Storms are raging, power is threatening to go out once again, so we’ll be taking the weekend off. Hopefully nature will cooperate next week! ?
~Ozzie and Icy
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Mortal Kombat Post-11 Sexy Fix, Part 1
Since “real fans” demanded for Mortal Kombat11 to bring back the sexyness, we decided to succumb to the demands and fix some disappointingly unsexy characters. If women in martial arts games are titninjas, it only stands to reason that male equivalent is a pecninja, right?
Scorpion the Yellow Pecninja
This design was surprisingly generous in showing us his oblique muscles and a tasteful sideboob sidepeck, so I had something to work of off! I reduced the top only to two strips of cloth forming a V and definitely-not-useless pauldrons that don’t even reach his lovingly rendered biceps now. And, of course, the male-presenting nipples clearly on display!
Since I went for the aesthetic that female characters sported for the last couple MK games, he ended up with long, laced stockings and arm warmers. Also obligatory zero pants.
The last fix was, of course, giving Scorpion an attractive face. Since the hood concealed most of his head, the look had to be redone from scratch. I went with Icy’s suggestion of stylish wolf’s tail as a hairstyle and paired it up with bold eye makeup, to give him a striking gaze.
I’m quite happy with the result and how much of his original costume’s silhouette and color scheme I managed to preserve.
A lot of people who view my feminist leanings as an “act” always point to the fact that I used to draw fetish art a decade ago as some sort of hypocrisy. But the fact of the matter is that just because I don’t draw fetish art anymore and identify as a feminist now doesn’t mean I have some sort of vendetta against it. The problem that arises when feminists clash with comic/game/geek content is because the “context” for the “sexy artwork” either doesn’t exist or is so flimsy it might as well not exist. There is nothing wrong with NSFW artwork, providing the context makes sense (and that includes the WHERE and HOW it’s being published).
Sidenote: I CANNOT recommend “Sunstone” enough to y’all. It’s amazing and you should check it out! Here’s the link to it on AMAZON.
PS: I genuinely don’t care that Quiet is a mute and can’t talk (that’s problematic in and of itself). I just wanted to make a point.
Huh, who knew there is a time and place to make female characters sexy and that time is not “always”?
Time for a reminder that this “sexy women just because” is such a norm that many seasoned creators still want to promote the idea that doing other than is somehow at odds with making a quality product.
Cliff Bleszinski recently got roasted for an Instagram post where he framed putting diversity into LawBreakers as a factor in its collapse, specifically because it did not get the praise that Overwatch did:
Ever since the studio closed I’ve been wracking my brain what I could have done differently. Pivot HARD when the juggernaut of Overwatch was announced. Been less nice with my design ideas and more of a dictator with them.
One big epiphany I had was that I pushed my own personal political beliefs in a world that was increasingly divided.
Instead of the story being “this game looks neat” it became “this is the game with the ‘woke bro’ trying to push his hackey politics on us with gender neutral bathrooms.” Instead of “these characters seem fun” it was “this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier.” Instead of “who am I going to choose” it became “white dude shoehorns diversity in his game and then smells his own smug farts in interviews” instead of just letting the product … speak for itself.
It’s okay to be political when your company or studio is established for great product FIRST. But we were unproven and I regret doing it. (This will be quite the doozy of a chapter in the upcoming memoir.)
Now obviously there were the usual suspects chanting “Get Woke Go Broke” when the game closed, but largely (in places that are not boiling cesspits) it didn’t get a lot of discussion either way because of a wide variety of other, more pressing factors like gameplay, bugs, sever issues, graphical similarity to Overwatch, etc.
But the first thing that springs to mind is “I should have made the female characters sexier” because the conventional wisdom is somehow (despite society’s ongoing oppression of sex workers) female characters looking less than porny is a risky political statement.
