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De-failing League of Angels Part 2: The Angel of my Personal Hell

You’d think I would have learned my lesson, regarding picking The Worst Things for redesigns, but not before I had to fix this!! I didn’t even have alcohol to keep me company while I worked on it.

I’ll start by briefly noting that every redesigned element, besides the face, took up to 4 tries to figure out, just in terms of shapes alone! I wanted to keep certain elements from the original, such as that belt motif, so I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what the hell I could do with them. At least one ended up in a weird place.

I will also say that while working on this piece, I decided that this character feels more like an agender rather than a woman angel, so they’re agender now. On that note, let’s begin with what I loved working on the most: the face. I made the eyebrows and nose more interesting, made the makeup more gender-neutral, and changed the palette. Definitely one of my favorite and least painful edits.

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After doing that… I just changed everything else about the design! Oh, except I did keep the foorwear and the arms. The under-boobs belt became a breastplate, with the crotch armor (?) belt thing incorporated into it. The cloth thingie hanging off the crotch armor (?) got moved up to probably be part of some shirt under the breastplate.

Everything besides that is me exercising my painting and suffering skills, so y’all better appreciate it. I decided to go with some gambeson for the legs, instead of our regular poofy pants, because the cloth thingie was conflicting with the poof. I added black pants and a similar undershirt visible in the armpit to tie the design to the background a bit. Also, I needed another color besides light grey, sky blue, and white. The original palette is pretty limited when you’re not distracted by the tiddy.

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My rendering skills are obviously not as good as the artist for the original, but I tried (Oh my God, did I try). And I do believe that at least in the design aspect, my reworking is an improvement.

Bonus closeup of the breastplate because it sucked to work on.

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-Icy

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pressfirmlytoclose:

When Samus was in armor, guys respected her (and even said they wanted her armor). But girls didn’t give a damn. They still don’t give a damn about her in armor, whenever I see fanart of it, the artist is almost always a guy. But now that Nintendo is pushing her as a big-breasted latex model with a nice butt, fangirls are drawing her, saying they idolize her and want to be her (and saying they want her SHOES). Care to weigh in on what’s up with that?

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

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So… since I haven’t heard anything like this… I went and asked one of my gamer friends who happens to be a woman what she thought. Here’s how she started her response:

“Please provide sources, if you’re going to attempt to tar girls with the same brush that is clearly lubricated by entitled male gamer tears, then you must provide the burden of proof.”

From there the rage intensifies and it gets kinda nerdy, so I shall just share the highlights:

“You’re referencing art of ZERO SUIT Samus, which rose to popularity with Super Smash Bros, which has targeted a younger demographic.  It’s become commonplace to see Samus OUT of her suit rather than in it, despite it being an iconic image of Metroid. Back in itty bitty pixels, we saw as a bonus at the end of a game that Samus was a girl, thats it.”

“If they’d spent any time actually IN the gaming community of tumblr … then they’d be aware that the community ISN’T vocal in favour of Samus’ new look”

“She’s 6 foot 3 too, mind you, and weighs 90kg. The recent sexualisation/slimming of Samus is a move on NINTENDO’S part, not the gamer fangirl base.”

 So to make sure this wasn’t a one off, I asked another friend:

“Firstly, Dudebro McFedora, you have no basis to say that women don’t like Samus.  The odds are that you’ve probably never talked to a girl that’s played the games.”

From there the rage intensifies – so I will just share some of the highlights:

“I will say that I particularly want her shoes. They’re spark shooting death heels  to beat up people.  It’s wonderful; who wouldn’t want that?

They are not appropriate for SSB though BECAUSE THEY’RE FUCKING PUMPS.  You can’t run around in that shit!”

“Samus in her armor is fantastic because it creates this unique position where anyone can play her and entitled ‘macho boiz’ never think to say, “Oh shit I don’t want to play as the girl” or “Sweet, the girl character is fucking hot.””

“Samus Aran is my role model.”

Also, I seem to recall seeing amazing fan art by women:

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And amazing cosplays:

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This is not to say there aren’t female gamers who only discovered Samus when they announced her high heels of doom, female gamers who really want to cosplay Samus in heels because they’ll look cute and sexy or female gamers who like the Zero Suit better than the armors for other reasons.

I say this theoretically because I did look to try to find some of them, and between quick searches for them and searches to find choice examples of art and cosplays… I didn’t find a single woman who suggested that she only became interested in Samus due to the Jet Boot heels.

So if you have come across women who only got into Samus due to the high heels, it’s still quite ridiculous to decide those particular women are somehow representative of women or female gamers as a whole.  Particularly since the character first appeared in 1986 – so has had quite a while to grow a diverse fan base.

Trying to dismiss and/or erase huge numbers of female fans just so that you can try to pretend gender stereotypes are facts is pretty much the reason why the rage intensified. 

– wincenworks

Fan Artworks:

Cosplays

Bringing this old ask post back, because I couldn’t help but be reminded of it while browsing through other people’s reblogs of the Kitana/Jade redesign post. 

The “Girls didn’t give a shit about Samus before she became sexy and therefore cosplayable!” rhetoric makes just as much sense as “Women in Mortal Kombat are floss-bikini titninjas because it’s the female power fantasy and the cosplayers want that!”, which seems to be the go-to contrarian reaction to Brendan George’s slightly less misogynistic art direction in Mortal Kombat 11. 

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[image related to a Soul Calibur, not Mortal Kombat, character, but the “argument” is literally the same] 

Once again, all the props to @wincenworks​’ friends for how eloquently they described the nonsense of the asker’s (and, by proxy, all the other Dudebros McFedora’s) “logic”. 

TL;DR: People who obviously never spoke with any woman sure do feel the most eager to mansplain what women really want from female video game characters. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 

~Ozzie 

notice: This is a reposting of this throwback, due to Tumblr queue being a total goober and initially publishing the Throwback Thursday post on Wednesday. 

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De-failing League of Angels Part 1: Stabby leather lingerie

Apparently we felt like taking a challenge the day we made those edits, because, well, it’s League of Angels, the epitome of creative bankruptcy in video game marketing. 

What I decided to redesign was this extra-stabby leather… um… outfit that I bingo’d before. 

After the initial shock of how uncomfortable that “armor” must be, the literally biggest thing that caught my attention in this artwork were her thighs. HOW FREAKING HUGE ARE THEY IN PROPORTION TO THE REST OF THE BODY? Unfortunately this seemed mostly like an epic fail at foreshortening rather than an attempt at ‘thicc’ fetish, let alone at earnest fat representation… So I decided to reverse that. 

Instead of shrinking the thighs to give her conventionally attractive model proportions, I readjusted the rest of the body to fit them, resulting in a chubbier figure.

Her arms now have some heft and her head isn’t tiny anymore.
Though most important changes went into the torso, which now has a human-sized waist and connects to other body parts at humanly possible angles, instead of those of a Tetris puzzle. 

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I am very satisfied with what I managed to do with that shameless boobplate. The idea was to still have it be a breast-oriented armor without making it look like two coconut halves with extra-emphasis on cleavage, and while retaining as much of the original’s decorative aesthetic. Basically a more sophisticated attempt at what I did with Regime Wonder Woman waaay back. 

I also slightly reshaped the stabby laced leather part under it, because it looked cool enough… just not on bare skin. Speaking of which, of course there was no way I left this poor woman with no padding, so in place of all this pale skin I painted white gambeson, retaining the original color scheme. She also now has full leather pants, because why wouldn’t she? 

All in all, I think I managed to improve this image significantly. Not all edits are seamless, but I’m quite proud of the way they came out. How do you guys like it? 

~Ozzie 

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Argos – Clothing & uniforms, by Remy Paul

What’s this? Organizational uniforms that are not illogically altered for the women to be hot? The exploration suit even gives both the women and the men a slight heel, probably for that much-needed rocket boost. 

I am sad that the bridge crew lady gets tights instead of pants, and the artist is definitely hit-and-miss when it comes to their lady characters, but I still like these designs overall. The iron legion is, of course, my favorite. I just can’t say ‘no’ to a woman in combat boots and a gas mask.

-Icy

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Okay, so I know what you’re thinking – this game that is named uncomfortably close to the female wing of the Hitler Youth but is probably aimed to capitalize on League of Angels is clearly just a cheap porn game right?

Well, based off the visuals yes… but if you were were using a screen reader you’d be forgiven for understanding it was going to be an action orientated first/third person shooter (though according to the Twitter it’s a superheroine game, and the Steam “mature content” screen says battle arena) and even though the game isn’t out their site advertises:

That and well, this is not the first time it’s appeared on BABD… in fact it’s got a little bit of a history – but it’s still not out yet.  The actual core product itself is not for sale two and a half years later.  It’s like the opposite of asset flips and shovelware yet somehow worse.

Of course, the last patch to the game was over a year ago but apparently it’s coming soon to steam and was high up on the “female protagonist” tag search.

So glad that Steam doesn’t see the need to do any manual curating. 

– wincenworks

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DC Supersexy Boys Part 2 – J’onn J’onzz

Even though J’onn the Martian is shirtless in Injustice (and other media), I still wanted to redraw him. I’ll admit that he was a childhood crush of mine, back when the animated Justice League was on TV. I was disappointed to see this version of him, which was clearly not designed to appeal to people who liked his soft-spoken nature. So I decided to fix this missed opportunity.

A lot of the changes were textural: I made his skin smoother in a lot of places (decided to go hairless for this one, since he’s a Martian and all), and I actually made his muscles less pronounced. J’onn is a lithe, agile man, after all.

Beyond that, the significant changes were his pants area, and his face. (And of course, the cleavage window that I decided to add last-minute.)

I took away his stifling pants (where are his booty shorts??) and gave him a semi-transparent loincloth, as I’m wont to do. I figured, for this More Mature J’onn, maybe he wants to know what it’s like to have hanging bits? That’s what being more “mature” and “realistic” means, right?

As for his face, I wanted to recapture that animated Justice League look. I got rid of his cartoony Scowl of Doom, and instead gave him smooth, pleasant features. I decided to give him a cute blush at the last minute, too. Even Martians blush.

I do hope that other J’onn fans enjoy this redesign as much as I enjoyed working on it.

-Icy