GASP! Did all that sexy female armor art lie to me? Naaah, it must be because that’s a masculine body. Clearly feminine anatomy is magnetic with empowerment. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Our opinion is that cosplayers are people with their own agency, acting on their initiative and (hopefully) not putting themselves hence they’re entitled to dress as sexy as they like.
If the choices of cosplayers heavily influenced studios then Harley Quinn would still wear her full body outfit and mainstream media would have a lot greater diversity in character race (eg cosplayingwhileblack ), body types (eg chubby-cosplay ) and gender expression.
More important than telling the story. More important than making the character interesting and unique. More important than expanding your audience outside of straight white cis men. More important than making the character human or relate-able.
This mentality is upheld by myths such as sex sells, only boys play video games and that focus groups of straight white men can reflect everyone’s opinions.
The decisions are made by executives, marketers, creative directors and occasional auteurs who make these decisions on behalf of businesses that need to sell millions of units to stay in business. They’re re-enforced by media aboutfantasy art and loud groups who are dedicated to halting all progress.
Sexy cosplay ladies are not a big enough demographic to keep a AAA title in business and they’re generally not respected by society – they have no more say in what goes in mainstream media than slash fiction writers, furries, let’s players or anyone else who has a hobby related to popular culture.
Since convention season is in full swing, let’s remember that condemning female cosplayers (instead the costume designers and their higher ups) for perpetuating sexualization of women in media is just a derailment tactic. It shifts blame from the actual creators onto a vulnerable group of fans.
Instead of pointing fingers in the wrong direction, let’s question the complex issues behind the idea of “sexy” character design and problems cosplaying women face, as wincenworks expounds in this old post.
~Ozzie
As a follow up, I’d like to point out that if cosplay ladies got to decide the content of games – we’d see a whole lot more male empowerment.
Just out of curiosity, what is your opinion of female cosplayers that perpetuate the horribly designed costumes prevalent in comic books and video games? Now that I’ve been enlightened by your blog (thank you, btw), I cringe any time I see cosplayers that wear costumes that display the problems you discuss. I can appreciate the effort and craftsmanship that goes into their costumes, but I wonder if they think about the bigger issue.
Our opinion is that cosplayers are people with their own agency, acting on their initiative and (hopefully) not putting themselves hence they’re entitled to dress as sexy as they like.
If the choices of cosplayers heavily influenced studios then Harley Quinn would still wear her full body outfit and mainstream media would have a lot greater diversity in character race (eg cosplayingwhileblack ), body types (eg chubby-cosplay ) and gender expression.
More important than telling the story. More important than making the character interesting and unique. More important than expanding your audience outside of straight white cis men. More important than making the character human or relate-able.
This mentality is upheld by myths such as sex sells, only boys play video games and that focus groups of straight white men can reflect everyone’s opinions.
The decisions are made by executives, marketers, creative directors and occasional auteurs who make these decisions on behalf of businesses that need to sell millions of units to stay in business. They’re re-enforced by media aboutfantasy art and loud groups who are dedicated to halting all progress.
Sexy cosplay ladies are not a big enough demographic to keep a AAA title in business and they’re generally not respected by society – they have no more say in what goes in mainstream media than slash fiction writers, furries, let’s players or anyone else who has a hobby related to popular culture.
Since convention season is in full swing, let’s remember that condemning female cosplayers (instead the costume designers and their higher ups) for perpetuating sexualization of women in media is just a derailment tactic. It shifts blame from the actual creators onto a vulnerable group of fans.
Instead of pointing fingers in the wrong direction, let’s question the complex issues behind the idea of “sexy” character design and problems cosplaying women face, as wincenworks expounds in this old post.
~Ozzie
As a follow up, I’d like to point out that if cosplay ladies got to decide the content of games – we’d see a whole lot more male empowerment.
Ragingghostsbunker asked which outfit was the worst in the game, so I may as well get these out of the way. This is the conjurer raiment. The male sorcerer looks kinda like a neon sign explode all over a german fairy tale dapper gentlemen The female sorcerer appears to be wearing a bikini with a single long belt starting at her shoulder and wrapping down her leg, and then a single thigh high sock which appears to be made of smaller belts.
Wow. Soul Sacrifice is not great at female gear but what the actual fuck is this?
So, the female armor is a bingo-scoring pure absurd, while the male one is exceptionally ugly. Could this design fail at any more levels?
~Ozzie
Did someone look at the pipe dream minigame in Bioshock and think, “now THAT would be a good look for a breasted person!” cause that’s the only explanation I will accept for this monstrosity.
And if it’s not 10 year old minigames and portables, then it’s… umm……. hmm
…. I have questions but I don’t actually want to know the answers.
Since people often ask “Alright, well this is fantasy! Why can’t we have boob shapes in plate armor?!” I decided to make a post about it. My frustration hasnothing to do with historical inaccuracy and I’m all for imagination and freedom— but I’d like to (very quickly) illustrate this for you:
I purposely over-emphasized the shape of the two spheres in the armor so you can really think about this.
Look at the shape of the blue cups and the green line, think about the form of that on some beautiful ornate plate armor. A female warrior is charging into battle. In the midst of this, she trips! Or is pushed over, or takes a blow to the chest! So long as the force is on the front of her torso it really doesn’t matter for the conclusion:
She feels a sharp pain in her chest and hears the cracking of bone! Oh no, what’s gone wrong? Well she doesn’t have time to think about that, because she is now dead.
Her sternum just fractured, take another look at that green line, that’s where all of the pressure from any front impact is going to go because of the shape of the two blue cups made for her breasts. The rest of the armor slides around your body, but because of the two cups for breasts that are often made in fantasy female armors, the pressure point is directly on the sternum. The breasts are not going to stop the force of you falling onto them, and because of that the metal is going to push in and bash you in the sternum.
What does a fractured sternum do? Why it goes right into your heart and lungs of course.
(that was the sound of all of my followers inhaling a sharp breath between closed teeth at once)
Here are three great solutions to the problem:
GREAT EXAMPLE OF FANTASY TORSO ARMOR THAT IS FEMININE BUT FUNCTIONAL:
It is usually possible to bind the breasts when fighting if they really are far too large to fit into regular looking armor (there’s padding anyway), but most women can actually fit into a similarly sized male counterpart’s armor quite easily. Even if that’s the case, the armor can be made to have a curve to it without putting all of the pressure in one area, which was actually a style of armor for quite some time as shown here:
And don’t even get me started on the dreaded “Cleavage Window”
The “Cleavage Window” defeats the purpose of having any armor on your torso because it means you’re just going to be leaving open the vital organs the rest of the armor is trying to protect.
If people are going to protect themselves and not have much torso protection, invest in some blocking lessons, because the best defense is to not get hit at all. There are also advantages to not having plate armor, and plate armor was often really expensive anyway.
I’d also like to add that boob bulges direct blows straight to the sternum as well, rather than making them glance to either side. Good post.
This week’s throwback: one of the very first posts I reblogged and a big inspiration for BABD even existing. It is THE Boobplate Post – one with the most comprehensive explanations why semi-spherical individual compartments for each boob in armor are an awful, awful idea.
As we made a point before, a lot of unironic masculine equivalents to standard female sexualization come from gay or otherwise LGBTQ male artists.
And @bearsionated’s OSO project is no different: reimagining various Super Smash heroes as human bears (stocky, hairy gay dudes). Now that’s some quality balance to, say, turning pokemon into underclad generic waifus. Except the art is so much better, more creative and varied, even though all characters fit one beauty type!
