titankoretech replied to your post: “anomenon submitted: Heroic nudity is great, but for it to work,…”:
I need to draw a female superhero team that uses all of those models :3
Please do! I wanna see that!
Also take a look at full collection of this photoshoot here.
It’s gorgeous and inclusive and shows how diverse athletes at the peak of their form are!
Maybe it’s because you’re taking the same strategy you would in designing characters for comics or video games and applying it to real people, except fictional characters are a representation of how you choose to see people or wish them to be portrayed, whereas real people get to do their own choosing, because nothing is more sexist than denying someone the right to choose, regardless of what that choice may be.
anomenon submitted:
Heroic nudity is great, but for it to work, you need to give the figure a body someone can fear in battle. Quite honestly, there’s a very wide range of muscular female body types, just as long as it looks like the girl can lift her weapon and use it effectively it should be good.
Nothing against super-model thinness except that the front-lines of an ancient battle field seems to be the wrong place for it. An archer may be a little more appropriate though…
Thank you for submission! Great art 🙂
I would go and say that supermodel-thin women are not necessary all unable to hold heavy weapons, but their body type is definitely over-represented in popular media compared to any other, including various athletic female bodies.
It is a fact that muscle mass develops in different ways, depending on the type of physical activities the person engages in, thus female athletes can look as different as such:
(from left to right: bodybuilder, two weightlifters and two rhytmic gymnasts)
Sadly, as far as male warrior bodies are represented in many different ways (some more, some less believable), female ones usually are defaulted to generic thin figure with bust size as the only variation (if there’s even variation to speak of). And the rare exceptions tend to be… problematic.
Thank you again, anomenon, for bringing that issue up.
Incidentally I have an issue of ‘La geste des chevaliers dragons’ in my reference pile, because the cityscapes and castles are fantastic, I just thought I should point out that the characters wearing very little armour tend to be savagely eviscerated for their stupidity, not that it isn’t incredibly fan servicy and ridiculous despite that, but at least there are no inexplicably impervious navels.
As Ami of eschergirls and lady-knight- (in her comment) noted, it seems like Ange intended their comic to be subversive of fantasy clichés (so female virgins slay dragons instead of being kidnapped by them), but the execution indulges in harmful narratives (like demonizing women’s sexuality).
I don’t really think that letting scantily-clad warriors die for drama justifies making them scantily-clad in the first place.
It may work in comedy, but La geste des chevaliers dragons (or at least the first issue, the only one I managed to read) never makes fun of those costumes, just assumes we’re supposed to accept them as a sign of female empowerment or some other misogynistic bullshit.
The only character that commented on Jaïna’s non-armor was framed as a sexist dude who’s jealous of dragon slayer’s status, so… yeah, the readers probably weren’t supposed to agree with him.