Guild Wars 2′s Sexy Spooky Witch

Kept especially for Halloween, my redesign of witch’s outfit from Guild Wars 2 (human version). 

So, what does the original give us? Amazingly washed out monochromatic color palette, generic witch hat, bare thighs and shoulders, majorly over-designed bone ornamentation that looks super stabby (not to mention, frames her boobs)… and, of course, male version which looks nothing alike


After covering the gratuitous bare skin parts with poofy pants and sleeves, I decided to stick to two priorities: 

  • Make her color scheme more balanced (original, especially model sheet version I found on GW2 Wiki, is basically all just one shade of emerald!). Hope that dark teal, moss green and ebony compliment each other better when not so washed out.
  • Turn those needless small ornamental shapes into bigger, less distracting and less likely to stab her if she leans down. Obviously most of what was on her chest had to go in favor of something that doesn’t focus on the bebws.

All the actual design details and shapes were mostly incidental, as I was changing everything as I moved along, over two or three separate streaming sessions. 

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I guess I could have gone the path of what we did to Saint Seiya Online and change the lady’s design to that of her spooky (warlock? lich?) skeleton male version, but I don’t like his design either, just for reasons different than overt sexism.
His bone motif is somehow even more overdone than hers (three little skulls on chest, one on right arm, another one on his… crotch?) and there’s the vague “witch doctor” vibe to him that puts this in exotification category. 

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I decided to go with the traditional sexified male armor path of stripping him down to as little clothing as possible without changing the silhouette. And gave him face skin, because if lady witch doesn’t have a skull head, why should he?

Also made that weirdly suggestive crotch skull actually frame his package with its scary jaw, because we would never miss such opportunity.

~Ozzie

Tidy Up Tuesday #84

You might have noticed that lately, especially two weeks ago, we neglected to post on our regular schedule. Some personal issues fell on us and took more attention than we could spare for the blog. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep the queue going now. 


Unfortunately though, our schedules still do not permit to come back to weekly redesign streams. If anything about that changes, we’ll announce it as soon as possible! 


We’re currently reviewing our approach to posts of sexy male armor that are essentially gender flips/bends.  It’s a complicated topic and we certainly agreed that there’s a very, very wrong way to gender bend a character – so we’ll be looking at the best way to handle it going forward.


Things we addressed before:


Related to the above, please, before

submitting, messaging or tagging us

use search function to check if we posted on your subject matter already. 

We’re grateful for all submissions, messages and mentions BABD gets from readers, however the amount of repeats we’re sent makes it exponentially harder to sift through all of them and preparing posts with new topics. 


~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

Elvenar continues to be the kind of game with very standard, unsexy strategy gameplay and completely unrelated marketing imagery that is basically Fantasy Porn™ (read: standard for web ads). 

And this is the sort of design that amazes me. The kind that covers over half of the Female Armor Bingo card, but doesn’t manage to score a single row. All while not being a full body image. We can only assume whether it would score high heels and/or thigh-high boots if we saw more of this poor poor lady. 

~Ozzie 

That is very uncomfortable-looking bondage clothing

– Icy 

Marking it as sensitive, just in case.

signalacoustic:

theclawedking:

francisxie:

filling up more rule 63 request!

mystique & emma frost~

Daken approves of this bold new character choice 

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

Another venture into the world of sexy gender-swapped superheroines and villainesses! Somehow, for some reason, never a type of design choice made in canon with characters who are male in-story… ζ༼Ɵ͆ل͜Ɵ͆༽ᶘ
Just imagine Gambit or Nightcrawler being this fashionable! 

Funny, because Emma Frost in particular is second only to Bayonetta among (dubious) examples that are thrown our way as a female character expressing her sexuality “done right”. Yet other than fans turning her into a dude, there’s no direct male equivalent to her brand of sexy empowerment.

~Ozzie

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

dr-archeville:

pixiebutterandjelly:

I literally just read somebody suggesting that the “iron man” in all new all differen avengers van’t be pepper potts because the armor has no boobs….what ._.

But Rose, how can fans possibly believe it’s a G I R L in there if the suit doesn’t have BIG IRON TITTIES?! [/sarcasm]

In case anyone wondered what All-New All-Different Avengers is:

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Regardless of who this particular Iron Man is supposed to be, Pepper Potts rocks the boobless Iron Man suit just fine. Ask Stjepan Sejic (seems this artwork was deleted from dA. Here’s it’s archive.com copy).

~Ozzie

People really need to stop playing their faith in boobcups. They’re not necessary if you have boobs, and by now everyone should know that the boobplate does not guarantee boobs underneath:

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– wincenworks

more on Iron Boobs | more on boobplates

edit: found another post about gendering Iron Man’s suit!

Throwing this back as a friendly reminder that boobs on armor are neither in any way necessary for a female wearer, nor are they a warrant of feminine body inside said armor. 

Sadly, still a point that needs reiterating. 

~Ozzie 

Gotta Fix Everyone’s Weird Boob “Armor”

I was frustrated with how Marvel’s Valkyrie was just a sequence of weird design decisions. This particular version ticked me off because they had the cool cuirass with the abs, but then the chafing and the metal boob cones…. ugh.

I started with fixing that chest armor: getting rid of the weird metal bra and adding cool (to me, anyway) shoulder guards. I wanted to give her a more powerful look. I added some small dangling leather straps to mirror those on her belt.

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When it was time to fix her…. boots? I took the liberty of, at the same time, painting over poor Hel’s painful-looking <biggest air-quotes ever> “armor.” I actually started giving her a more reasonable breastplate but gave up. That would be a project all on its own.

Those leg ropes seemed very stupid to me, and they didn’t go with the rest of the design, so I gave her plate armor that kept the small shapes. I then gave her simple pants to be the large shape in the design. In hindsight, I feel like I should have gone through with the metal gauntlets I wanted to give her but bailed on.

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Finally, I replaced her Generic Pout™ with a more determined expression. Now both ladies can go forth and fight whoever it is they’re fighting. 

-Icy

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

The tragic evolution of Sophitia’s costume (source unknown). Fortunately Sophitia was spared the indignity of whatever Soul Calibur V would have inflicted upon her.

Hard to believe that Soul Calibur IV was also the game that introduced us to Hilde Von Krone, badass beyond compare. (image from IGN’s Positive Women in Fighting):

(More images here)

I don’t understand… is there like an in house limit of how many female characters can be taken seriously per game?  Or is the prophecy real?

– wincenworks

This week’s throwback, as the followup to Tira bingo, is the gradual downfall of Sophitia’s character design in Soul Calibur. 

Saddest part (beside Hilde being an easy proof that SC can do female warriors well if they want to) is that this is by far probably least absurd and demeaning female costume change out of many in the franchise. 

Remember when Taki exchanged her titninja full body condom for this… thing by Mari “Bayonetta isn’t sexist because a woman designed her” Shimazaki? Or almost anything Ivy wore after this? Yeah, they can and do get worse.

~Ozzie