It’s been faaaar too long since I did a “kitting up” photoset, so I thought I’d do another one of my heavy Chesterwick kit, which I wear for Swordcraft on Fridays when I’m not being an archer and wearing a dress. This kit puts me on maximum hitpoints (15) at Swordcraft and is all 100% functional stainless steel stuff I also use for other medieval activities – which means it’s not exactly light. It’s inspired by what a 14th century knight would wear, although I’ve taken a fair amount of creative liberty.
Here’s a breakdown of each layer, generously photographed by my friend @andrethesmall (and please ignore my funny faces, it’s been a long week):
1. Underwear! Medieval linen braies with an undertunic tucked into them. I’m also wearing workout pants underneath because it’s currently winter and I’m a lizard. In the summer I skip that layer. All of my medieval underwear is from Historic Enterprises. Unfortunately, they don’t really cater too much to women for this stuff (given that it is men’s clothing!), but I find I can fit most of it, although it’s not the most ideal fit, especially with the hose.
2. Hose! I love hose, I think they’re amazing and silly. I usually go for parti-coloured – I have three different colours to choose from (yellow, blue, green), so I just mix and match each week depending on what I feel like. I wear thick socks underneath to pad them out a little bit – since they’re made for men’s feet they’re a bit big on me.
3. Shoes, pourpoint, leg harness. The shoes are a new model from ArmStreet that I’m currently testing out for durability. They look medieval but have modern comfort, and feel great under armour! The pourpoint (tight vest) is what keeps up my leg harness (leg armour). Most of the weight of my leg harness is distributed across my hips, with very little actually pulling on my shoulders. If you look closely, you can see lots of vertical stitch marks in the pourpoint – that’s where I’ve taken it in time and time again as it’s really old and the linen keeps stetching! It’s really important for a pourpoint to be super tight to ensure an ideal distribution of weight. My leg harness is the same I’ve had for a few years now, from ArmStreet.
4. Gambeson! Mine is a bit beaten up and needs some new buckles. A gambeson is a padded layer that just adds a little bit of cushioning from armor.
5. Armour. I’m wearing bracers, elbow cops and 14th century inspired shoulders, all of which is fringed with green suede dagging. I opted not to wear my upper cannons tonight (which would completely cover my upper arms).
6. Cotte d’armes, a wool garment in the colours of my warband that hides my beaten up gambeson. It has yellow wool dagging on it to make it a bit fancier and set me apart from other members of the warband who wear a similar, unadorned item.
7. Breastplate. Enough said.
8. Hood, because it’s cold out and my helmet doesn’t currently have an aventail to cover my neck.
9. A helmet to top it all off. It has a faceplate but I opt not to wear it at Swordcraft since I usually need to be able to communicate with people and I find I have to yell waaaay too loud with it on.
10. A photo taken by Tony Delov at the game, with my current halberd.
Please let me know if you have any questions, happy to answer!
Another great combination of great example of practical armor and explanation of how you get all the pieces on by @sunandsword – complete with old school underwear.
Once again, if you’re interested in how wearing armor while female looks and works, we highly recommend looking for a local larp group – they might even be able to talk to you about what olde undies looked like.
Also super great to point out that there’s plenty of room for creative license while keeping things very plausible. (It’s also always worth remembering that actual historical accuracy only refers to the small sample of things we can definitely confirm, a lot of history is speculation based off limited evidence)
– wincenworks
h/t: @ravenhull
Hand-shaped bras a rare, but astounding “treat” among many, many gross boob-related costume tropes. And somehow, they’re almost always designed as skeleton/corpse hands, or at least monstrous looking claws… Because boob-grabbing wasn’t creepy enough on its own merits, I suppose.
What’s additionally weird about this particular one, is that if you look at her left breast, the hand-bra is not even holding it. It’s like hover hand, but extremely creepy instead of extremely awkward.
BTW, because nobody can prove me wrong on this one, I’ll assume that this lady lost her eye to one of those stabby spikes in her “armor”.
~Ozzie
edit: We’ve been noted that this artwork is actually stolen from League of Legends fanart. BABD’s policy is not to put down fan/amateur/hobby/otherwise non-commercial artists, and I’m sorry for accidentally doing that.
Shame on Dragon 2 for (not surprisingly, considering it’s a very generic shovelware/asset-flippy web ad) stealing someone else’s work!
~Ozzie
Weekly BABD livestream #21
After sexyfying some dudes, back to fixing lady warrior costumes live!
Time same as usual, Saturday 9 AM PST / 6 PM CEST. For your local time of the event, check here.
~Ozzie & -Icy
Let’s take a closer look at Sylvanas Windrunner, Queen of the Forsaken, as revealed in official Heroes of the Storm art. First though, to address one issue:
mitulita replied to your photo: “For the people who rushed to tell us we should never doubt Blizzard’s…”:
The Sylvanas design is not new, though. It has been exactly like this in World of Warcraft for years. They are just repeating an old mistake there…Which still totally proves our point that Blizzard is NOT trying to improve. They had a perfect opportunity to update the design and did basically nothing.
While her official model for some reason wears a thong over nice pants, lots of popular Sylvanas fanart depicts her as pantless and Blizzard seem to be pretty okay with that.
~Ozzie
more Female Armor Bingos | more World of Warcraft | more Blizzard
Since Blizzard fandom still seems to think that “You shouldn’t criticize this outfit used in Heroes of the Storm, because it originates from another game!”, we thought it’s time to bring back this HotS Sylvanas bingo. Along with the commentary that just because something existed in an older franchise from the same company, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be redesigned and improved.
Like… how does rhetoric make even the slightest bit of sense?
Bad, sexist design is just that, no matter how well established it is.
If Quiet somehow reappeared in a future MGS game, still dressed in a handkerchief bikini and torn tights, would you really expect us to stop making Breathing Through Her Skin jokes?
~Ozzie
So besides the fact that Blizzard has redesigned a lot of their characters over the years, promising to improve on a problematic aspect of your game, and then blatantly recycling those same old aspects, that’s not improvement. That’s the kind of behavior that gets you ridiculed by us.
-Icy
Apparently at some stage Valve was pitched these amazing designs by Drew Wolf and considered adding female variations of the Team Fortress 2 characters. For some reason failed to recognize how awesome this would be.
A shame because many of these would have really elevated the standards of video games and perhaps inspired certain other titles to work harder.
– wincenworks
Saint Seiya Online makes a comeback to the bingo, again with lots of stabby bits, gendered posing and shameless double standard in design, yay!
~Ozzie
I love how the little lotus posed armor totally just sits there pretending like the woman armor is even close to resembling it. It really shows that they either didn’t realize or didn’t care about anything more than showing some skin. SMH.
-Icy
This week on Blizzard Does Women Better, Watch as they introduce a new hero to their free MOBA Heroes of the Storm via sexy demon skins for the ladies! How Original™!
The three lucky ladies are Jaina, Zagara and Sonya (from left to right):
(Though, don’t be fooled by that awesome concept art of Sonya, her in-game model is of smaller frame and has no defined muscles.)
So let’s take these in order, shall we?
Jaina is an ice wizard (basically) whose regular outfit just looks really stupid, besides not making any sense. Her demon skin replaces her 70s pants with booty shorts, and while she does gain “armor,” it’s in the laziest possible way. [x]
Her design brings to mind the Draenor, rather than demons. It’s so generic, I don’t even have anything to say… And what’s with the colors?
As for Zagara, you may notice that she is not even a person. She’s the “Broodmother of the Swarm,” an “ant queen” type of creature; she doesn’t even have a face, despite that strange exoskeleton boobplate. The maw in the front of her bug abdomen spews various things in combat. So of course her demon skin makes her Hot Bug Lady. [x]
I mean, we know she has weird bug arms and huge bubbling pustules on her insect-like abdomen, but look at those titties! This is the second Zagara skin that gives her a sexy face, but why include her in this particular promotion at all, for the release of a lich character from WoW? Do they think their zerg-birthing monster needs more sexy lady skins to even out the fact that she’s a bug? ಠ_ಠ
Finally, we have Sonya, the lady barbarian from Diablo III. Her demon skin still reveals about as much as her regular, although for some reason she has platform shoes now? This is called the Death Knight. Much spooky. [x]
Also, the design screams “we didn’t know how to make her demonic.” There is a skull on every piece of armor she’s wearing, and her weapons! This is even more baffling when you realize that this skin came out concurrently with the Deathbringer skin:
It’s the exact same skin (save for the weapons), except no spooky scary helmet, and actual padding under her armor… so why?? Why did they take the padding away from the Death Knight skin? I thought they were just doing the typical fantasy barbarian thing, where they sort of wear kind-of clothes, but apparently not!
Doing women better, though.
-Icy