Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 2: Empowering the gentlemen!
In the latter part of our Saint Seiya redesign stream (or, for Ozzie, out of technical difficulties, last Saturday >_>), we doubled down on the switcheroo aspect and swapped armors around. Icy did the sexy male version of the blue knight, while Ozzie took on the male bronze knight.
Well, considering the blue lady’s… creative design, I had no shortage of material to work with. Besides transplanting the boob window breastplate and giving him the same mankini-adjacent undergarment, I decided to switch the original boring stockings out for more interesting ones, with lace! Premium stockings.
I gave him a softer facial expression, to match our lady’s pout, and made his right hand less aggressive. I decided not to give him heels, but I gave him a booty. And last but not least, I gave him glorious mustache-shaped body hair! Thank you to the person who suggested it!
Does every sexy boy I redesign for this blog have very defined junk? … The answer is probably yes. I definitely had a lot of fun with this one, despite this shading style that I had a hard time emulating.
-Icy
Despite the ugly “muscular wide-shouldered male is equivalent to a lady with big boobs and wide hips” motif, the bronze knights had one thing in their favor… the dude has his oblique muscles exposed equally to the female version! Now all I had to do is to recreate all the other weirdly exposed spots from her costume on his.
First thing I decided to do was to make his pose more equal to hers without just straight-up copypasting her legs onto him. Instead, I switched his leg position to simulate her sexy strut, then slightly changed forearm position to be closer to hers. Then I allowed myself to replace his right hand with hers, which is posed less aggresively. And of course, I left the long nails on 😉
His pants are now just underpants and thigh-high stockings. He also acquired high heels. I wondered for a while how to turn his breastplate into something similar to the boobplate with window for each breasts, and finally decided just to copy her piece and reshape it to match his pecs.
Major negative (other than double standard, that is), was the armor’s color scheme that blends with their skin tone. If it wasn’t against the idea of our exercise, I’d probably slightly adjust those colors to contrast better, then the pec windows would be more obvious. Oh well.
~Ozzie
Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 1: Armoring the ladies!
This stream redraw session was heavily inspired by this reblog we did from @amusing-saint-seiya and the exercise @costumecommunityservice proposed in the post we reblogged ages ago.
The idea is to take two gender disparate version of the same costume and make them equal to one another, by either basing male version on female’s or the other way round.
We concluded that Saint Seiya Online, which we bingoed twice since, is a perfect material to try this out on, as their concept art (credit to @saintseiya-zone for posting them!) includes most armors in both male and female version, which are basically always textbook examples of double standard in costume design.
Prepare for this being a double feature. Today we’re posting female knights equalized with their male counterparts. On Friday come the same male knights sexified to be as empowered as original forms of their female equivalents.
First thing I noticed about the blue-white knights is that since the dude one happens to be rather androgynous and strikes a flamboyant pose, designers doubled down on “feminizing” the lady one with pigeon-toed pose and super bingo-able version of the outfit. The two share very similar body type, so I concluded that pasting his parts onto her verbatim would work perfectly.
First thing to do was to give her his legs and right hand, so she can strike a power pose instead of generic dainty passive body language completely disparate from her male counterpart’s.
Then the task was relatively easy: paint over all those completely out of place holes in her outfit, give her waist a little more plausible girth and shrink her high heels to be exactly the same size as the guy’s.
It’s actually quite upsetting how the developers put in an active effort into ruining perfectly fine costume just to communicate that the lady version is different.
~Ozzie
I will fully admit that I probably? cheated by cutting the red guy’s chest right off of him (misandry?) and pasting it onto the lady, but I have good reason! We so often see strong women characters who are supposed to have a more “masculine” muscled look, but it never actually gets to the part where they don’t have an hourglass figure with the same old narrow shoulders. (See Overwatch’s Zarya and her most narrow shoulders.) So I wanted this lady to be beefy as heck.
To me, it seems like the artists’ definition of “beefy” for women was just a bigger rack and thiccer hips, and that wasn’t doing it for me. I made her shoulders way wider, stole the guy’s entire torso, and narrowed her hips. You also can’t ever have too much biceps. There are women who look like this, believe it or not.
(A minor thing, but I shortened her nails as well.)
For people who may not like this one because she looks too much like a dude… sometimes people do look like that. And maybe the problem is with our definitions of “manly” and “girly.” Why even cisnormativity.
-Icy
Ah, Gloria… What in the Nine Hells is even going on.
Gloria here is from Devil May Cry 4, where she is a high-ranking soldier. Yes, you read that right. She even demonstrates her “acrobatic and combat skills” in the game, to even the horror of VergilNero*, the main character. Watch the video at your own risk, not in public if possible.
For those who don’t want to scar their eyes and brains, here’s instead a picture of what the back of her “outfit” looks like:
In case you thought that the front of her could not be outdone.
-Icy
* The series really needs to consider in giving male leads distinct appearances or unique personalities… or maybe just personalities at all.
Cool for the Summer Skins (NSFW)
Our first (and definitely not last) foray into redrawing Overwatch. Their summer 2017 skins were a strange mix of bland and safe, cosplay, and a single actually good idea (grill dad 76). We decided that wouldn’t do, and so picked two of the more unsatisfactory skins in the collection to redesign and actually have some fun with!
Widowmaker
When I first saw Widow’s boring, predictable summer skin, I was mildly annoyed. But after giving it some thought, I became hugely disappointed that they didn’t make her into a fisherman! The fishing rod that looks like a sniper rifle? She even has a grappling hook that could be made to look like she’s throwing a fishing line. What a missed opportunity.
So I made try-explaining-those-tanlines Widow into fishing-day Widow, complete with plaid shirt and huge rubber boots. Because her legs are so fricking long, I should probably have given her hip waders, which are rubber boots that go up to your thighs or higher. They’re actually appropriate thigh-high boots, for once! Given more time, I could have also given her more accessories on her belt, like a bunch of lures and containers with bait.
This is one of those ideas that I may come back to and actually design properly
in the future.
-Icy
Mercy
I found the “Nike” Mercy skin utterly uninteresting and kinda overdesigned. to fight that, I changed her tunic to have a shorter “tabbard”, expose one breast (because why not?) and cover up more of her butt.
Got rid of those sandals with weird, borderline impossible to wear straps, and replaced them with winged Nike sneakers.
And to make more serious attempt at portraying her as Nike, the goddess of victory, I put the laurel in her hand, instead of head, which is this mythical figure’s most basic attribute, right after the wings. And one more in her mouth, to make her more cheeky.
~Ozzie
Y’know, even if there wasn’t a single woman in all of history who had fought in war or a single example of real, historical female armor, there would be no problem in pointing out fantasy armor is unrealistic because the complaint is not based on what women DID wear but what women WOULD wear.
Came across this amazing comment while archive binging our positive examples tag.
I think it perfectly sums up the basic flaw in the “women warriors aren’t historically accurate, so realism doesn’t matter when portraying them in media” kind of rhetoric.
~Ozzie
(via bikiniarmorbattledamage)
Much like… most of the angry ranting we receive, the plea “not proven historically accurate” tends to ignore the key reason why “sex sells” doesn’t work.
In fiction, armor is a costume, and a costume is a statement about the wearer. It is the creator’s opportunity to tell the audience about the world, the society the wearer is from and the wearer of themselves.
If a creator’s most compelling message they can think of is “she’s got sexy bits” then not only is every female character going to be yet another addition to an already over saturated nonsensical trope.
However, if you decide to actually communicate some things like… what the armor is made from, what it’s supposed to protect against, what’s happened to it since it was made, or how the wearer would decorate it: you open up the doors to infinite possibilities.
Some of which may be heavily influenced and inspired by history.
– wincenworks
SMITE-ing Masculine Beauty!
After League of Legends, where we fixed Jarvan and Azir, our next dude-sexyfying endeavor layed in the land of gods, double standards and shameless racism that is SMITE.
Poseidon
Not gonna lie, after all the effort I put into Arhian, I picked an easy male material to work of. I used this official Poseidon design found on Hi-Rez’s artist’s ArtStation as a base. His left pec, abs and obliques were lovingly rendered already, so I made it my task to show off more of his muscular godly body. No big changes about his physique were needed, the costume and Poseidon’s attitude is what called for some modification.
What I landed on outfit-wise was, appropriately enough for the lord of the oceans, a mankini. Made out of metal and gemstones.
The idea (which, I believe, Icy or some stream watcher might have suggested) was pretty brilliant solution to showcase more bare flesh while keeping the water theme.
His weirdly low-hanging belt buckle became a decorative codpiece. Gemstones and decorative spikes accentuate the nipples.
Also I replaced strategic butt covering in his cape into a strategic butt display. Obviously, god of the sea has perfectly shaped and shiny bubble buttocks.
Last, small but crucial change was his expression. From an angry god who will kill you for looking at him wrong into a loving, kissable daddy.
Soft Poseidon cares about you.
~Ozzie
Vulcan
I wasn’t lucky enough to find a high-rez picture of Vulcan, but I decided to do the hot volcano-dwelling smithing god anyway. I removed most of his clothes, leaving only hotpants (for the hot god ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)) and a little bit of apron. It’s not like he needs protection from the furnace, he’s a god, after all. I gave him more of a wrestler body, since he’s a smith, as well as a nipple-framing suspender. But just the one.
I also made his prosthetic rounder, to match his soft, round body.
As for his face, I gave him a big, soft beard, a shy pout, and a long, smooth undercut suggested by someone during the stream (sorry I can’t remember who!). And the final touch was, of course, the curly hair on his chest and leg.
Now Vulcan is truly warm and welcoming.
-Icy
on a textual level, a female character can dress however she wants and shouldn’t be slut-shamed and hated for what she prefers to wear.
on a metatextual level, she might still have been designed with an intention to provide fanservice.
this means that criticising a design, as opposed to a character, is neither misogyny nor slut-shaming. being displeased about the way a character has been designed is not synonymous with hating her.
have i made myself clear?
CRYSTAL CLEAR.
PS: I love you, durendals. Why didn’t I see this post on my dash ever before? It’s perfection.
Throwback this week: the character’s agency argument in a nutshell.
A silly, sexualized outfit might as well fit* the character’s personality and preferences within her story. That doesn’t make her design any less silly and sexualized to us, real people consuming that story for entertainment and criticizing it.
~Ozzie
*Keep in mind, though, that just as often it can’t be justified with even that much. Some characters walk around in bikinis or boob and butt windows despite being canonically modest or shy or body conscious etc. because Creepy Marketing Guy put his foot down and demanded for every lady in the story to be poster child of “sex sells”.