird mother/sex-figure relationship with the Chief, I imagine 343 had a tough time trying to back the nude, sexy space lady into its supposed gritty, serious, highbrow sci-fi lore, so of course this is ham-fisted, more excuse than explanation, but there you go. The sexy, busty, naked, obedient sci-fi woman is as thus because she’s actually tricking you, you uncontrollable horny toad.
Why is Cortana naked? Halo franchise director Frank O’Connor has an answer [GamesRadar]
