DC Supervillain Girls 

This stream session was devoted to antagonistic women of DC universe. They might be fiends to superheroes, but mostly to wearable fashion. 


Star Sapphire 

I knew that at some point we’ll discuss the amazingly awful modern costume of Star Sapphire (not to be confused with Starfire, also a DC property), so around the same time we redesigned and bingo’d two equally skimpy takes on the same character. 

Managed to find this official concept art for Infinite Crisis game on the artist’s dA account (please do not bully them for doing a commission of a character who already looked sexualized) that looked like a good material to work of off – digital painting that represents quite fairly how she tends to look in the comics.

There were so very little things worth preserving in the original, so I ended up redoing it almost from scratch.
First I readjusted her cartoonishly thin figure, made her olive skin a little less ambiguously brown and gave her a bigger nose – she’s more often an antihero than a villain since Star Sapphires got retconned into a Lantern corp, so I don’t think she needs to be white-passing. Also changed her haircut to a less bothersome bob. 

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Leaving in her white popped collar, I decided to use white detailing to break up purple shapes on her. Little cape with big white trim and lining is probably my favorite original part. When I was done, we concluded that it’s probably still a bit too purple, so I ended up making an alternate version, with dark violet for sleeves and pants, to have the color scheme contrast better.

Completely coincidentally we’re posting this redesign, which turned out a lot like a Ms. Claus outfit, around the Winter Holiday season. But I’ll take Santa Sapphire over Skin Sapphire any day of any season. 

~Ozzie 


Blackfire 

This was another one of those images where everything in it was just Bad. (See Valkyrie redesign for the first of these that I worked on.) So, I ended up fixing Starfire’s body too. That’s actually what I started with, because it kept distracting me how she’s doing a T&A pose while being choked. Not sure what the thought behind that was….

After that, I had to redline Blackfire to fix her back and legs, and I got to fixing her… “clothes.” I decided to go with the spikes motif and extend it into a vest. I left some of her abs showing because she’s kind of a cocky lady, and I feel like she’d want to show off a bit. I just think that she’d show off while wearing reasonable clothes.

Her face is one of my all-time favorite edits of mine. I also gave her hair red roots because I think that siblings should share at least a small piece of a design element, like I did with Morgana.

This was definitely a fun redesign. People who were there for the streams may remember that I wanted to make Blackfire trans, but I decided to back down on that, since she is a villain, and I didn’t want that association. We don’t have enough of a track record of non-evil trans ladies here, but there will definitely be more of an effort to change that.

-Icy 

Star Sapphire in Justice League Doom

@avatarwill113 submitted: 

Wow. So she decided “I’m going to wear this pointless half-helmet that offers no protection, but I’m going to expose most of my upper torso, in a way which is hugely impractical for most mundane tasks let alone super-villainy”. Maybe she wants to show off her lack of bellybutton? 

Star Sapphire basically never gets a break from godawful costume. 

What upsets me the most is that animated adaptations usually veer on the safer (and less physically impossible) side of sexualized superheroine costumes (see: Angela and Dagger), thus old DC Animated Universe Star Sapphire just wore a leotard and thigh-high boots: 

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The Justice League Doom one is just… ugh.

~Ozzie

Legion of Doom, more like Legion of Skin. 

Nobody in this team has a bellybutton…

Also, apparently that purple star tattoo is where she stashed her powers. Observe.

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Am I the only one weirded out by the casual way with which he just sticks his hand into another person? ( ಠ_ಠ) Not to mention, maybe put the crystal that holds all of your powers somewhere where a person can’t just grab it so easily. Then maybe she could wear a better outfit. 

-Icy

@strawberryshakeus directed us to this thread which combined the usual claims that men can’t be empowered with a bizarre implied narrative that Star Sapphires (Pink Lanterns in all but name) shouldn’t have male members because they’re powered by Love (as opposed to Willpower for Green Lanterns or Rage for Red Lanterns).  

Failing that, if male Star Sapphires must be allowed in the game, they shouldn’t dress provocatively as female Star Sapphires tend to.

Can’t wait for the next troll critic to drop in and tell us that double standards aren’t really a thing.

Come on, who wouldn’t want to look up and see that bold man defending their city!?

– wincenworks

Sadly, DC seems to share the double standard sentiment

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~Ozzie

@strawberryshakeus directed us to this thread which combined the usual claims that men can’t be empowered with a bizarre implied narrative that Star Sapphires (Pink Lanterns in all but name) shouldn’t have male members because they’re powered by Love (as opposed to Willpower for Green Lanterns or Rage for Red Lanterns).  

Failing that, if male Star Sapphires must be allowed in the game, they shouldn’t dress provocatively as female Star Sapphires tend to.

Can’t wait for the next troll critic to drop in and tell us that double standards aren’t really a thing.

Come on, who wouldn’t want to look up and see that bold man defending their city!?

– wincenworks

Sadly, DC seems to share the double standard sentiment

image

~Ozzie