What are your thoughts on magical girl anime/manga outfits? Not talking about shows such as Kill La Kill or magical girl shows for adult men, but ones such as Precure, Sailor Moon, or Tokyo Mew Mew. Do you believe these are excused due to either being created by women, or intended for a young girl audience?
I don’t believe that “created by women” or “made for female audience” is ever an excuse if the product is problematic, especially in terms of sexism.
After all, women sometimes work on the stuff we feature here (like the design of warrior princess Solange). And because those female creators internalized the harmful ideas about gender expectations, their designs aren’t inherently any better than those made by men.
As for mahou shoujo/magical girl anime and manga, they’re generally hand-waved by the “a wizard did it“ principle. The characters are magical girls and their powers usually oscillate on the edge of exaggeration, so their battle outfits aren’t expected to be exactly fully-protective armor.
There’s this popular argument that the whole point of magical girl genre is to empower little girls by weaponizing femininity: everything is designed around female appeal, so that the audience can see that a hero can be an epitome of girlishness while still beating the crap out of evil monsters.
Which of course is not an excuse for why some of those battle uniforms and transformation sequences tend to be… questionably fanservice-y.
It’s really a classic ‘childhood ruined’ moment when a little girl grows up and realizes just how absurdly short Sailor scout’s skirt were and that the sparkly transformations she admired so much were someone else’s fap fodder. Especially considering most magical girls are underage.
~Ozzie
It really says something about fantasy art that the thing people seem to remark most on in my work is the fact the female armor I draw is ‘functional’ with out and sexy bits out there showing. Something I just think of as “well you wouldn’t want to get stabbed in the navel… so lets put some studs and leather there” is so foreign to some that it sticks out. But, it really shouldn’t stick out. People shouldn’t even notice that. And that kind of pisses me off about the other artists out there. Look I am not saying every character has to be all covered up and armored, if it is a female/male rogue who uses her god given talents to subvert, distract, and get what s/he wants by all means show some skin.. .but if it is a paladin, warrior, anything that needs to be heavily armored then put some damn good armor on them! And despite what some art directors think, a girl can look pretty damn hot in some nice, functional, armor with out her tits flopping about. And if you are an artist and the only way you can make a female attractive is by showing her ass or cleavage, you are a BAD ARTIST, go practice.
Bolded for emphasis.
It’s really a painful realization that bikini armors are so ingrained in the collective consciousness that actually protective female armor stands out as novelty.
Which also proves just how bullshitty the “skimpy costume design is creative” excuse is. If it was so, people would be more surprised by it than by costumes that do provide cover.
Yet here we are and no-one’s shocked by the sight of bikini armor anymore.
~Ozzie
People talking about practical armor in Red Sonja dont seem to realize its practical for her. The world she lives in looks rather warm so wearing full armor would burn her up and sap her energy, not mention restrict her movements and agility. It would be impractical to have her in full armor given her environment and fighting style; just like when Spider-Man had that armored suit that slowed him down…it made it harder for him to fight
Hint: you have NO IDEA what you’re talking about.
A metal bikini is not an armor, cause it serves no protection. It’s just an uncomfortable bikini.
It does NOT lend any bonus to the character’s agility, quite the contrary, cause it’s just underwear made of metal: it’s cold, it’s heavy, it’s chafing, it’s pinching.
If Sonja was supposed to wear something that doesn’t make her hot or restrict her movements, she’d go topless in some kind of loincloth, like Conan does.
~Ozzie
Without going into complicated discussion of the character and the origin story, the reason the original Red Sonja (not the current incarnation) can fight in that bikini is “divine protection”* (related to “a wizard did it”) combined with near suicidal recklessness.
The reason she doesn’t wear regular clothes is… the costume was designed in the 70s, became iconic and until recently people kept choosing nostalgia over making sense.
* Doesn’t it seem kind of sexist that the female rival to Conan needed divine magic to be his equal? Yes. Yes it does.
– wincenworks
There was a very strange article I recently read on video games that involve fighting and “jiggle physics”
Cal submitted:
The quotes near the bottom are what concerned me the most…
“Anyway, as it turns out, a female martial arts instructor I was talking to recently revealed to me over a Skype chat that ‘no matter how much you try to prevent it from happening, you can’t stop them from jiggling’.
‘They’ll jiggle?” I inquired.
‘Yes, they will,’ she replied, ‘in my case, they absolutely will jiggle.
‘When they jiggle, how is the movement like?’ I inquired further.
We went back and forth like this for about 15 minutes, before I was forced to conclude that, no matter how much you try to control it, it’s only natural for them to jiggle.”
I feel like this kind of stuff entitles the developers from Namco (They make Tekken and Soul Calibur) and other companies to add over the top and ridiculous breast physics.
Some of the comments on that page from the users also made me pretty uncomfortable…
I can’t get over the idea that comical jiggle physics in Tekken are for “realism” but none of the realism advocates want the female characters to dress in that would have a chance of containing their boobs.
Rooster Teeth did a video testing the “realism” of costumes in Tekken’s competitor Soul Calibur. Why yes they did to put censor bars up to block accidental nudity, how did you guess!?
And to think, there are people who wonder why video games aren’t taken seriously as an art form.
– wincenworks
Acknowledging that real boobs do, in fact, jiggle doesn’t make video game jiggle physics pass as “realistic”…
Ask any boob-haver who takes part in athletic activities (like, I dunno, martial arts? that thing Tekken is about?!) and they’ll confirm that for a person
to
freely move around, breasts need to be bound with something like a sports bra… or two… or three.
~Ozzie