Look at the design variety! So many lingerie options!
The strategic cutouts from the dress fabric are just hilarious. How does she walk? These are Carnival outfits, not armors.
The most empowered man I’ve found in the labeled promotional material is the following guy on the left, though his image is completely ruined by monster-truck-wearing scowly man on the right.
And even he’s not reaching anywhere near the levels of empowerment of the ladies in this post.
We have to stand up to this reverse sexism! This particular MMO is apparently undergoing a relaunch, so now is our chance to let the developers know what we gamers really want.
-Icy
Edit: there have been a few comments about the potential child in one of the pictures, to which I reacted with a “(kill me)” and you are correct! That does appear to be a child. Here’s a better picture, for better or worse.
I tend to do a lot of livestreaming, and lately I’ve been working on BABD-related arts for the blog, so I figured, why not have a weekly livestream where I take requests, or do super quick armor designs or paint-overs or whatnot for a few hours.
I’m planning on having the first one of these tomorrow, Friday April 14 at 1 PM PST, until 3 PM PST. I’ll post a reminder an hour in advance tomorrow, too, so anyone who wants to can chime in.
Okay, yes, baby steps, Blizzard has got a long history of being terrible and a lot unlearning to do. But they could at least try to show some self-awareness of this.
And it’s not only body diversity which seems to be a challenge for female Overwatch characters, so is their AGE!
D.Va is actually the youngest in the whole ensemble (19). Female characters don’t get older than 34 (Mercy), while male ones range from 20 (if you count Zenyatta, a robot) or 25 (Junkrat) all the way up to 61 (Reinhardt).
The overall design of D.Va is perplexing on so many levels, too. What new is she supposed to contribute? Yet another young, thin, conventionally pretty woman in a catsuit… something the game (and the industry as a whole) so totally lacked before! Even her silly pseudonym rubs in that she’s a diva. The idea of a Korean professional gamer-turned-mecha pilot is very cool (even if the backstory rips off Evangelion/Pacific Rim), but why make her look so generic… and paint her mech pink?
My most optimistic guess: one of many Blizzard’s CreepyMarketingGuys saw Zarya and said “So, we’re doing female tanks now? Okay, but next one is gonna be the SEXY tank! And make her more PINK!”
Remember when Blizzard was doing female characters better in Overwatch?
Yeah, me neither.
We will be doing a full post about the new Widowmaker skin, but until then, we just wanted to throwback to this post about all the effort Blizzard is putting into their diversity. It still doesn’t make sense for Widow to wear those clothes because,
a) she is a sniper and that top just screams nip slip; and
b) she’s a sniper, who’s she going to be ‘distracting’ exactly from 2 miles away?
It also just looks really ugly? It really looks like someone designed a practical suit for her, and then Creepy Marketing Guy walked in and told them to cut a third of it off, so they just did, without any design adjustment.
-Icy
edit: Since a lot of replies ignore that the original post is almost 1,5 years old and mentioning newer characters is beside the point Icy is making about Widowmaker, let’s quickly address this: We do acknowledge how Ana Amari is a cool non-sexualized old lady (even if squarely within OW’s established beauty standards) and Orisa is a cool female robot. That said, there are still problems with how old characters continue to be depicted and adding new heroes doesn’t change that.
~Ozzie
PS: Mercy is 37, not 34 – my bad. She looks neither age, regardless.
Daughters of Persephone! My women only Space Marine Chapter. Not my best illustration work, but its really starting to take too much time for a quick fan work / colour concept, and I should work on more original works really (though I’ll probably end up doing other fan stuffs :P)
Threw together another quick sketch, playing with the general out of armour look.
I like this interpretation of the black carapace.
It’s going to happen sooner or later
You keep telling yourself that lol
Yeah…
Just remember there is more ‘Daughters of Persephone’ where that came from 🙂
Warhammer 40k bros are the epitome of fragile geek masculinity*
To them, not only women as Space Marines simply can not be a thing, because arbitrary fluff reasons – Emperor God forbid any fan dared to draw, let alone customize some figures of them! Literally. We’re talking about the Toxic Masculinity Brigade yelling “Heresy!” at anyone who even mentions the possibility of a female Astarte existing.
See all of @pantmonger‘s awesome Daughters of Persephone art + some commentary regarding detractors in one post here.
When messaging us with a question whether we saw/formed opinion on some specific piece of media, please always do include its full name, source or, if possible, link to where we can check it. Often a reader’s message is the first time we hear of something, and a lot of things are hard to find just by vague description like “that new comic/trailer with x and y”.
Thanks joabobs for for the tip about Legacy of Discord. I was having fun with this bingo (picked out of several different options that were equally generic and lingerie-y) but then I found this image and I died a little more inside:
I mean, besides the hilariously obvious double standard, that… whatever it is she’s wearing is so uninspired, and the messy rendering makes me think they spent an entire 25 minutes on it because Creepy Marketing Guy wanted a Hot Chick™ on the advertisement. Her giant hat is the coolest thing about her design, but even that isn’t done well. Compare her to the guy on the right, who has what looks like a literal bear trap on his armor. I want one of those! (Also the shape language on him is just a lot clearer.)
I got distracted from the original point of this post, but do I really need to say more about Ms. Furious Wings up there besides Kerrigan Lingerie Victoria’s Secret Angel?
-Icy
Posted on
Not a very impressive bingo, considering this “armor” seems to be mostly covering and even includes pants (such a rare feat!), but there are a couple things making up for it:
How absurdly overdesigned it is, to the point that it’s hard to make out what is what. Especially with all the random elements and blue light effects floating everywhere.
The description: “The master of Frost, holy and sexy, dominate the battlefield with powerful magical mirror!”
HOLY AND SEXY, you guys! Whoever is Legacy of Discord’s copy writer, they should get a raise just for that spurt of “creativity”.
~Ozzie
Maybe their shaders glitched out as they were taking these screenshots. She looks more like the master of Headaches.
