It hasn’t been a great few months for our weekly streams, as things keep getting in the way. We will try to continue our Hot Marvel Dudes redesigns next week.
Fantasy does NOT have to follow real world rules. Fantasy does NOT have to relate to some real world event, country, concept, law, or history. Fantasy does NOT have to mirror any particular time period or country, even if you’re basing your world on a real world one. There is NO SUCH THING as “historical accuracy” in fantasy as it relates to the real world.
THE ONLY THING Fantasy has to do to be believable is follow the established rules OF ITS OWN WORLD. Fantasy can literally be anything you imagine it to be.
If your fantasy world excludes people of color or those belonging to the LGBT+ community, if it’s grossly misogynistic and white cis-male centric, that’s because YOU made it that way. Stop blaming “historical accuracy” or “believability”. It’s not the genre; it’s YOU.
@bikiniarmorbattledamage I believe this is highly relevant to the rhetoric you guys often combat.
Indeed all of this relates to all the stuff we talk about on BABD.
Ultimately, no matter the justifying rhetoric, it’s the creative decisions that will be under scrutiny, not some superficially “objective” rules regarding a fictional setting.
~Ozzie
The cool thing (that people sometimes forget), is that a fantasy setting, rather than being historical fiction (somehow), instead illuminates the values of its creator. Sure, it feels bad to be called out, but it really does make you a better creator if you ask yourself: why are all my characters light skinned/skinny/cis/straight/male/etc?
Sometimes, there are good reasons, like if the story is about (to use a basic example) race-based oppression, and all the characters are on one side of that. But sometimes the reason is just “cause that’s what i like.” And honestly, besides being a bad reason, that’s just boring.
If I hadn’t gone through this process myself, I wouldn’t have my favorite Pathfinder OCs! Just sayin’.
-Icy
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SAO/GGO Figurine Redraws, Part 2: The Incest Fairy
Why do I call her The Incest Fairy? Well… people even remotely familiar with SAO’s lore are aware that this character’s sexualized design is only worse in the context of her story >_> The interesting twist is that this girl who joins the main character in the game turns out to be his adoptive sister/cousin, literally playing in the next room. The creepy twist is that she happens to have a massive crush on him.
So, there’s a lot of emphasis on Leafa’s ample cleavage here, with the creepy anime waifu hand gesture which I hate. I redrew her hand completely. Then I reworked her weird impractical cincher into something combined with a leather vest, to contain her breasts with something more than just the white top (which I made less boobsocky). Keep in mind her breasts aren’t smaller now, they’re just held together by actual clothes.
I also decided to give her a bit less generic anime facial features, with a more prominent nose, chin and eyebrows. Also subtly changed her eyes’ expression and added some detail to the shading on her face and hair, so that it’s all more interesting and not as weirdly 2-dimensional on a 3D figurine.
Or course, her waist was tiny and her limbs stick-like, so I gave them some heft. The most head-scratching part of her costume were the tights that somehow just… disconnect in the middle of the thigh, then continue below like nothing happened. I made them whole, then added thin green stripes, to match the one stripe on each of her arms. Also, since there was little to no contrast between where the tights end and the boot begins, I recolored the upper part of the boots into golden rings, matching ones on her wrist. Now her legs and arms don’t look like designed separately.
I also noticed what seems like a minor case of Imperial Walker Hip, or at the very least that her right leg is disjointed from her pelvis. Did the best I could to fix it with limited time and liquify tool at my disposal. It’s not ideal, but at least I also took that opportunity to not make her crotch visible from the cut in front of her skirt. I would probably repaint the whole pelvis section if I had to do it today, because even with some painting over the current results are kinda awkward.
I have no idea what those white… pillows she was standing on were, but they looked so weird and suspiciously boob-shaped (a thing really hard to not think about when looking at this figure), so I decided to erase them the best that I could with my Photoshop stamp tool skills.
Overall, not the most creative or technically proficient of my work, but hopefully she ended up as something with more balanced design than just “DID YOU NOTICE I HAVE A CHEST?”, which seemed to be the principle of the original.
It’s Hot Guys Week! Come hang out (and maybe even provide ideas) while we empower some fictional men.
Daylight savings ending in some places might affect your watching time, so you can check your local time here. We’ll be streaming on Saturday at 11 AM PST / 7 PM CET!
yeah but, cartoon women, any drawn women, aren’t wearing those skimpy and sexual clothes out of choice, they’re wearing it because someone drew them that way, normally for a reason. so so don’t go “oh maybe she chooses to fight crime in a bikini and high heels” bc a man sat at a desk and decided she was gunna wear those clothes, for a reason, for the audience or his gaze. so no, its not slut shaming, its creepy man shaming
*applause* A point that sadly needs to be constantly reiterated. I’ve been saying exactly this for a long time now!
We’d appreciate never again having this nonsense rhetoric thrown at us.
~Ozzie
As a well-known cartoon woman once said:
I get it; people get attached to fictional characters. I do it a lot, too. But that doesn’t mean that they’re real and sentient. All I think of when I hear a creator justify a character design with “she chose to dress that way,” is that they probably only sees the character as an object with no actual motivations.
-Icy
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SAO/GGO Figurine Redraws, Part 1: “Bulletproof Armor”
This one was Ozzie’s idea, as she’s heard a lot about Sword Art Online and then got me in on those videos. I decided to stay in the franchise but go to a different fictional MMO. This is Sinon from the in-anime game Gun Gale Online, which is about characters with guns running around doing… stuff.
I was doing some Googling trying to find the online store where I first found this thing and am now regretting I didn’t go for this picture instead:
Just kidding, I don’t regret it at all. This is a totally Serious Action Anime, not about girl butts at all.
Anyway, I’m stalling because my redesign is pretty boring, I think. Most of my time was spent trying to fix her posture. Is this another casual, confident pose? Oh sorry, the description says she “marches along the battlefield.”
Apparently she is supposed to be wearing “bulletproof armor” in the original?????????? Where is it??????? So I gave her actual coverage that would allow her to lay on the ground and snipe without getting dirt and sand inside her clothes (also known as a Yikes). Honestly, I was so distracted by her pose that I couldn’t really think of any cool design elements to give her. I even kept the stupid boob-supporting buttons on her shirt.
Maybe one day I’ll go back to this and do it some justice. At least now I can believe she’s actually a sniper wearing bulletproof armor.
-Icy
PS – God, I forgot what the back of her looked like…. enjoy!
Some readers notified us that redraws which include crotch bulges for characters I reimagined as trans women are fetishistic and transphobic. I should have known better than to depict trans bodies in that way and I apologize sincerely. It goes directly against BABD’s philosophy of not reducing people, especially members of vulnerable groups, to body parts. I promise to do better in the future.
As a commenter on one of the old posts on that said, great thing about the original Harley in Batman: TAS was that instead of being a 24/7 femme fatale (like most other villainesses), she dressed and acted sexy specifically for the occasion of having actual sex.
Compare also to our critique of Starfire, another superhero comic woman known for being openly sexual in her private life whose “sexy” costumes make zero sense in context of fighting.
PS: If you can’t find Harley’s original bodypaint skin tight catsuit sexy enough without removing 80% of its coverage, we’re really worried for you.
