Yes! …and no. While not overtly sexualized, they all have femminizing features that…become impractical. If I remember right the WASP suit had heels instead of flats. Valkyrie’s outfit is, just bad? It doesn’t seem to fit her and is guilty of boobplate and worse. I agree that these are great steps in a direction, like holy hell it used to be worse, but these are not without their faults.
We touched on Marvel and their love of boobplate before, as well as the fact that coverage of skin does not mean nonsexualized by default. Now, we’re not saying that all femininizing aspects of costuming are bad. However, for a warrior to wear heels, or clothes so tight that they can’t properly move (to get that perfect Ass and Legs look, etc)… that’s just not practical, and will probably lead to injury.
Of course some of these costumes have positives; it’s not often we see a lady character wearing a helmet, for example. But we can definitely do better, and we should! And hopefully, we will.
things that don’t break white male gamer’s immersion: dragons, magic, made up metals, impossibly large weapons, eating 50 potatoes while in combat, riding a horse up a 90 degree cliff
things that break white male gamer’s immersion: realistic armor for women, black people
This time reblogging from @big-wired, who was smart enough to convert it from garbage chat post format into a text one AND made a valuable addition to the list of things that (cis) white males can’t handle in games (and other media) because ‘historical accuracy’… in largely fantasy worlds.
Though we would be here all day if we were to list ALL the common and perfectly normal (often historically accurate) kinds of things and people that “ruin” the immersion of a Status Quo Warrior gamer dudebro.
When Samus was in armor, guys respected her (and even said they wanted her armor). But girls didn’t give a damn. They still don’t give a damn about her in armor, whenever I see fanart of it, the artist is almost always a guy. But now that Nintendo is pushing her as a big-breasted latex model with a nice butt, fangirls are drawing her, saying they idolize her and want to be her (and saying they want her SHOES). Care to weigh in on what’s up with that?
So… since I haven’t heard anything like this… I went and asked one of my gamer friends who happens to be a woman what she thought. Here’s how she started her response:
“Please provide sources, if you’re going to attempt to tar girls with the same brush that is clearly lubricated by entitled male gamer tears, then you must provide the burden of proof.”
From there the rage intensifies and it gets kinda nerdy, so I shall just share the highlights:
“You’re referencing art of ZERO SUIT Samus, which rose to popularity with Super Smash Bros, which has targeted a younger demographic. It’s become commonplace to see Samus OUT of her suit rather than in it, despite it being an iconic image of Metroid. Back in itty bitty pixels, we saw as a bonus at the end of a game that Samus was a girl, thats it.”
“If they’d spent any time actually IN the gaming community of tumblr … then they’d be aware that the community ISN’T vocal in favour of Samus’ new look”
“She’s 6 foot 3 too, mind you, and weighs 90kg. The recent sexualisation/slimming of Samus is a move on NINTENDO’S part, not the gamer fangirl base.”
So to make sure this wasn’t a one off, I asked another friend:
“Firstly, Dudebro McFedora, you have no basis to say that women don’t like Samus. The odds are that you’ve probably never talked to a girl that’s played the games.”
From there the rage intensifies – so I will just share some of the highlights:
“I will say that I particularly want her shoes. They’re spark shooting death heels to beat up people. It’s wonderful; who wouldn’t want that?
They are not appropriate for SSB though BECAUSE THEY’RE FUCKING PUMPS. You can’t run around in that shit!”
“Samus in her armor is fantastic because it creates this unique position where anyone can play her and entitled ‘macho boiz’ never think to say, “Oh shit I don’t want to play as the girl” or “Sweet, the girl character is fucking hot.””
“Samus Aran is my role model.”
Also, I seem to recall seeing amazing fan art by women:
And amazing cosplays:
This is not to say there aren’t female gamers who only discovered Samus when they announced her high heels of doom, female gamers who really want to cosplay Samus in heels because they’ll look cute and sexy or female gamers who like the Zero Suit better than the armors for other reasons.
I say this theoretically because I did look to try to find some of them, and between quick searches for them and searches to find choice examples of art and cosplays… I didn’t find a single woman who suggested that she only became interested in Samus due to the Jet Boot heels.
So if you have come across women who only got into Samus due to the high heels, it’s still quite ridiculous to decide those particular women are somehow representative of women or female gamers as a whole. Particularly since the character first appeared in 1986 – so has had quite a while to grow a diverse fan base.
Trying to dismiss and/or erase huge numbers of female fans just so that you can try to pretend gender stereotypes are facts is pretty much the reason why the rage intensified.
Bringing this old ask post back, because I couldn’t help but be reminded of it while browsing through other people’s reblogs of the Kitana/Jade redesign post.
Once again, all the props to @wincenworks’ friends for how eloquently they described the nonsense of the asker’s (and, by proxy, all the other Dudebros McFedora’s) “logic”.
TL;DR: People who obviously never spoke with any woman sure do feel the most eager to mansplain what women really want from female video game characters. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
~Ozzie
notice: This is a reposting of this throwback, due to Tumblr queue being a total goober and initially publishing the Throwback Thursday post on Wednesday.
Her shoes looks stylish and comfy, I’ll give her that. Other parts not only serve zero protection against weather and battle damage, they also look like they’d slip off from her body within minutes of moving around.
I remember when Fortnite first came out I had a look and felt that while it was kind of nice they were doing a little body diversity, they had a pretty clear agenda when it came to the Female Constructor design:
Apparently there are still those out there for whom this is not sufficient conformity to traditional pandering, even if this character is also an option in the original game (no PhotoShop required)
Have to say though, I feel pretty proud that “tumblrization” is credited for any sort of deviation from these designs. Another bright side is this has pretty great meme potential (with a few great ones in the Twitter thread already).
– wincenworks
It’s quite telling about attitudes towards beauty standards when a slightly cartoony female character of average human built, with tan skin tone and clad in regular street clothes (and not the “unfeminine” full battle gear) is such an unbearable level of SJW pandering which the status quo warriors find necessary to “fix” with whitewashing, bikini tops and photoshop-based plastic surgery.
Just imagine how they would “un-tumblrize” Constructor if her original design wore a bulletproof vest, had darker skin and hair, zero makeup, fatter body and more detailed, less smooth facial features.
~Ozzie
Credit to icantatricks and mitotic for the discovering of the photoshopped image,
So, as well as just to remind the world in general what the kind of people who complain that their female characters in battle royale games are “not sexy enough” are like… before Tumblr turns to ash and we all forget it existed except as a cautionary tale: I thought it’d be nice to bring this one back.
Not just because of its content, but because well when @gailsimone (who would never troll ANYONE) made a similar series of posts about the Punisher… well certain demographics did not show it the kind of support you’d expect. At all.
So… this incredible encapsulation of so many things wrong with “gamer”culture actually happened. An “esports apparel” shop somehow managed to make a dress that was more cheerleader outfit (or chair) and in order to “show respect” to “female gamers” (also known as women) and decided to brand it as a “new identity” as though none of them have worn a dress before. Unsurprisingly, more people liked this amazing parody than the real thing.
But needless to say, they learned an important lesson about women’s clothing and considerations to make. Certainly not considerations like wanting gaming gear to comfy for hours of sitting around playing games. They learned about marketing, specifically “delivery of tweets”:
So of course, as of the time of this post their ratio’d tweet is… pinned and their most recent “likes” entry was… more like “yikes”.
Yes, literally all they actually learned after a full 24 hours of free feedback is that “female gamers” are women… and frankly I’m not convinced they’re going to remember that when they sober up.
– wincenworks
Yikes indeed. There’s… so much to unpack in this and I don’t even know where to start.
I suppose what amuses me the most about this case is that Cranium Apparel somehow could not be assed to involve any women in creating that outfit, yet once called out on casual gender essentialism of selling a cheerleader dress as their exclusive piece of “female gamer” apparel… THEY NOW ASK THEIR FEMALE CRITICS to do the job of marketing team for them for free (and calling feedback they dislike “hate”).
All the while shamelesslyclaiming that they did their market research beforehand and none of the “few females” they asked foresaw the backlash.
This company desperately needs to replace its PR and marketing departments, preferably with an all-female staff.
i wanted to fix some things that made me uncomfortable…also it was fun kinda redesigning these ladies from bnha cuz god damn their original suits are shit and dont make sense according to their quirks….
first off: shutup omg. yall forgetting these are fictional women written by a man. “they design their own outfits” is a dumb argument. these women dont exist and didnt decide anything. the artist/writer did. get smart.
second. the only thing different with momo is i took away the tittyshow of a 15 yr old. she still has a window on her chest and tummy but a lot of the shit she forms from her body comes from her back and limbs. there’s an inch long difference between her weird ass skirt and the shorts i gave her– i think she’ll make do.
ashido is a disaster. her quirk is secreting acids so why are the parts of her body that show as much skin covered? legs take up a lot of the body. the only other difference in her uniform is–once again— i took away the tittyshow of a 15 yr old. i literally gave her MORE skin to show.
let me wrap it up with nemuri since yer argument to this was by far the dumbest. nemuri can still rip off her clothes. she is STILL showing the same amount of skin as the original. I just changed the color and design so it looked like this bitch didnt just roll outta bed and throw over a hot topic lingerie set over a white lace onesie.
Those are very awesome redesigns of some of the worst female costumes in current mainstream anime. Thank you, @bumbleshark, for saving those poor heroines.
And it’s not like My Hero Academia can’t do female costumes well. It just seems to mysteriously give up when a certain threshold of boob size is crossed ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
~Ozzie
Well yeah, Ozzie; at a certain boob size, you gotta give them a window to breathe through. Thenyou strap them in with your boob sealbelt. And MHA’s got both!
A handy armor design 101 for games (but works for other visual media as well). It approaches a lot of tropes we often discuss, like the importance of covering vital body parts or the absurdity of adding boobplates and high heels to female armor.
I especially like how the article handles the double standard in gendered armor silhouettes, a subject we alluded tobeforea fewtimes, but didn’t have opportunity to talk in depth about. Thus, here’s an excerpt:
Tight armor and layers
Looking at the Demon Hunter (Diablo III, Blizzard Etertainment, 2012) above, you will notice that while her shoulder pads and scarf increase in size with her armor level, her waistline does not. In this case, it looks like she keeps wearing only some sort of leather corset to protect her stomach, while strapping on enough excess metal on the rest of her body to build a spare suit of armor. Honestly, I would have advised her to trade the sexy female silhouette for actual protection. This would mean adding for example a gambeson and maybe also a mail under the harness, which would make her waistline several inches thicker.
[…] While you would most likely want the layer that looks like leather here to be padded to soften incoming blows, and the harness probably is too tight to actually move around in, it shows quite well how layers are put upon layers in heavy armor. This sadly means that you’ll have to choose between looking like an hourglass and surviving while fighting.
This week we’re bringing back the nice little guide to armor design for fiction, with special emphasis on double standard in portrayals of layering in male and female armored characters.
