i’ve been meaning to do this post for YEARS and i finally managed to dig out all these sketches and put them together.
the sexual dimorphism in WoW has always been sad especially considering blizz had such good ideas at the start but the furious fan feedback always made them redesign these fascinating and monstrous females of the races into much more humanlike. i also remember the uproar of thin male blood elves and the homophobic and sexist slurs that followed which made them beef up the male model considerably.
i tried my best to give a go at redesigning them to make their body types, postures and facial features more aligned.
dwarf, undead, goblin and gnome models on the other hand are great, 5/5.
welcome to video game!!!!!! customize your character; but first, choose your gender:
in case anyone thought this was an exaggeration
TERA is such a bad joke of a game. And not only that, but female characters all wear super-skimpy outfits and lean way the hell over so that you can see their panties when they run.
I mean, nothing against fanservice (although I prefer mine a bit more equal-opportunity). This game, however, is just…tawdry. Like something out of a particularly bad adult manhwa.
Also, I remember a discussion in which the scummy fanboys broke out literally every scummy fanboy derailing tactic in the book (plus a Godwin or two and an accusation of “shaming” the characters). So…there’s also the matter of the brand of fan it attracts.
Ah, TERA Online. Once upon a time, I played (and enjoyed) the closed Beta, up to the point where I had to interact with a female NPC who literally wore a metal bikini (not chainmail, actual solid metal) whose breasts still swayed–with the armor.
I actually have a mixed attitude toward the designs in the game. On the one hand, it’s all very Male Gaze, creepy, and completely impracticalor physically impossible to wear into battle. On the other hand, some of their stuff is actually well-designed (i.e. actually makes use of design principles) and is nice to look at. It’s the kind of stuff I wouldn’t mind seeing at a Haute couture fashion show (though they can’t seem to design shoes for shit).
But the game isn’t Project Runway: TERA, unfortunately.
-Icy
I love how not only is @xylophil’s satire spot-on, but also that @dreamersollux easily found an official game promo pic of exactly what it’s making fun of.
I think it’s been long enough but if you find yourself getting ready to type up a comment related to Mass Effect: Andromeda’s animations please consider watching this educational video from Extra Credits and not commenting here instead. This post is going to be a clarification of what we mean when we say Creepy Marketing Guy, and since the first post on this topic featured Samara, it’s only fair that Cora be the star of the clarification.
First, let’s start with what we do not mean when we refer to Creepy Marketing Guy. It does not refer to:
Using distinctly porny ads to promote products (be they porn or not porn), particularly if they’re generic images from a clickbait ad company
What we instead refer to is a product where you can see the development team’s intentions are to create something where every element is involved in telling a specific story – and then someone (usually marketing) steps in and makes the change specific parts of them with the assumption that the cishet male demographic needs the sexual availability of at least one female character broadcast to them in order to be interested in the unrelated aspects.
In this case, they pick Cora Harper, who is an ultra-professional soldier (one of the most battle hardened in the team), introduced as being calm in a crisis, the second in command on the mission, and seems to use “male” set of animations for her running, etc (instead of the elbows-in butt wiggle run generally assigned to female characters, including fem!Ryder).
Then you see in the outfit in the top of the post before launching into the tutorial mission, during which she appears in cut scenes like this:
Pretty much every other female character in the establishing chapters of the game has pragmatic, non-gendered attire on and off the battlefield. But, since Cora is a romance option for bro!Ryder, she apparently needs to wear a fetish outfit sculpted around her boobs and butt, while on the battlefield. The other female member of the away team who is a romance option also similarly needs to broadcast she’s got a sexy side (she also only owns one set of clothes).
All other traits other than romance option to bro!Ryder are considered secondary – to the extent now Cora looks not just contradictory to her character but out of place in the game about exploring a new galaxy, finding wondrous alien technology and shaping humanity’s future.
(This does not seem to apply to the male romance options, examples 1 & 2)
Ironically this now means she is so out of place cannot be included in marketing material without making the game look a ridiculous parody of a dramatic adventure exploring alien worlds in a new galaxy. It’s almost like they should have just given her one of the dozens of pragmatic outfits I am sure the concept artists designed for Cora before being told to sex it up.
– wincenworks
What is it with the “above boobs and under boobs belts” design feature that’s become so popular lately? Also, I thought Ashley’s outfit in Mass Effect 3 was insulting; the new BioWare studio really took it up a notch, though. … Good job?
I’ve read none of the promotional material for ME:A before it came out, so when I watched part of a Let’s Play of it out of curiosity, I couldn’t believe that Cora was this battle-hardened badass soldier type; I thought she was just another human on the ship. Her design makes me think of EDI before anything else. Those really sad attempts at actual armor pieces (like the baby plates on her shoulders) somehow make it worse, like Creepy Marketing Guy begrudgingly allowed it.
Also, send help, that butt window is staring into my soul.
Okay, yes, baby steps, Blizzard has got a long history of being terrible and a lot unlearning to do. But they could at least try to show some self-awareness of this.
And it’s not only body diversity which seems to be a challenge for female Overwatch characters, so is their AGE!
D.Va is actually the youngest in the whole ensemble (19). Female characters don’t get older than 34 (Mercy), while male ones range from 20 (if you count Zenyatta, a robot) or 25 (Junkrat) all the way up to 61 (Reinhardt).
The overall design of D.Va is perplexing on so many levels, too. What new is she supposed to contribute? Yet another young, thin, conventionally pretty woman in a catsuit… something the game (and the industry as a whole) so totally lacked before! Even her silly pseudonym rubs in that she’s a diva. The idea of a Korean professional gamer-turned-mecha pilot is very cool (even if the backstory rips off Evangelion/Pacific Rim), but why make her look so generic… and paint her mech pink?
My most optimistic guess: one of many Blizzard’s CreepyMarketingGuys saw Zarya and said “So, we’re doing female tanks now? Okay, but next one is gonna be the SEXY tank! And make her more PINK!”
Remember when Blizzard was doing female characters better in Overwatch?
Yeah, me neither.
We will be doing a full post about the new Widowmaker skin, but until then, we just wanted to throwback to this post about all the effort Blizzard is putting into their diversity. It still doesn’t make sense for Widow to wear those clothes because,
a) she is a sniper and that top just screams nip slip; and
b) she’s a sniper, who’s she going to be ‘distracting’ exactly from 2 miles away?
It also just looks really ugly? It really looks like someone designed a practical suit for her, and then Creepy Marketing Guy walked in and told them to cut a third of it off, so they just did, without any design adjustment.
-Icy
edit: Since a lot of replies ignore that the original post is almost 1,5 years old and mentioning newer characters is beside the point Icy is making about Widowmaker, let’s quickly address this: We do acknowledge how Ana Amari is a cool non-sexualized old lady (even if squarely within OW’s established beauty standards) and Orisa is a cool female robot. That said, there are still problems with how old characters continue to be depicted and adding new heroes doesn’t change that.
~Ozzie
PS: Mercy is 37, not 34 – my bad. She looks neither age, regardless.
I don’t know if you´re familiar with Japanese video games but it’s very rare to find a chubby character in a game, so today I want to talk about Shikiri Hasebe ( 長谷部しきり )
She is a character from しんけん!! (Shinken!!). Shinken!! is an online “Line Defense” web browser game developed by studio PROSPECT / PICTOGRAPH and published on DMM.com.
She is adorable!
She was featured in La Farfa magazine
Most female characters in videogames are usually slim and sexy, it’s refreshing to find a chubby character that is cute!!
Usually, female characters are ‘rescued‘… not the other way around haha.
She’s so adorable and badass! Such a simple, yet inspired design.
Wonder why creators who are vocal about “just really liking girls” only ever make games about the same type of skinny “sexy” girl, when so much different body types, like short and chubby, get ignored.
Shikiri Hasebe stands for all the potential that is wasted when female characters aren’t allowed to represent all shapes and sizes in which real women come.
So there have been a range of reactions to this, ranging from people celebrating that there is finally an auteur who can be honest about their decisions (rather than assuring us of the validity of breathing through one’s skin) to groans about how unsurprising given Taro’s last game (full size):
But really, this misses the larger conversation: In a medium where the people who are investing millions are understandably concerned about what they’re getting, what kind of decisions get approved and what kind get blocked?
Basically there are various creative decisions which will be green-lit without question (literally any excuse is good enough), but others which are dismissed or allowed a brief moment then cut down.
For such a short sentence, it also carries a lot of unfortunate subtext.
Like the implication that sexualizing female characters is okay, as long as you admit to liking girls/women, as if creator’s sexuality made any difference in this context.
Which also suggests that attraction to girls naturally leads to perpetuating female objectification, even though numerous creative people who are into women somehow manage to make projects without it.
Or just the fact that justifying a very generically sexy female design with “liking girls” in general implies that she represents all girls/women, despite the fact that most women look nothing like her.
She will fit into your favorite moba game very good character garanteed
Edit: Holy shit it’s a joke please stop tagging this as reference/helpful/wow so good please stop using this as reference please stop thinking this is your goal please stop holy crap holy cRAP
You need to seriously re-evaluate yourself if you believe the incredibly narrow and offensive things in these gifs oMgGG
Everything about it is so painfully accurate, but the “Pick ≤ 3” part is my favorite one for the purposes of this blog.
~Ozzie
I love how pasties are the only essential chestware and how the actual high heels are not “necessary” just so long as her shoes maintain the same shape as if there were heels there.
– wincenworks
edit: Added the author’s later commentary, just to make it clear that no-one’s supposed to take this “tutorial” seriously. ~Ozzie
Because the subject of “just let the artist do whatever they like/want!” comes up regularly and far too many people are confused about what is wrong about nearly every female character looking next-to-identical, even within one game with a big cast*, this week’s throwback is the guide to the “creative” process behind designing women in media AND their costumes (bikini armor or otherwise) by the invaluable @shattered-earth.
And just for the record, this gifset is still a joke. Please do not take it as legitimate art advice!
