An artist replaced the men in these classic Westerns with women. The images are awesome.

An artist replaced the men in these classic Westerns with women. The images are awesome.

Cowboys outfits rarely get thought of as “armor”, since they’re usually just very durable and/or decorated clothes of a particular era – yet somehow so many depictions of women in this genre go so, so wrong:

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Which is why I’m grateful for this series, which pretty faithfully recreated all manner costumes ranging from the flamboyant to the ultra-pragmatic.

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– wincenworks

That equal opportunity fan redesign of one Saint Seiya Online armor we reblogged on Friday made us look up more double standard armors from that game… and let’s say we won’t be running out of potential Female Armor Bingo material for some time. 

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This thing really aimed for the stars with all the shamelessly applied bikini armor tropes. I don’t think we got so much of the bingo card cleared in a while! 

Also “nice” bonus of how even when a guy on the model sheets get a pose with more personality, like this one, the lady’s pose still is some variation of “Come play, my lord!”.

~Ozzie

No stream this week, sorry!

Oh my god! The mods actually have weekend plans???

Since Ozzie has people things to do on Saturday, and Icy needs to ready her body to stare at the Sun, this week’s livestream is cancelled. 

Hopefully we’ll be back next week!

Sorry again!

~Ozzie & Icy

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

mapleflavoreddice:

“He knows how to design female armour because he spent years studying corsetry and lingerie.”

Me:

The scariest part of this is that so many of these concept artists who seem to “study” corsetry lingerie tend to overlook some basic details about the universal design principles:

  • Boobs are not excluded from physics, especially gravity
  • Lingerie is not generally held on by superglue
  • Women need to breathe and need internal organs
  • Different materials have different qualities, you can’t swap out silk or soft leather for steel in… sensitive areas

So yeah… horrifying as it is, studying corsetry and lingerie would actually be a step forward in many cases.

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– wincenworks

We still can not emphasize enough that overall quality of costume and character design in pop media would increase if the artists actually studied corsetry and lingerie instead of just looking at lots and lots and lots of examples, starting at puberty, as our commenter put it

Relevant reference to the topic:

Still, please remember that very little of that would help with designing actual armor, which is a whole another layer of costume and should be treated seriously on its own.

~Ozzie

I can definitely think of a few designs we’ve featured on this blog that could benefit from someone with actual knowledge of corsetry and lingerie. And that’s just off the recent first page of our Bikini Armor Bingo tag!

This is impressive in the saddest way.

-Icy

Robots, Gender Roles, and You.

cataphoriccatastrophe:

myriadofnocturnes:

Howdy folks, Myriad of Nocturnes here. I’m thinking of starting a series of posts where I bitch about shit that really grinds my proverbial gears. So, being the bonafide robot lover that I am, I thought I’d start us off with something that really just seems lazy to me. 

Robots, Gender Roles, and You. 

Credential wise, I’m a Transformers fan, Gundam fan, and fan of pretty much every robot focused franchise you could care to name. I love pretty much every sort of robot design, but there is one in particular that really annoys me. 

You’ve all seen the content, i’m sure. A big, hulking inhuman (but masculine coded) robot with all sorts of deadly implements of war, death, and what have you….who shares a setting with a robot with ‘feminine’ coding who looks like a shrink wrapped supermodel. 

It’s cowardly, if you ask me. People feel the need to assign some sort of humanity to their robot, rather than allowing it to be a robot. Why does your robot have to conform to hetero-normative gender roles? Why are all of your lady robots running around looking like human women with fancy helmets? Why does a robot have to act in a manner consistent with the way people act? 

Ya’ll often share posts about making monster girls more monstrous. I just passed one today that called for people to give their orc women fangs, tusks, scars, and muscles. 

I say let your robots of any gender coding have multiple arms, inhuman features, and alien thought processes. Be creative! Let your robot be any gender it desires. If you want your robot to be feminine in some manner, let it, but don’t show us that it’s feminine by giving it big anime titties. 

That’s just lazy.

@bikiniarmorbattledamage Seems relevant even though you usually don’t do robots.

We talk a lot about suspicious dimorphism among design of living creatures, but when this trope regards robots, it’s a special case. There’s no “they’re just naturally like that” Thermian argument to juggle. Instead, there might be the “Don’t blame us for how that fictional robot looks, blame its equally fictional creator!” variation of the agency argument.

@femfreq has an old episode regarding the inherent sociological problem with sexualizing female-coded robots: 

The video focuses exclusively on gynoids in advertising, so doesn’t really touch on the even bigger problem in various science fiction and similar media.

Popular media tends to assume a robot, an artificial (not always sentient) being should either be coded male or assumed male in absence of gender signifiers. A female-coded robot is generally requires a “good” justification to look like a lady – usually some combination of being seen as subservient, providing fanservice or the Smurfette Principle. 
Thus making them look feminine is a bigger priority than taking advantage of the fact that robots can look like whatever – that privilege is reserved to machines which are male by default.

That leads me to quite a bold conclusion that Orisa is by far the best female playable character design in Overwatch – bearing very little gender signifiers (particularly compared to all the human women in the game) and having silhouette that is both very bulky and not entirely humanoid.

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Now only if Blizzard applied the same priorities of defying the Law of Disparate Stylization to humans as they did to Omnics…

~Ozzie

Tidy Up Tuesday #69

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Long post this time around as there’s a few issues:


If you know female developers working on indie games and incorporating bikini armor or similar tropes is to, at the appropriate opportunity express your concerns as concerns for their production – and let them decide on how important it is to them.

If they’re interested that’s great, if not, then it is very unlikely that their production will have a profound impact on the market and she could very well have her own personal reasons for it.  Personal projects are just that, personal.


However, if you are creating a game or similar production and you want to make it as accessible and welcoming as possible to as wide an audience as possible then we recommend researching the works of those talk about these things already.

And many others.  Also if your production is to feature someone from a marginalized background that is not your own and be prepared to pay them.  Consultants are generally not as expensive as you might think but can add massive value to your production.


In terms of actually working for a company in the industry and managing to be a positive influence, then that’s the very complicated balancing act of expressing yourself and respecting your employers. (If you work out how to master that, please tell me how).

But largely the best advice I can give if you happen to be in a company meeting is to be prepared to talk about ways they add or detract value to the production and be eager to show your working.  Example:

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These are some illustrations that Casper Konefal used to help get Cassandra Pentaghast’s unconventional look approved. (source, Casper’s ArtStation)


We are aware that the blog is apparently flagged as restricted/adult content by Tumblr… though because it’s Tumblr it’s still unclear what this does everywhere.


While we do realize that lack of helmet is often used for character identification and usually touches heroes of any gender – it is still can be (and is) used for reinforcing double standards. Therefore “No head protection” remains on the Female Armor Bingo, even if it doesn’t always delegitimize a female costume design.


Things we addressed before: 


– wincenworks,

~Ozzie

 & -Icy