An article from 2014 that is no less relevant today. Not surprisingly, all the arguments listed have their place on the Female Armor Rhetoric Bingo.
Here’s one of the summarizing paragraphs of the list which I find most important:
If people only “lose their minds” when the comics industry objectifies women or ignores its female audience, that’s because it’s not happening the other way around. Male readers are not being ignored, and female readers are not being pandered to at the cost of men’s dignity.
Smite’s newest goddess, Artio, seems to be an improvement. Reasonably dressed for a girl on the battlefield, and she switches to a bear form that is actually bearlike (although with some feminine hair). (full size)
Unfortunately, the same patch that’s bringing her is bringing this Awilix skin…
Oh SMITE, I’m not sure if I should be congratulating you on moving on from ripping off Dragon Age to ripping off Horizon: Zero Dawn (rather than, I dunno, looking up the difference between Gaulish Celts and Gaelic Celts… I see that tartan and faux woad), but it seems you also chose to rip off League of Angels as well.
As a side note, remember that time SMITE released Bellona, an almost reasonably well armored goddess? Check out what skins she has now:
With SMITE, hope truly is the first step on the road to disappointment.
– wincenworks
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Kamihime Project is a strategy game where the player controls a bunch of hot girlsmercenaries Goddess Princesses. Wait, where have I heard that before?
This particular lady is apparently Gaia. It’s hard to tell whether there’s any inspiration from the mythological Greek figure… but then again it’s hard to tell anything with this. I just get more confused the more I look at her.
I get the feeling that this game will be making many more appearances on the blog, especially with Creative Characters like these:
Not to mention their interpretation of Hecatoncheires, the Greek giants with 100 arms and 50 heads….
I guess the wreath on her head is supposed to mean ‘Greek?’ I just… mm.
-Icy
Apparently (some of?) those are supposed to be actual figures from different mythologies… This game makes me want to apologize to SMITE, it really hurts.
Also, even though the promo material attempts (if you can call it that) to establish a “personality” for Gaia… it’s amazingly bland and vague AND doesn’t match the character design at all!
Okay, so we had a few people ask for opinions on Yacht Clubs Games adding the Body Swap Mode to Shovel Knight. I want to preface this by saying I completely believe that they have good intentions and have done some very progressive things (like letting you set your pronouns independent of sprites) but that it also has some issues.
The second is that while they’ve attempted to be equitable with the first rule provided: “Body swaps should be exactly as gendered as the original character.” this doesn’t factor in that largely their designs are default (male) and deviation (female). You know, The Smurfette Principle.
Lastly, and linking back to the first point, it’s important to remember that body swap options like this have a very strong tendency to promote an idea of false equality by creating a situation where gender is irrelevant. In real life, people’s gender is often very, very relevant to how the world interacts with them, their internal motivations and their general experience.
(That’s not to say there’s not a purpose to gender options or characters that exist outside of gender, but rather that one cannot just assume gender doesn’t matter – especially after heavily investing in gender roles)
To use one of their own examples, compare King Knight and Queen Knight.
Now, honestly I think the design in the sketch without the ridiculous boobplate effect was better but if Queen Knight looks like this, then King Knight should really look like Henry VIII combining his party and jousting attire:
The idea that “boobs decide if female” thing seems to be a trend with a lot of their swap designs, to the point of absurdity with some designs:
And when they don’t opt for boobs as the signal, it sadly seems to fall down to the idea that a male character has slightly more impressive armor (the most obvious example being The Enchantress) and aggressive stance than a female character.
As I said, I believe that the intention is there it doesn’t seem to have led to the actual examination of issues like “why are we sexualizing armors in the first place?” and “are we making the female characters seem out of place or a deviation?”
That can be challenging questions to ask, particularly if you’ve already got a dozen or so designs you really already love – but not asking them tends to result in re-enforcing the same old messages just in different ways.
