OriginalNon-Binary Presenting NipplesAnd if Tumblr doesn't like a nipple... PUT A BIRB ON IT!

Old Redesign Stwitcheroo Part 1

The last stream of 2018 was a special one – bringing back designs the other one fixed in the past and redoing them again… our own way! 

Blossom and the Sliding Scale of Furry Breast

As a person who created some faun-adjacent characters I felt personally offended with how Blossom from Battlerite is handled, particularly her body. Icy’s poncho idea was cute, but obscured all the interesting things about her half-deer nature, which I wanted to explore more in-depth. 

If her unwearable bikini top didn’t make it clear, her suspiciously furless torso was obviously delegated to be the “sexy” area of her body, reminding the players that women be sexy and, obviously, sexy and feminine = hairless (?)… Despite her legs and face being covered with brown fur. 

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I couldn’t erase that awful bra without deciding what to do with her breasts, so I settled on not only making this nature-loving character topless and furry, but also that a deer-person should not be endowed with human female breast tissue. Blossom is far enough on the animal-human scale to not have udders, but not far enough to have chest as a secondary sex characteristic.
Indeed, while drawing this redesign I concluded that the character reads as so androgynous that they should be non-binary in my version. 

As for clothes that remain, I replaced the ugly and vaguely thong-like

loincloth

with bright-colored skirt that matches their birb friend’s design. I also upped saturation on the jewelry, so it stands out better and matches both Maxwell’s plumage and Blossom’s optimistic personality. 

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Also looking at the image I chose made me realize how weirdly receded Blossom’s chin was from this angle. I gave them an actual jaw line and did some minor other edits to the face, adjusting proportions of the nose, position of the mouth and eye makeup (no more black mascara for a magical forest creature). 

Not sure if I gave them my all, especially in the costume department, but I’m pretty satisfied with how much difference even the subtlest changes to their body made.

~Ozzie 

PLACEHOLDER

BattleWrong – We’re sure that Joke hasn’t been done before! 

Battlerite’s a bit of a disappointment in its character design. They seem to have cool ideas (for the male characters and Iva), and their art style is cute and colorful… and yet. So why not try to fix some of their more uninspired designs?


Blossom

To be honest, my desire to redesign Blossom was from my deep-seated frustration with animal-looking characters having a humanoid body shape. Why couldn’t she just be like Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies? Just a deer that stands on her back legs, without breasts and a skinny waist and hips. I realize that she’s a “faun” according to the wiki, which means human/animal hybrid, but the fact that she has both hair and fur on her head/face makes it look like they just slapped some tits on an upright deer. Maybe they were going for something new, but boy did it not work.

I tried to give her more clothes at first, but then decided…. screw it. She’s a deer now. Why does she wear clothes? So in the end, I just gave her a simple poncho. I did want to show off her deer-ness, so I left her shoulders uncovered and gave her upper body some fur, so it’s not weird that she has the same on her face.

I also changed her face to be less Generic Cute Girl.

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After I finished the edits, we started making jokes about just Photoshopping a deer head on her instead, so I did that. Got some images of a deer and a birb off the internet, and so Blossom’s True Form came to be. (You can still see the lines from the stock image watermark.)

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[She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’ll throw an acorn at your face.]

The result is fairly simple and could probably use some embroidery or patches of different-colored cloth, and some people might say this was an easy cop-out on my part. But I just want her to be a deer, not a deer with boobs; is that too much to ask for?

-Icy


Freya 

Thing about Freya’s original design is that I don’t actually find it overall bad – the random bikini top that looks like coconut shells strapped to a choker is the only thing that ruins it.
As mentioned back when we bingo’d her pre-update design (with even worse, sideboob-y bikini top!), she looks pretty great from waist down. Also, while far from unique, her face shape is allowed to be a tiny bit more angular… when viewed from certain angles, at least. 

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(basically it’s Zarya level of safe approach to diversity in female facial features – still conveniently attractive and wears makeup, but allowed to have square-ish jawline, given that you tilt your head and squint)

But since I couldn’t spend 2 hours of stream only painting her a decent top, I decided to build upon what’s there and add some more actually distinct features.

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Of course, the boobplate had to go first. Since it bore some resemblance to Angela’s (coincidentally, also character associated with Norse mythology), I decided to base Freya’s new breastplate on my earlier Angela redesign. Also a blue tank top matching her bracer and tassets, for minimal layering. Left her shoulders bare, just gave them a tiny bit more heft. 

I approached tweaking her face to create a more believable character. No makeup (which, unfortunately made her blue eyes with orange eyebrows stand out less), more prominent freckles, bigger nose, more sunken cheeks… All to create an image of a warrior who’s more concerned with surviving battles than spending hours in front of the mirror. 

I’m rather pleased with the subtle changes to this design and my painting technique in this piece. Hope you guys like it too. 

~Ozzie 

PS: I didn’t know that while doing this redesign, but apparently some genius on Reddit, upon seeing slightly more boob coverage on Freya’s official updated design decided to “fix” her back to her original bikini. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ 

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Battlerite is a recent addition to the growing popular genre of “just fight people in multiplayer” games that continue to come forth with no end in sight.  Given the starter line up in this game, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to discover a large portion of their tag on Tumblr is Rule34.

What’s interesting about Battlerite, though, is that it only released on 8 November 2017, it already has two characters added (both female).

The first was Destiny.

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She was released with the first patch seemingly as some sort of afterthought that there may actually be people out there who wanted to play a female character who did not look like a child, was clearly recognizable as human, wasn’t in a hyper sexualized costume and appeared to turning up to the fight because was a warrior.

In December, they released Alysia… who looks kind of presentable from the waist up but has weird thigh highs. In her video she spends her time prancing and talking about being an artist.  I guess they’re trying to find a magic mix of objectification and actual good design.

It kind of makes you wonder whether someone in particular told them that hardly anyone wants actual badass warrior women or whether they just worried a certain demographic wouldn’t check out the game on opening day unless they were being pandered to.

tl;dr: Not only do they appear to be copying Smite’s core gameplay, they’re also copying their strategy regarding attempting to have their feminist cookie and gratuitous cheesecake too.

– wincenworks 

This game seems to go through some sort of visual identity crisis regarding female characters. A reader actually noted us that the white-haired lady, Jade, went through a “sexy” redesign some time ago: 

@emissaryofwind submitted: 

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You already talked a bit about Battlerite’s Freya before, but I was looking at this character named Jade, and noticed this. On the left is her old design, notice how apart from her hairstyle everything is very practical. Low, chunky heels (I’ve been told 1" heels are better for your back than flat heels), a full-coverage coat and shirt, a mask to protect her from inhaling dust, etc. 

On the right is her current design, complete with useless-to-dangerous mini armor plates, stiletto heels, boob window, shoulder windows, and a big hole in the back of the coat making it essentially useless.

It’s sad to see that such a good design has been replaced with a generic “sexy” design.

What a waste of a design that was both practical AND much more interesting visually (just compare the silhouette!). The new one could easily just come from some random shovelware web ad. She sticks out like a sore thumb, even next to other sexualized ladies, due to a slightly different (generic and overly detailed) art style.

Battlerite is in a desperate need of rehashing its art direction to something more consistent and not at all dependent on the creepy marketing guy.

~Ozzie 

edit: Fixed link to Alysia’s video.

Freya from Battlerite totally proves this is a very creative game… she’s such an original Viking/Norse lady with her flimsy bikini top, two Mjolnirs and horned headpiece totally not similar to what Marvel’s Loki wears in their female form

Gotta say, though, from waist down the design would be fine… too bad the artists are firmly in the club of designers who think that Vikings invented either the bikini or metal boob cups.

~Ozzie