The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Tag: Character Design
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Actual Barbarian Women (NSFW)
Seeing as how many “barbarian” ladies grace our blog, we thought we had a great opportunity to see the kinds of barbarian women we actually wanted to see; by drawing them ourselves! Here are our takes on 2 barbarian characters that appeared on BABD before: Belladonna and Arhian. It’s a shame we couldn’t redesign their names, honestly.
Belladonna
So the first thing that had to change was Bella’s boring, impassive face. I wanted her to be formidable, and I decided to play up the dramatic lighting that the cover artist tried to do, in a half-assed way. I removed her makeup and tried to make her look intimidating and experienced, overall, with the obligatory battle scars. I decided to play with the scars a bit, and so ended up giving her a slightly-disfiguring lip scar. Also, messy hair!
As for the rest of her, first thing was to get rid of her awful top. Her clothes in general seemed too manufactured-looking, so I ended up making her kilt into a more ripped and imperfect-looking garment.
I then gave her more muscle and an overall larger frame, and changed the way she was holding the axe, because her original hold on it looks like a nail polish ad pose. The thing doesn’t even look like it’s heavy in the original! Now it has blood on it, too, which was to add to the intimidation factor.
Her face in the background was like a 2-min afterthought I did at the very end cause it looked so goddamn boring. Overall, I’m very happy with the changes I did to her face and attire, though my rendering wasn’t as good as I wish it were now. I should have given her some body scars, too, but at least she has more stage presence on her own cover than none at all.
-Icy
Arhian
I decided to leave most of her skimpy costume as is, just getting rid of the physically impossible bra – Barbarians either go topless or wear something comfortable, not… this thing!
Her platinum, almost white hair inspired me to turn Arhian into a significantly older character. And in the Barbarian warrior’s life, with age come scars. Lots and lots of scars. Most prominent one is the big burn scar tissue on her left breast, which I referenced from real life. Perhaps a “gift” from a dragon?
Then there’s the giant stitch scar above her breasts and some cuts here and there, especially her face. Speaking of which, I made it my priority to give her unique facial features instead of the generic conventionally beautiful supermodel mug.
It’s by far my most satisfying face redo. I drastically changed the shape to be more squat and angular, with strong jawline. He original nose was a disproportionately small vestigial organ, so I have her a schnooze she can breathe through, and also made it broken, to match the scarred aesthetic. Then completed the look by getting rid of her makeup, undoing the obviously tweezed eyebrows, adding wrinkles and scars. I also changed her expression from vacant, vaguely “sultry” stare into a scowl of a veteran warrior.
As for her body, I just made it visibly more muscular, with prominent abs and thigh muscles. Her breasts are bigger in my version, as I wanted to present what time and gravity (and some scorching burns) actually do to the breast tissue. Nipples not only do exist, but they tend to point downwards the bigger the breast is! Also, boob stretch marks are a thing! Who knew?
All in all, I’m quite proud of that redesign. Hope you guys like it too!
-Ozzie
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She-Ra Reboot
Something a lot of readers asked us to chime in on is the recently revealed artwork for rebooted She-Ra cartoon.
Considering the showrunner for it is Noelle Stevenson, aka @gingerhaze, the author of Nimona and co-creator of Lumberanes, and from whom we reblogged a couple times in the past, it’s quite safe to assume it will be much more interesting and diverse than the original’s “exactly like He-Man, except looks like a Barbie doll and rides a flying unicorn.”
First off, judging from the EW interview, Stevenson intends to take full advantage of the heroine’s backstory, in which she was kidnapped and raised from infancy by the Evil Horde before she turns against them as She-Ra. That leaves a lot of story potential for internal conflict and development of relationship between princess Adora, her antagonists and friends (some of whom will likely be one and the same).
Second, and more relevant to BABD, her character design is pretty damn solid mix of stylized magical girl elements (long hair, barely any armoring) and some practical choices, like comfortable looking shoes, short pants under her tunic and breast piece without the original’s cleavage. This is what we mean when we say a warrior design can be feminine without being objectifying.
And yes, since we need to address the elephant in the room: there is a vocal minority of entitled manbabies crying that their childhood icon got snatched by the evil gay SJW agenda. That Adora/She-Ra, a teenager, is deliberately unsexyfied and that is bad because sexyness is totally what original show’s intended audience (young girls who wanted a He-Man’s feminine counterpart) liked about her. Not to mention allegations that the story is going to be “forcibly” turned into a queer narrative by the lesbian showrunner, which would be a bad thing, because…?
Here’s hoping that if this series catches on, then maybe a He-Man reboot comes next, this time turning all the gay undertones into overtones and angering dudebros even more.
I was quite surprised to find people rushing to comment that a certain terrible screenshot was actually demonstrating destroyable armor (I guess if you already knew about it, and hence knew that her armor had been destroyed… so it doesn’t really help with marketing).
Now we have mentioned destroyable armor before… but maybe it’s best we do a little more talking on it since apparently it’s a thing that’s been sold as making sense. Surprisingly, the first appearance of this trope in video games (that I’m aware of) was inflicted up a male character.
A manly man named Arthur who was on a quest to save his love, Prince Prin Prin (actual name!), from a foe no less than Satan himself (who lives in Hades… just go with it! I promise nothing in the game will make any more sense than this summary. Nothing at all.)
While “soft” armors like kevlar weave and leather will become less protective over time they don’t fly apart for a very simple reason. Anything that hits your hard enough to dislodge armor from your person has hit you hard enough to kill you. Even the force to dislodge regular clothes by impact (rather than deliberate tearing off) will easily kill you in a most spectacular fashion!
Armor isn’t a car, it doesn’t have crumple zones. Your armor being blasted off you and you coming out relatively unscathed means that you are literally tougher and more resistant to damage of all sorts than your armor is.
Missing enamel/coloring, destroyed ornamentation, blood marks, changes in the silhouette on parts etc all convey that the armor is damaged and becoming less and less useful without also conveying that the actual point of the game is to try to see your character naked without them dying.
– wincenworks
A thing we didn’t reference in yesterday’s redesign post is that Kanpani Girls indulges in a very particular version of destroyable armor trope – creepy “defeated” sprites of humiliated waifus with their clothes and “armor” shred to pieces. I’ll put Flavie and Marica’s “defeated” looks under the cut for comparison with the previous post, because it’s genuinely disturbing.
So this week’s throwback is a reminder that there’s no reason to incorporate armor which suspiciously falls apart during (or after) a fight in fiction, especially on female characters. And people who do it have an obvious agenda to show off flesh, not battle damage, which could be easily conveyed in non-pervy ways.
~Ozzie
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Kanpani Girlfriends
When we discovered that Kanpani Girls is a perfect candidate for our Wall of Shame, we dug through their massive library of really badly designed waifus and picked some relatively easy fixes. Reading up their bios, our choice were two Holy Knight friends, Flavie and Marica, whose defining characteristic is being self conscious about being too short and too tall, respectively.
Liking the cute dynamic of them both helping overcome one another’s complexes, we decided our versions should be girlfriends.
Well, the obvious first thing to go was that single-breasted boob plate, which was a…. unique design, I guess? I instead changed it to a design I saw when looking up armor references for my OCs.
I gave her Elizabethan poofy pants because everyone should wear them, honestly. I decided to go for an overall brown and cream color scheme, but left in the red and added some blue to tie the colors in with Marica’s red and blue details, since they are girlfriends. The flame on her tabbard comes from her element in the game, which is fire. Her design is basically all large and medium-sized shapes, so I wanted to add something small. It’s hard to see, but I also gave her a cream-colored sleeve on her left arm. Finally, I adjusted the scarf shapes to look better, both around her neck and as it blows in the wind.
Even though the final redraw is fairly simple, it was definitely fun to work on. I ended up trying like 3 different pants shapes for her before I settled on these. Cell shading is definitely not my thing, though.
It was one of those designs that’s very close to working as a stylized girly armor, but doesn’t, because someone HAD to give her big ol’ cleavage and exposed thighs. So, my aim was to bring back its potential.
I’m quite happy with how the breastplate shape came out, with its high curve and slightly bigger tassets. First I intended to incorporate that leather cincher into it, but it just didn’t work. I also gave her semi-poofy pants with diagonal pattern similar the absurd shape of her original thigh-baring stockings.
Another thing was to make her shoes at least a tiny bit flatter and more planted on ground, considering the original artist drew her as if she was floating in air rather than supporting her own weight on her feet. High heels not only are universally stupid footwear for a knight, but Marica is supposed to dislike being tall! Why would she wear shoes that add to her height?
Finishing touches were to establish her better as the girlish one of the couple (big part of her and Flavie’s actual bios) by making her red ribbon/bow motif more significant, especially with hair bow that nicely contrasts with her blue locks (inspired largely by the ending of one of my favorite anime). Also last minute change: decorative piece on her halberd is now red too, to tie everything together.
Bonus point that red accents connect her to Flavie 🙂
If I were to do it today, I’d also turn her skirt and collar into the same graphite color as her armor joints and dark part of her pants, so that they wouldn’t blend into her blue hair. All in all, not my best or most complex rework (I also had big trouble with cel shading style, obviously), but I think it goes to show how small changes can make a difference between gratuitous sexualization and cute girlishness.
~Ozzie
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Poison Ivy’s Design Team has Clearly Never Touched a Plant
We’re going back in time a little with this one, as I was working on this at the same time that Ozzie was doing her Starfire redraw. With this one, I was mainly focusing on giving her an actually plausible costume for the Gritty and Realistic “aesthetic” (insert a few more quotes around that word) of Injustice 2. Wearing plants against bare skin sounds like a bad idea to me, so I instead decided to give her a sports bra and shorts, and a leaf dress on top. After all, Black Canary and Harley Quinn (and Catwoman, sorta) get to wear Real People clothes. Why does Ivy have to (ironically) get the rash?
I also wasn’t really a fan of the almost militaristic “plants should rule the world” motivation she has the game, so I decided to just make her into an overenthusiastic plant lover. Although her vine…. things, have bigger teeth, she’s got a bracelet and flowers on her sensible non-high-heel shoes, as well as moss on her legs so that the green is not restricted to only the top half of the design.
Her makeup was predictably hideous, so I reduced it and gave her a more defined face shape, though I should have given her deeper eye sockets. I decided to give her lip gloss instead of the cliche red lipstick, because I was thinking that if I was going to a fight, what kind of don’t-have-to-worry-about makeup would I put on in 5 minutes? Mascara and gloss were the ones.
I think with more time, I probably could have worked the design to be more interesting, with vines and flowers everywhere. As it is now, it’s a pretty simple design overall. I rendered the crap out of those frigging dress leaves though!
-Icy
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Ivy & Starfire: Fan Feedback edition!
Jumping ahead for this post to past weekend’s 50th Stream Extravaganza Finale so we can showcase two pieces that would not exist without our Fans.
I decided to take them up on their advice, and made Ivy into a hot, firey, Machiavellian goddess. She’s so hot, she’s even sweating a little!
And in case you’re wondering, everything below the waist there is Fire–as it should be.
-Icy
The second is an attempt to meet the very vague expectations that some random new commenter left under the old Injustice Starfire redesign. They implied that compared to the super-skinny original, my stouter version actually wasn’t muscular… and at the same time implied that this alien humanoid might be too heavy to use her power of flight.
Following this very helpful comment, I used two newer, better quality images from the game, redid Star’s bodytype and gave her a costume redesign I was working on in my free time.
NOW princess Koriand’r is of perfectly muscular and aerodynamic shape, not to mention the adequate weight to get off the ground and get decent momentum!
That post about “attractive armor without bikini” actually left me wondering: why would you actually want an attractive armor? Sure, everyone loves an aesthethically pleasing armor, but we can’t just forget that armor is mostly made to be, well, intimidating. It’s supposed to make people both safer in combat and also more powerful. Not having to battle – because you look so threatening or even downright unbeatable – is some 40% of the purpose of an armor piece. Why does it need to be attractive?
But let’s set some things straight first: armor is done primarily to be protective. It sure helps if the design makes the wearer intimidating enough to make the opponents surrender right away, but at its core it was invented as a physical barrier between a person and whatever or whoever threatens their life or health.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for decorative armor in the history. Highly ornamented muscle cuirass (male equivalent of boobplate) was designed to impress and worn by high-standing officers during non-battle special occasions, like parades.
That said, in the world of fiction the distinction between purely functional and decorative armor is not necessary. It’s not real, and unless the setting of choice is gritty life-like naturalism, the armor (and any other design) needs just to be believable, not realistic. We commented on it before.
This is where those two bingo squares come in. Fictional worlds, especially the more fantastic ones, can be stylized, sometimes even to ridiculous degree, as long as all of the world is consistent with its level of stylization. That’s why it’s not inherently bad to have people fight monsters in G-strings… It just needs to all make sense within its own narrative and preferably not be gendered (which basically never happens).
Hope that answers it.
~Ozzie
Sometimes we make comments about how attractive a person looks in armor, because a lot of the time, their design is going for that. Unfortunately, the shorthand for that tends to be More Skin, High Heels, the usual offenders. But even if a character is designed to be attractive, that can be done without resorting to tired sexist tropes. And so we bring attention to it sometimes, when it’s done well.
Historically speaking, a lot of European plate armor was quite ugly from a design perspective, actually.
Look at that silhouette, the tiny shapes everywhere, that scarecrow head-adjacent helmet, those duck feet. Beautiful.
Compare that to any armor in Game of Thrones, which is functional, but is just so much nicer to look at.
As critics of art and design, we care more about seeing women’s designs being consistent (and good) in their universe, rather than having 100% Organic Free Range Realism. (Don’t worry though, we will continue to feature actual ladies in actual armor for positive examples.)
-Icy
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Spider ladies, tits and boobies, oh my!
The spider-themed Sadira from Killer Instinct proved to be a much easier fix than first expected. Just giving her poofy pants and limiting the excessive spikes made her look so much less generic! Her silhouette also became significantly more distinct, if I say so myself.
Another tiny fix was making the muted brown accessories, especially the spider belt, a little bit more vivid. I probably should have given that treatment to her whole color scheme. Oh well.
Since I was basically done with all three angles of her model sheet, I’ve spent the rest of the stream adorning it with sketches of boobies and tits… THE BIRDS (every innuendo intended, though).
Now they are the splash of color Sadira really needed.
