Everytime I go on the train with Evie Jacob is sitting there and says
“is that what your wearing?”
Evie got that sass.
But then, when you are rocking threads like this, it is understandable!
I really love this outfit for Evie as a great example of how you can (particularly with modern animation technology) make fantastic and creative costume designs for female characters (even assassins) without dipping into the bikini armor or other "ridiculously sexualized” bins.
I’ve been playing some Elsword recently, and I decided that I couldn’t leave this un-bingoed. The elf is Rena in Night Watcher form, one of her advanced class options. No bingo, but pretty close.
I feel like her hair, the cape, and that weird belt-overskirt thing must get in the way a lot.
It’s amazing how a design this busy can be also that lazy and generic. So many details and needless accessories, yet not a single drop of genuine creativity was poured into that costume.
Just a “Draw a naked animu elf girl with marbles on her chest, paint the mandatory and optional areas from this chart green, add as many belts, feathers and flowy fabric to trip over as possible. Don’t forget to make her hold her weapon entirely wrong.” approach. And that’s a high-end “armor” in this game? Creative freedom, everyone!
I’ve been playing some Elsword recently, and I decided that I couldn’t leave this un-bingoed. The elf is Rena in Night Watcher form, one of her advanced class options. No bingo, but pretty close.
I feel like her hair, the cape, and that weird belt-overskirt thing must get in the way a lot.
It’s amazing how a design this busy can be also that lazy and generic. So many details and needless accessories, yet not a single drop of genuine creativity was poured into that costume.
Just a “Draw a naked animu elf girl with marbles on her chest, paint the mandatory and optional areas from this chart green, add as many belts, feathers and flowy fabric to trip over as possible. Don’t forget to make her hold her weapon entirely wrong.” approach. And that’s a high-end “armor” in this game? Creative freedom, everyone!
It’s an adequate superheroine outfit and has Diana’s iconic elements intact, but its supposedly biggest change, the skin-covering catsuit, seems indeed like an uninspired,colored-in afterthought.
While, as Bob points out in the video, there will always be a crowd unsatisfied with the changes (especially for such a popular character), I say it’s crucial to just PUT AN EFFORT into a redesign. Only then things can begin to work out.
See, for the record, BABD’s favorite re-imaginings of Wonder Woman:
Ironically when it comes to characters like Diana, a large part of this is that the comics industry is influenced by unhealthy amounts of nostalgia so instead of doing completely fresh re-designs they tend to insist on homaging the original.
And when the outfit was as ridiculous as Wonder Woman’s original outfit it’s kind of hard to make something that looks credible. Particularly since people aware of her origins tend to go with “sexy pinup dominatrix” rather than “genuinely intimidating and dominant woman”.
So i’ve come across this blog of yours, and i can’t help but notice you seem to hold this ideal that showing skin is bad. I’m not saying there’s not a time and a place for everything, and i’d be quite warm to a game where someone in skimpy or silly armor got their just desserts. But i don’t see why you think these designs inherently wrong on such a level. Designers designed them for a reason. They had a vision of the character and made them a certain way. No “change” needs to be made.
You’re right, designers did design them that way for a reason: to be sexy. And that’s where a change needs to be made. When everyone is “sexy”, no one is. There needs to be more variety in female character designs.
You see, women are like onions. But not because they turn brown and start sprouting little white hairs if you leave them out in the sun too long: because they have layers (didn’t you see Shrek, geez). They’re also all different, though you wouldn’t guess so based on media representations of them. I’ll start accepting a designer’s vision for a sexy lady, the minute that stops being the only vision they ever have.*
*Also what we get isn’t always the original design as there’s sometimes pressure from editors or other outside influences to make the character “sexier”.
As a designer myself I’m REALLY tired of this argument. Art and design does not exist in the vacuum. An idea being the artist’s “vision” does not make it inherently good or creative, in fact the first ideas that come to a designers mind tend to be the most derivative and uninteresting.
On the other hand, as Staci notes, lots of designs RHA, BABD and related sites comment on aren’t actually a result of concept artist’s original idea, but a product of many revisions from the executives. And executives (unlike artists they hire) are the people whose “vision” is usually the farthest from creative.
No matter how you look at the “artist’s sacred vision” logic, it’s flawed and in no way justifies a cliched, unresearched, insonsistent design.
~Ozzie
Bringing this back as a reminder that “an artist created it, therefore it’s creative” is NOT a valid rhetoric to justify bikini armors… or anything, for that matter.
