This “girly” TikTok creator is redefining gaming through the female gaze

destructoid.com:

I am someone who identifies as a very girly gamer. So much so, in fact, that my TikTok algorithm figured this out pretty quickly, which means my For You page is full of creators who share similar interests to my own, which usually equates to looking cute and playing video games. One of them happens to be a girly gaming creator named Navami Nethravathy, who goes by @pinkjusitsu on the app.

My favorite series she does is called “The Yassification of Gaming,” the premise of which is to show femininely-presenting gamers how they can play games in a “girly” way. The term “yassification,” like most popular slang these days, came from LGBTQ+ spaces dating back to the drag ball scene in the 1980s, and specifically from people of color. It derives from the simple term “yas,” which is a way of expressing overwhelming approval of something – having to describe it like this makes me uncomfortable in the way of having to explain why a joke is funny, but I digress.

Yassification, then, takes this a step further, and thanks to Urban Dictionary, is defined as, “the process of making something substantially better than its original version, or of having something appear to be significantly better than its similar or comparable predecessor.” The meme swept Twitter last November, filling our timelines with pictures of historical figures and fictional characters sporting new hairdos and full faces of virtual makeup that were created in FaceApp.

An example of a “yassification” relevant to the gaming scene is the viral image of a before and after of someone putting makeup on Aloy from the Horizon series to bemoan the crime of the developers not making her pretty enough. A key difference here is that the original poster of the image was