The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Tag: babd
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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
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.
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]
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:
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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Heroes of Newerth’s Boudica Legionnaire Cleavage Johnson
This redesign happened on a day of very annoying technical difficulties. Since my computer was refusing to cooperate, I ended up reaching for some easy fix material to Heroes of Newerth, a game prominent for its creative bankruptcy. HoN’s image gallery is our emergency stash of subjects for bingos and/or streams.
This boobtastic, vaguely-Pict lady looked so amazingly generic that we didn’t care to look up whether she’s an actual named character (apparently she’s supposed to be queen Boudica’s legionnaire). Instead, we dubbed her Cleavage Johnson and I proceeded to fix her namesake.
All it did to make her look like a somewhat competent warrior was to cover her cleavage and belly (while making her armor not-boobplate and adding a bit of girth to her improbable waist), then giving her kilt a couple more inches and getting rid of its shmexy thigh cutout.
Frankly, while the changes were deliberately small and easy to do, I think just that little made her silhouette stand out from the background a bit more. Amazingly, bare skin and meaningless tribal tattoos* somehow didn’t prevent her from blending with the environment.
Thing I notice about Soul Calibur is that with every installment of the franchise new costume designs are introduced for established characters and they usually go the pretty straightforward path of de-evolution (see Sophitia as an example and keep in mind she’s far from the worst).
We already devoted a couple of bingos and stream redesigns to them, but with the SC’s momentum leading up to the prophecy, we will probably never catch up completely to every awful version of every female character in the games.