Athena from Smite! All she’s wearing is some kind of dress thing with boob plates stuck to it somehow? Anyways, a goddess of war deserves more.
I don’t know what that tiddy armor is even supposed to protect. I was tempted to fix the amazon armor but honestly that would work better with Artemis than Athena.
We had some technical difficulties with our stream this weekend, fret not! We got a great SMITE goddess redesign right now.
This really is a lovely armor fix that actually uses the original’s shapes and motifs effectively! I like the breastplate and collar in particular. The headgear looks better as well, and I’m so glad her WoW-esque pauldron got shrunk to a reasonable size.
The only change I would make is to either give her a white tabbard or something else under the belt, just to break up the 2 different browns.
Even though we’ve featured @enecola on the blog before, I will continue to recommend that you check out their blog for more cool redesigns and original character designs~
-Icy
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Y’know, even if there wasn’t a single woman in all of history who had fought in war or a single example of real, historical female armor, there would be no problem in pointing out fantasy armor is unrealistic because the complaint is not based on what women DID wear but what women WOULD wear.
I think it perfectly sums up the basic flaw in the “women warriors aren’t historically accurate, so realism doesn’t matter when portraying them in media” kind of rhetoric.
Much like… most of the angry ranting we receive, the plea “not proven historically accurate” tends to ignore the key reason why “sex sells” doesn’t work.
In fiction, armor is a costume, and a costume is a statement about the wearer. It is the creator’s opportunity to tell the audience about the world, the society the wearer is from and the wearer of themselves.
If a creator’s most compelling message they can think of is “she’s got sexy bits” then not only is every female character going to be yet another addition to an already over saturated nonsensical trope.
However, if you decide to actually communicate some things like… what the armor is made from, what it’s supposed to protect against, what’s happened to it since it was made, or how the wearer would decorate it: you open up the doors to infinite possibilities.
Some of which may be heavily influenced and inspired by history.
Not gonna lie, after all the effort I put into Arhian, I picked an easy male material to work of. I used this official Poseidon design found on Hi-Rez’s artist’s ArtStation as a base. His left pec, abs and obliques were lovingly rendered already, so I made it my task to show off more of his muscular godly body. No big changes about his physique were needed, the costume and Poseidon’s attitude is what called for some modification.
What I landed on outfit-wise was, appropriately enough for the lord of the oceans, a mankini. Made out of metal and gemstones. The idea (which, I believe, Icy or some stream watcher might have suggested) was pretty brilliant solution to showcase more bare flesh while keeping the water theme.
His weirdly low-hanging belt buckle became a decorative codpiece. Gemstones and decorative spikes accentuate the nipples. Also I replaced strategic butt covering in his cape into a strategic butt display. Obviously, god of the sea has perfectly shaped and shiny bubble buttocks.
Last, small but crucial change was his expression. From an angry god who will kill you for looking at him wrong into a loving, kissable daddy.
Soft Poseidon cares about you.
~Ozzie
Vulcan
I wasn’t lucky enough to find a high-rez picture of Vulcan, but I decided to do the hot volcano-dwelling smithing god anyway. I removed most of his clothes, leaving only hotpants (for the hot god ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)) and a little bit of apron. It’s not like he needs protection from the furnace, he’s a god, after all. I gave him more of a wrestler body, since he’s a smith, as well as a nipple-framing suspender. But just the one.
I also made his prosthetic rounder, to match his soft, round body.
As for his face, I gave him a big, soft beard, a shy pout, and a long, smooth undercut suggested by someone during the stream (sorry I can’t remember who!). And the final touch was, of course, the curly hair on his chest and leg.
I was quite surprised to find people rushing to comment that a certain terrible screenshot was actually demonstrating destroyable armor (I guess if you already knew about it, and hence knew that her armor had been destroyed… so it doesn’t really help with marketing).
Now we have mentioned destroyable armor before… but maybe it’s best we do a little more talking on it since apparently it’s a thing that’s been sold as making sense. Surprisingly, the first appearance of this trope in video games (that I’m aware of) was inflicted up a male character.
A manly man named Arthur who was on a quest to save his love, Prince Prin Prin (actual name!), from a foe no less than Satan himself (who lives in Hades… just go with it! I promise nothing in the game will make any more sense than this summary. Nothing at all.)
While “soft” armors like kevlar weave and leather will become less protective over time they don’t fly apart for a very simple reason. Anything that hits your hard enough to dislodge armor from your person has hit you hard enough to kill you. Even the force to dislodge regular clothes by impact (rather than deliberate tearing off) will easily kill you in a most spectacular fashion!
Armor isn’t a car, it doesn’t have crumple zones. Your armor being blasted off you and you coming out relatively unscathed means that you are literally tougher and more resistant to damage of all sorts than your armor is.
Missing enamel/coloring, destroyed ornamentation, blood marks, changes in the silhouette on parts etc all convey that the armor is damaged and becoming less and less useful without also conveying that the actual point of the game is to try to see your character naked without them dying.
– wincenworks
A thing we didn’t reference in yesterday’s redesign post is that Kanpani Girls indulges in a very particular version of destroyable armor trope – creepy “defeated” sprites of humiliated waifus with their clothes and “armor” shred to pieces. I’ll put Flavie and Marica’s “defeated” looks under the cut for comparison with the previous post, because it’s genuinely disturbing.
So this week’s throwback is a reminder that there’s no reason to incorporate armor which suspiciously falls apart during (or after) a fight in fiction, especially on female characters. And people who do it have an obvious agenda to show off flesh, not battle damage, which could be easily conveyed in non-pervy ways.
That post about “attractive armor without bikini” actually left me wondering: why would you actually want an attractive armor? Sure, everyone loves an aesthethically pleasing armor, but we can’t just forget that armor is mostly made to be, well, intimidating. It’s supposed to make people both safer in combat and also more powerful. Not having to battle – because you look so threatening or even downright unbeatable – is some 40% of the purpose of an armor piece. Why does it need to be attractive?
But let’s set some things straight first: armor is done primarily to be protective. It sure helps if the design makes the wearer intimidating enough to make the opponents surrender right away, but at its core it was invented as a physical barrier between a person and whatever or whoever threatens their life or health.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for decorative armor in the history. Highly ornamented muscle cuirass (male equivalent of boobplate) was designed to impress and worn by high-standing officers during non-battle special occasions, like parades.
That said, in the world of fiction the distinction between purely functional and decorative armor is not necessary. It’s not real, and unless the setting of choice is gritty life-like naturalism, the armor (and any other design) needs just to be believable, not realistic. We commented on it before.
This is where those two bingo squares come in. Fictional worlds, especially the more fantastic ones, can be stylized, sometimes even to ridiculous degree, as long as all of the world is consistent with its level of stylization. That’s why it’s not inherently bad to have people fight monsters in G-strings… It just needs to all make sense within its own narrative and preferably not be gendered (which basically never happens).
Hope that answers it.
~Ozzie
Sometimes we make comments about how attractive a person looks in armor, because a lot of the time, their design is going for that. Unfortunately, the shorthand for that tends to be More Skin, High Heels, the usual offenders. But even if a character is designed to be attractive, that can be done without resorting to tired sexist tropes. And so we bring attention to it sometimes, when it’s done well.
Historically speaking, a lot of European plate armor was quite ugly from a design perspective, actually.
Look at that silhouette, the tiny shapes everywhere, that scarecrow head-adjacent helmet, those duck feet. Beautiful.
Compare that to any armor in Game of Thrones, which is functional, but is just so much nicer to look at.
As critics of art and design, we care more about seeing women’s designs being consistent (and good) in their universe, rather than having 100% Organic Free Range Realism. (Don’t worry though, we will continue to feature actual ladies in actual armor for positive examples.)
