The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Tag: commentary
Posted on
Posted on
(Warning: This game deals with a lot of dark material and imagery for this game includes a lot of themes of torture, death, psychosis and gore. I have tried my best to avoid putting any disturbing imagery in this post or linking to any directly)
We’ve had numerous requests for comment on Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and to be honest it’s a complicated topic. It is true that it is a game that avoided various tropes that we’re told games need such as bikini armor, battle thongs, cleavage, etc But the outfit is still not on par with say Emily Kaldwen or Billy Lurk’s attire. (It’s still angering brodudes though)
It’s also a game where the much more important criticisms such as the handling of theme of mental illness and protagonist having locs (which Celts and Vikings did not have, which is why their descendants need various modern products to replicate them). So comparatively Senua’s attire not being terrible is minor.
The game is however is an interesting example of how even studios beginning with the noblest intentions can get pulled down by industry pressure and reliance upon media and societal standards. They started with:
They wanted it to be historical, but when it came time to find reference images… they didn’t exactly cite what I could call historically robust sources:
When it came time to scan a body for the 3D model of Senua, they went with a fitness instructor, who also happens to do modelling. She she did end up half of the things that the original vision promised she would not be, and her attire was designed more around modern fashion ideals than her origin.
The fact that it stands out to so many people as so different and that the developers felt they only had the freedom to do this much by avoiding signing on a publisher really says a lot.
OMG the women’s boots have no heels!!!! You could actually run in those things!
Diverse cast AND sensible footwear! A girl could hardly ask for more…
that gold stripe on the thigh looks like a zipper. is that… are those… pockets?
This is such a tiny detail but it makes me so damn happy but look at the shoes. The women and men’s shoes are the same! There are no heels! Even Voyager and DS9 gave the women shoes with a heel. Even Wonder Woman, movie of my heartface, gave Diana fucking wedges which makes no goddamn sense. But not here! The shoes are the same! No heel in in sight! I fucking love this show already.
Here’s why it’s a big deal when female uniforms in Star Trek have the same principles applied as male ones.
Basically, the franchise’s record in that regard is mixed at best and the reboot films were a pretty big step backwards, even when ignoring the double standard in how female uniforms were cut.
“He knows how to design female armour because he spent years studying corsetry and lingerie.”
Me:
The scariest part of this is that so many of these concept artists who seem to “study” corsetry lingerie tend to overlook some basic details about the universal design principles:
Boobs are not excluded from physics, especially gravity
Lingerie is not generally held on by superglue
Women need to breathe and need internal organs
Different materials have different qualities, you can’t swap out silk or soft leather for steel in… sensitive areas
So yeah… horrifying as it is, studying corsetry and lingerie would actually be a step forward in many cases.
– wincenworks
We still can not emphasize enough that overall quality of costume and character design in pop media would increase if the artists actually studied corsetry and lingerie instead of just looking at lots and lots and lots of examples, starting at puberty, as our commenter put it.
Still, please remember that very little of that would help with designing actual armor, which is a whole another layer of costume and should be treated seriously on its own.
~Ozzie
I can definitely think of a few designswe’vefeaturedonthisblog that could benefit from someone with actual knowledge of corsetry and lingerie. And that’s just off the recentfirst page of our Bikini Armor Bingo tag!
Howdy folks, Myriad of Nocturnes here. I’m thinking of starting a series of posts where I bitch about shit that really grinds my proverbial gears. So, being the bonafide robot lover that I am, I thought I’d start us off with something that really just seems lazy to me.
Robots, Gender Roles, and You.
Credential wise, I’m a Transformers fan, Gundam fan, and fan of pretty much every robot focused franchise you could care to name. I love pretty much every sort of robot design, but there is one in particular that really annoys me.
You’ve all seen the content, i’m sure. A big, hulking inhuman (but masculine coded) robot with all sorts of deadly implements of war, death, and what have you….who shares a setting with a robot with ‘feminine’ coding who looks like a shrink wrapped supermodel.
It’s cowardly, if you ask me. People feel the need to assign some sort of humanity to their robot, rather than allowing it to be a robot. Why does your robot have to conform to hetero-normative gender roles? Why are all of your lady robots running around looking like human women with fancy helmets? Why does a robot have to act in a manner consistent with the way people act?
Ya’ll often share posts about making monster girls more monstrous. I just passed one today that called for people to give their orc women fangs, tusks, scars, and muscles.
I say let your robots of any gender coding have multiple arms, inhuman features, and alien thought processes. Be creative! Let your robot be any gender it desires. If you want your robot to be feminine in some manner, let it, but don’t show us that it’s feminine by giving it big anime titties.
We talk a lot about suspicious dimorphism among design of living creatures, but when this trope regards robots, it’s a special case. There’s no “they’re just naturally like that” Thermian argument to juggle. Instead, there might be the “Don’t blame us for how that fictional robot looks, blame its equally fictional creator!” variation of the agency argument.
@femfreq has an old episode regarding the inherent sociological problem with sexualizing female-coded robots:
The video focuses exclusively on gynoids in advertising, so doesn’t really touch on the even bigger problem in various science fiction and similar media.
Popular media tends to assume a robot, an artificial (not always sentient) being should either be coded male or assumed male in absence of gender signifiers. A female-coded robot is generally requires a “good” justification to look like a lady – usually some combination of being seen as subservient, providing fanservice or the Smurfette Principle. Thus making them look feminine is a bigger priority than taking advantage of the fact that robots can look like whatever – that privilege is reserved to machines which are male by default.
That leads me to quite a bold conclusion that Orisa is by far the best female playable character design in Overwatch – bearing very little gender signifiers (particularly compared to all the human women in the game) and having silhouette that is both very bulky and not entirely humanoid.
An article from 2014 that is no less relevant today. Not surprisingly, all the arguments listed have their place on the Female Armor Rhetoric Bingo.
Here’s one of the summarizing paragraphs of the list which I find most important:
If people only “lose their minds” when the comics industry objectifies women or ignores its female audience, that’s because it’s not happening the other way around. Male readers are not being ignored, and female readers are not being pandered to at the cost of men’s dignity.
Okay, so we had a few people ask for opinions on Yacht Clubs Games adding the Body Swap Mode to Shovel Knight. I want to preface this by saying I completely believe that they have good intentions and have done some very progressive things (like letting you set your pronouns independent of sprites) but that it also has some issues.
The second is that while they’ve attempted to be equitable with the first rule provided: “Body swaps should be exactly as gendered as the original character.” this doesn’t factor in that largely their designs are default (male) and deviation (female). You know, The Smurfette Principle.
Lastly, and linking back to the first point, it’s important to remember that body swap options like this have a very strong tendency to promote an idea of false equality by creating a situation where gender is irrelevant. In real life, people’s gender is often very, very relevant to how the world interacts with them, their internal motivations and their general experience.
(That’s not to say there’s not a purpose to gender options or characters that exist outside of gender, but rather that one cannot just assume gender doesn’t matter – especially after heavily investing in gender roles)
To use one of their own examples, compare King Knight and Queen Knight.
Now, honestly I think the design in the sketch without the ridiculous boobplate effect was better but if Queen Knight looks like this, then King Knight should really look like Henry VIII combining his party and jousting attire:
The idea that “boobs decide if female” thing seems to be a trend with a lot of their swap designs, to the point of absurdity with some designs:
And when they don’t opt for boobs as the signal, it sadly seems to fall down to the idea that a male character has slightly more impressive armor (the most obvious example being The Enchantress) and aggressive stance than a female character.
As I said, I believe that the intention is there it doesn’t seem to have led to the actual examination of issues like “why are we sexualizing armors in the first place?” and “are we making the female characters seem out of place or a deviation?”
That can be challenging questions to ask, particularly if you’ve already got a dozen or so designs you really already love – but not asking them tends to result in re-enforcing the same old messages just in different ways.
This whole thread is definitely worth reading for a better understanding of The Creepy Marketing Guy and why so many games, particularly in early campaigns, seem to rely on generic strategies like sex sells.
So the next time you see a promotion for a game that seems to focus entirely on boobs, butts and explosions then you can be sure that it’s because the marketing guys are getting paid for the campaign, not the sales of the game, and they probably got to interfere in the process of game development, messing with the original vision of the developers, to make that happen.
