@spiraldrawsstuff submitted:
I saw this on twitter and thought it relevant to your blog.
There’s so much in this casting call that we’ve talked about indirectly before:
- Casting so that women are, at most, as big as the smallest men
- The strange belief that fictional characters and actresses cast by executives get to decide the costuming (also here)
- The assumption that sexy men are in a movie means everything is automatically fine and equal (also here)
- The generic female character production line and how it carries on into merchandise and costumes.
And this was a movie where I was kind of kind of excited about because it had Gamora in it!
– wincenworks
It’s one of those cases that disappoints, but doesn’t surprise me. Especially since with the first movie, not unlike with Avengers, they reduced female team member count to one, despite there being more women in the comics.
For all the praise Marvel Cinematic Univese gets, it still has a really hard time letting go of tired tropes and conventions, like the Smurfette Principle and Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty.
And we should be always pointing that out, for as long as it remains the status quo.
~Ozzie
As the follow up to last week’s throwback, it’s worth remembering that the general differences between men and women in mainstream media are most certainly not the result of “how things are”.
Major studios hire casting teams to generate calls like this and then carefully curate everyone who gets to be in front of a camera. Sometimes this is for specific effects (making 5′9″ Lucy Lawless look like a towering glamazon) but more often it’s just to re-enforce harmful ideals and perceptions.
Like that men should be complicated and diverse – and women should be sexy.
– wincenworks
If New Exiles taught us anything, it’s that you shouldn’t design a character’s costume where it looks like you forgot to give them a bra and just scribbled on two gold discs at the last second and that you shouldn’t wait until your second last issue to break out imagery like this:
– wincenworks
@edgion-the-great submitted:
Some ‘beauties’ from Game of War: Fire Age.
Male armour thrown in for comparison >_>
Also the top left one has that weird metal armour that moves with her as she breathes (And when she breathes her boobs expand)
Game of War – because why have design quality when you can just have the most expensive ad campaigns and create a game where the main source of revenue is letting the richest 1-3% bully the other players.
– wincenworks
Spooky Ladies competition entries Part 2/2
The gallery of the Spooky Lady category from our Overwatch Halloween Contest comes in two halves. Huge thank you to all the participants!
Artist credits are on the caption of each image. We’re glad to display all of them as the evidence that Blizzard could do so much better for Halloween – even the simplest ideas prove that there’s more to novelty female costumes than “sexy witch”, whitewashed undead or shameless exotification.
Sexy Gentlemen category entries can be viewed here.
Spooky Ladies ½
~Ozzie
Spooky Ladies competition entries Part ½
The gallery of the Spooky Lady category from our Overwatch Halloween Contest will come in two halves. Huge thank you to all the participants!
Artist credits are on the caption of each image. We appreciate and encourage all the creativity and ideas that went into those non-sexualized Halloween skin designs.
Sexy Gentlemen category entries can be viewed here.
Spooky Ladies 2/2
~Ozzie
PS: We’re withholding Female Armor Bingo posts this week to properly display and promote all the contest artwork. Bingo Sunday will come back next weekend!
It’s kind of worrying that there’s literally a “publisher” on steam who seems to be signing on indie developers trying to get their first break in games with but only if the can put ridiculously sexualized armor on the art.
Yes, we’ve featured Storm of Spears and The Chosen before, but at least their cover art seemed to have something to do with their content – this one doesn’t even seem to have women as gladiators… just male warriors and women servant/people who agree to marry you.
Still got to have bikini armor though, otherwise how will people know it’s about gladiator stuff? Well, the good news it seems this strategy is working about as well as you’d expect… even though though they keep returning to it.
– wincenworks
@3dphoto submitted:
The two “android investigators” available as KS exclusives look strangely dissimilar.
More fun here (see “Diver”): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/diemensiongames/deep-madness
(it’s a co-op board game, which comes closest to “RPS” in your tag list. Mayebe time to add a “board game” tag?)
We received this submission a while ago but wanted to wait until the Kickstarter had expired. Not only is this game a textbook example of double standards, it’s also a textbook example of the creativity we see in so many of these productions:
The canonical blonde Black Widow is Yelena Belova and a completely different person to Natasha Romanov (played by Scarlett Johansson in the movies) and looks, almost exactly like this model:
So I’m not sure if they just outright stole or if they had the some genius idea for how to make them “totally different” that Marvel did. Either way, she’s still a better design than the fore-mentioned “the Diver”:
Even there shameless Ripley rip-off has to have boobsocks:
And the worst part is, based off the default Investigators that come with the game’s most basic package – it looks like they started with an intention to make all the designs actually just… be good.
I guess somewhere along the way they got led astray by Creepy Marketing Guy and lost in an old myth with no basis in reality.
– wincenworks
(Also in response to the suggestion in this submission, we’re now using the tag “tabletop games” for all board games, tabletop wargames and the like.)
The complete collection of entries we had for Sexy Gentlemen category of our Overwatch Halloween Competition. Again, a very big thank you to everyone who entered.
Artist credits are on the caption of each image, we were especially impressed with the many ways that Junkrat could be shown to have an empowered sexier side and hope Blizzard will take this message on board.
The Spooky Ladies entries will be posted later this weekend.
– wincenworks