Marvel Rivals' blonde female heroes all look the same – fans call it a character design fail

There's a fight brewing in Marvel Rivals – and I'm not talking about the comic book heroes squaring off against Marvel's supervillains. No, the real showdown is happening online, where fans are side-eyeing the suspiciously similar design of the game's famous blonde female characters.

We're used to artists taking on and adapting Marvel characters to their style, read my interview with Stanley 'Artgerm' Lau for how this can be done, but the blonde female characters in Marvel Rivals – including Invisible Woman, Dagger and Emma Frost – all do, kind of, look the same, and fans aren't happy.

Marvel Rivals is a super-popular superhero online shooter in the style of Overwatch; it's vibrant, fast-paced and, to date, fans have loved the hero design. But after the recent addition of Emma Frost, fans have taken a closer look at the character roster and noticed something odd – every blonde character looks the same, as if she were made with a base template and then tweaked.

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Marvel Rivals as a character design problem

The main culprits appear to be Dagger, Invisible Woman and Emma Frost, but fans are also adding Captain Marvel and Gwen Stacy into the mix to suggest Marvel Rivals has a blonde white girl problem. Each character has the same heart-shaped face, delicate nose, pouty lips and tussled, wavy blonde hair. The dev team certainly has a 'type'. But fans are saying, from a character design view, it feels like a overuse of Ctrl+C, Ctril+V.

Good character design, even when adapting a famous or predefined character, should be about putting the personality front and centre, so players and fans can see, at glance, who the hero is and what they stand for. But in Marvel Rivals, is feels like any sense of individuality is being massaged away in favour of a popular but ultimately similar look.

This could be because Marvel Rivals really hit it big with its character designs for Gwen Stacy and Invisible Woman, and the art team has doubled down (free-to-play games like this can be cynically designed by data).

It's not only dedicated comic fans who are noticing the similarities, Marvel Rivals fans have taken to social media to post side-by-side galleries of the three blondes at the heart of the debate. X user Enchandted write, "No hate (I'm hating) but damn they really made 3 characters that look the same".

Sure, it does feel like the dev team at Marvel Rivals has discovered 'generic blonde DLC generator' and fans are just going to have to put up with being served similar heroes.

Stylisation too far?

To be fare to Marvel Rivals art team, the game has defined style and it's proven incredibly popular, and within that style there's likely little space to manoeuvre to make each new character truly distinct. That, and the dev team know which Marvel characters their fans are going to love and, well… they happen to be busty, slim blonde females.

Marvel Rivals is a huge hit, at its peak the game has had 644,269 players on Steam, so it's doing okay and has a formula. But if Marvel Rivals wants to win over casual and diehard comic fans, especially legacy Marvel fans, it will need to address this character design problem. Right now the game's blondes are blurring together and no one seems happy.

Here's just some of the social media criticism:

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What do think of Marvel Rivals female character design? Let us know in the comments below.