Setting aside the objectively terribad costume, maybe if it was just a screenshot I could believe that this is supposed to be a dynamic fighting stance… But having this be a figure that can be ogled from every angle, I know we’re supposed to always land our eyes on her crotch and/or underboob. That pose looks so borderline porny that I can’t help but be reminded of Greg Land’s drawings literally traced from adult movies and magazines:
So, 2018 has come and gone. Sadly but unsurprisingly, the skimpy female armor and the high level variant did not die as a commonplace trope. Oh well… maybe 2019 will be the year free of bikini armor! Let’s ask the magic eight-ball…
But you know what popular media? I dare you to make a fool of me.
All you have to do is go a year without ridiculous female armor… that should be easy right?
– wincenworks
Posted on
Uprooting the Sexy Flower Warriors
[We’re not sure how a draft gets posted without our permission, but Tumblr might as well start collapsing from all sides at this point. Here’s the actual full post!]
This dominatrix-looking lady apparently “evolved” by exchanging a short dress and no pants for short pants and two ribbons. Her previous form, for comparison:
Looking for inspiration, I just googled “fritillaria” and I learned that in Polish we call this kind of lily a “chessboard flower”, for pretty obvious reasons, once you look at its petals:
I decided that though this character seems based different species, fritillaria camschatcensis (there was no info on her being “chocolate lily” back then), fritillaria meleagris is much more striking visually, so I included its colors and chessboard pattern in my redesign. She doesn’t resemble her actual flower in the first place anyway.
While the costume is amazingly skimpy and objectifying (especially that excuse for a “bra”), it’s not without a potential. There’s promising metal cincher, which I decided to enlarge and turn into full breastplate, and she comes with POOFY PANTS, a staple of BABD redesign streams, which I adorned with tassets that compliment their shape and match the breastplate.
I got rid
of her long-ass pigtails and of all the action lines, which collectively made the composition more chaotic than dynamic. Minor thing that bothered me was her sword being stuck in the ground for some reason instead of fastened to her belt, so I quickly fixed that too. The final touch were, of course, sleeves and tights with purple chessboard pattern, which tie the whole thing together.
I found the abundance of fleur-de-lis symbols on her to be hilariously excessive, to the point I erased all of them during the stream. After some deliberation I figured that maybe the one on her hat fits, so I just muted its color, because magenta doesn’t fit the new scheme I gave her.
All in all, I find Fritillaria to be one of my most inspired redesigns, which makes me doubly disappointed in her creators, considering they could have just googled a flower photo to get some non-boring ideas.
Love how she’s apparently Maple by the fact that she has some maple leaf hair clips and a bit of a maple leaf pattern on one small part of her mini skirt. So for this one, I channeled my inner Blizzard character artist, in that I wanted to way overdo the whole maple leaf theme. (I used samurai armor as reference.)
I ended up redoing almost her entire torso, since I needed to give her an actual breastplate, instead of… I guess it’s a crop top camisole? (Do those exist?) Then I gave her actual kusazuri (the plates hanging down her legs), and made them maple leaf shaped!
I did give her a less traditional chest piece, but there are so many small shapes in the design that we needed the main armor pieces to be bigger, I think. I did break it up with a huge maple leaf on it though.
I also hated everything about her face and hair, so I gave her a more traditional hairstyle to match her more determined expression. There were also a lot of smaller edits, like flipping her foot around so she’s not standing as awkwardly, and adding some volume and muscle to her sword arm.
And finally, I added a few more small maple leafs to her “skirt,” to really reinforce that maple leaf theme. I’d hate for people to miss it. Though, honestly, after finishing this redesign, I think she should just wear a maple leaf costume.
