Tag: ask

Posted on

ronnie92:

I’m a lady-type person with a large rack (Around european cup size 75j-80j). At this size binding doesn’t really work (at least for me – sports bras don’t really do enough either) What kind of armor you reckon would work best for a large bust?

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

I don’t have a lot of experience in building armor myself, but I reached out to a friend who’s been into extremely enthusiastic for several decades and happens to be a woman.  Her recommendation is a globose breastplate with padding for additional support.  Something like these:

image

(Joan of Arc by Albert Lynch (x) and Knightess by TypeSprite (x))

It is possible that one made off a peg suit you, but more likely that you would need one custom made.  Regardless you’d be going to a smooth deflective curve such as in the illustrations above.  Plate armor like this is actually quite roomy in order to allow movement, so there’ll be plenty of room to add supportive padding.

Globose breastplates are held on with a harness, so with firm padding should be able to restrain even the mightiest bosom.  Similar armoring techniques were often used when making custom suits for rotund nobles,  Henry VIII of England armors show a gradually increasing girth throughout his life.

image

(Photo by Chuck, King Henry VIII’s armor in the Tower of London’s Royal Armouries.)

– wincenworks

Today’s throwback: a question that comes up in our inbox and notes sometimes: whether large-breasted people need special adjustments in armor. 

Short answer is: YES, but it still would not be anything close to a boobplate. 

And a quick reminder that since all armor requires padding underneath, resulting in a

pretty uniform

silhouette across the genders, people with masculine and feminine figures can’t be easily told apart when in full armor. Height and weight of a person are much bigger factor in armor customization than secondary sex characteristics are. 

~Ozzie 

See also: How do I Armor? – Common Gender Signifiers and Armor | whole How do I Armor? comic post series | Resource & Reference tags

Posted on

pressfirmlytoclose:

When Samus was in armor, guys respected her (and even said they wanted her armor). But girls didn’t give a damn. They still don’t give a damn about her in armor, whenever I see fanart of it, the artist is almost always a guy. But now that Nintendo is pushing her as a big-breasted latex model with a nice butt, fangirls are drawing her, saying they idolize her and want to be her (and saying they want her SHOES). Care to weigh in on what’s up with that?

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

image

So… since I haven’t heard anything like this… I went and asked one of my gamer friends who happens to be a woman what she thought. Here’s how she started her response:

“Please provide sources, if you’re going to attempt to tar girls with the same brush that is clearly lubricated by entitled male gamer tears, then you must provide the burden of proof.”

From there the rage intensifies and it gets kinda nerdy, so I shall just share the highlights:

“You’re referencing art of ZERO SUIT Samus, which rose to popularity with Super Smash Bros, which has targeted a younger demographic.  It’s become commonplace to see Samus OUT of her suit rather than in it, despite it being an iconic image of Metroid. Back in itty bitty pixels, we saw as a bonus at the end of a game that Samus was a girl, thats it.”

“If they’d spent any time actually IN the gaming community of tumblr … then they’d be aware that the community ISN’T vocal in favour of Samus’ new look”

“She’s 6 foot 3 too, mind you, and weighs 90kg. The recent sexualisation/slimming of Samus is a move on NINTENDO’S part, not the gamer fangirl base.”

 So to make sure this wasn’t a one off, I asked another friend:

“Firstly, Dudebro McFedora, you have no basis to say that women don’t like Samus.  The odds are that you’ve probably never talked to a girl that’s played the games.”

From there the rage intensifies – so I will just share some of the highlights:

“I will say that I particularly want her shoes. They’re spark shooting death heels  to beat up people.  It’s wonderful; who wouldn’t want that?

They are not appropriate for SSB though BECAUSE THEY’RE FUCKING PUMPS.  You can’t run around in that shit!”

“Samus in her armor is fantastic because it creates this unique position where anyone can play her and entitled ‘macho boiz’ never think to say, “Oh shit I don’t want to play as the girl” or “Sweet, the girl character is fucking hot.””

“Samus Aran is my role model.”

Also, I seem to recall seeing amazing fan art by women:

image

And amazing cosplays:

image

This is not to say there aren’t female gamers who only discovered Samus when they announced her high heels of doom, female gamers who really want to cosplay Samus in heels because they’ll look cute and sexy or female gamers who like the Zero Suit better than the armors for other reasons.

I say this theoretically because I did look to try to find some of them, and between quick searches for them and searches to find choice examples of art and cosplays… I didn’t find a single woman who suggested that she only became interested in Samus due to the Jet Boot heels.

So if you have come across women who only got into Samus due to the high heels, it’s still quite ridiculous to decide those particular women are somehow representative of women or female gamers as a whole.  Particularly since the character first appeared in 1986 – so has had quite a while to grow a diverse fan base.

Trying to dismiss and/or erase huge numbers of female fans just so that you can try to pretend gender stereotypes are facts is pretty much the reason why the rage intensified. 

– wincenworks

Fan Artworks:

Cosplays

Bringing this old ask post back, because I couldn’t help but be reminded of it while browsing through other people’s reblogs of the Kitana/Jade redesign post. 

The “Girls didn’t give a shit about Samus before she became sexy and therefore cosplayable!” rhetoric makes just as much sense as “Women in Mortal Kombat are floss-bikini titninjas because it’s the female power fantasy and the cosplayers want that!”, which seems to be the go-to contrarian reaction to Brendan George’s slightly less misogynistic art direction in Mortal Kombat 11. 

image

[image related to a Soul Calibur, not Mortal Kombat, character, but the “argument” is literally the same] 

Once again, all the props to @wincenworks​’ friends for how eloquently they described the nonsense of the asker’s (and, by proxy, all the other Dudebros McFedora’s) “logic”. 

TL;DR: People who obviously never spoke with any woman sure do feel the most eager to mansplain what women really want from female video game characters. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 

~Ozzie 

notice: This is a reposting of this throwback, due to Tumblr queue being a total goober and initially publishing the Throwback Thursday post on Wednesday. 

Posted on

@wolfscythephotography said

So i just want to say that, aside from a few small gripes (mainly the seeming assumption that only cishet males promote the objectification of women in games. Feel free to tell me if i misunderstood that.), i love this blog. It does address many of the issues in modern media in regards to women. While there still seems to be a small bias it is easily ignored for the most part as the information provided is useful to designers. Thank you, though, for keeping things as straight forward as possible

Glad we can be of service! I did want to clarify our “assumption that only cishet males promote the objectification of women” because we do see people trying to throw the objectification blame around as if that’s productive. We never meant to imply that only cishet males objectify women, just that design decisions that lead to things like this are usually made to appeal to the cishet male demographic, or even just to their cishet male designer. Anyone can objectify a character, but that doesn’t mean that the character was designed to be consumed in that way by certain demographics. With how many “men only” game ads we see, I think we can agree they aren’t pandering to queer women.

-Icy

And on that note!

@ikuni-shock said:

I follow quite a few women / nb people in the anime and games community who are attracted to women (I’m a straight woman), and sometimes I see them enjoying or creating art that is objectifying and makes me uncomfortable. One example is Camilla from FE Fates, and the ‘damaged-clothes’ pictures in FE Heroes. I see women / nb people finding these things sexy. I don’t want to tell LGBTQ people what they should or shouldn’t be attracted to though. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Anyone can objectify anyone else, but in western society, women are often seen as objects meant for the consumption of men. As I said above, sometimes there comes a person who claims that “well, Chris Evans is objectified too! Look at all the gifs of his butt that are on Tumblr!” and that’s not how systemic discrimination works.

There is no social structure in place that routinely supports male objectification or places queer people in the same position of power over women as it does for cishet (white) men. 

That said, we don’t tell anyone, even cis straight men, who and what they should be attracted to. We just want people to be aware and critical of those things and consider the bigger picture of what that attraction means. Especially if that thing comes from mainstream media that inevitably builds the collective image of the world we live in, and not from, say, niche kinky corners of the Internet.

Hope that answers your questions!

-Icy and ~Ozzie

Posted on

what is something you cant stand in games regardless of genre?

enhousestudios:

evilguacamole:

enhousestudios:

Zack: Escort quests.

Nikko: Immersion breaking female armor. I refuse to play certain games because it seems just ridiculous to me. Like this:

This makes me so mad, not for the obvious reasons, but because it just breaks any sense of the world being real (which is important to me, follow the rules of your universe however dumb). If it’s a fantasy world where everyone’s skin is made of stone- fine- let ALL of the characters run around in skimpy armor. But when the female armor looks like this compared to the male armor… it breaks any sense of immersion to me. I completely ruined Tera for me along with other games (Nier). 

Justin: 

Escort quests, yeah. Or.. 

Like fan service…just why. 

But yeah escort quests, fan service, and uhhh shooting games…regardless of genre.

Have you seen @bikiniarmorbattledamage?

@bikiniarmorbattledamage is a amazing, thank you lol

Glad to be appreciated by creators of a promising Kickstarter-funded indie game! 

We have many problems with skimpy female armors (like the fact how ugly and derivative they tend to be), but the immersion-breaking double standard has always been among the biggest issues.
The idea of skimpy armor itself isn’t necessarily bad. It all relies on the execution and consistency with the established worldbuilding. 

~Ozzie

Posted on

So my brother claims that the only games that have oversexualized girls are free to play games or just generally bad games. Overwatch apparently doesn’t count because “it’s overrated” so any examples for good games with skimpy armour? Thanks a lot!

Well, like so many explanations, this creates some obvious issues.

Firstly it’s dependent upon arbitrary divisions that mostly serve to try to pretend various parts of media just don’t exist or somehow don’t matter regardless of who  consumes them.

For example: only free to play?

League of Legends is a free to play game that generates millions in revenues, has a professional esports scene and pretty much launched the rise of MOBAs as a gaming genre.  While it does have some characters who are positive examples, and the occasional sexy man, it’s in fact so problematic it has a whole blog trying to keep track of it all (ie @leagueofsexism)

Long time offender World of Warcraft is basically the MMORPG that got away with not being a free to play game for years and years (and the free part available today is super stingy). 
Ultimately, Free To Play is just a business model – there are good games that use it well and terrible games that try desperately to exploit it. 

As for the statement of generally bad games, well it’s certainly true that many games that rely upon the skimpy armor are terrible.  It’s also true their poor reception tells you everything you need to know about the myth that “sex sells”. However, there’s certainly also celebrated AAA titles that feature all kinds of terrible female attire:

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain has a massively critically successful creation of game development superstar Hideo Kojima.  It was a massive financial success and brought us so, so many wonderful breathing through your skin jokes.

The Witcher 3 collected a slew of awards, critical praise and is still getting massive sales of the game itself and it’s hefty DLC expansion packs after resorting to trying to blame a female character for her questionable battle attire choices and pretend the rest of the problems weren’t there.

As for overrated… well by who?

Every game has people who feel it’s overrated and most games have people who think it’s underrated.  No opinion though changes that Overwatch has sold millions of copies, gotten massive amounts of media attention, generated tons of vocal fans and made millions of dollars for Blizzard.

Really the arguments above aren’t really a useful statements, they’re just an excuse to dismiss literally any game as not being worthy of valid concern.

– wincenworks

Continuing from your brother’s logic, here’s an extended list of arbitrary things a game can’t be if we want to judge its treatment of women:

  • it’s free to play
  • it’s freemium/pay to play/any other technically free

    gameplay model

    that involves microtransactions for the full experience

  • it’s popular
  • it never became popular
  • it’s overrated
  • it’s underrated
  • its core demographic are horny men
  • its core demographic are children
  • it’s made in America and therefore immune to criticism under freedom of speech 
  • it’s made outside of America and therefore comes from a magical land of porn and fairy dust 
  • the title contains letters of some sort in it 

  • it has graphics of some kind

Well that suuure leaves us with a fair and totally unbiased choice of games to talk about.

~Ozzie

Posted on

ilovetoomanydifferentthings:

So my brother claims that the only games that have oversexualized girls are free to play games or just generally bad games. Overwatch apparently doesn’t count because “it’s overrated” so any examples for good games with skimpy armour? Thanks a lot!

Well, like so many explanations, this creates some obvious issues.

Firstly it’s dependent upon arbitrary divisions that mostly serve to try to pretend various parts of media just don’t exist or somehow don’t matter regardless of who  consumes them.

For example: only free to play?

League of Legends is a free to play game that generates millions in revenues, has a professional esports scene and pretty much launched the rise of MOBAs as a gaming genre.  While it does have some characters who are positive examples, and the occasional sexy man, it’s in fact so problematic it has a whole blog trying to keep track of it all (ie @leagueofsexism)

Long time offender World of Warcraft is basically the MMORPG that got away with not being a free to play game for years and years (and the free part available today is super stingy). 
Ultimately, Free To Play is just a business model – there are good games that use it well and terrible games that try desperately to exploit it. 

As for the statement of generally bad games, well it’s certainly true that many games that rely upon the skimpy armor are terrible.  It’s also true their poor reception tells you everything you need to know about the myth that “sex sells”. However, there’s certainly also celebrated AAA titles that feature all kinds of terrible female attire:

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain has a massively critically successful creation of game development superstar Hideo Kojima.  It was a massive financial success and brought us so, so many wonderful breathing through your skin jokes.

The Witcher 3 collected a slew of awards, critical praise and is still getting massive sales of the game itself and it’s hefty DLC expansion packs after resorting to trying to blame a female character for her questionable battle attire choices and pretend the rest of the problems weren’t there.

As for overrated… well by who?

Every game has people who feel it’s overrated and most games have people who think it’s underrated.  No opinion though changes that Overwatch has sold millions of copies, gotten massive amounts of media attention, generated tons of vocal fans and made millions of dollars for Blizzard.

Really the arguments above aren’t really a useful statements, they’re just an excuse to dismiss literally any game as not being worthy of valid concern.

– wincenworks

Continuing from your brother’s logic, here’s an extended list of arbitrary things a game can’t be if we want to judge its treatment of women:

  • it’s free to play
  • it’s freemium/pay to play/any other technically free

    gameplay model

    that involves microtransactions for the full experience

  • it’s popular
  • it never became popular
  • it’s overrated
  • it’s underrated
  • its core demographic are horny men
  • its core demographic are children
  • it’s made in America and therefore immune to criticism under freedom of speech 
  • it’s made outside of America and therefore comes from a magical land of porn and fairy dust 
  • the title contains letters of some sort in it 

  • it has graphics of some kind

Well that suuure leaves us with a fair and totally unbiased choice of games to talk about.

~Ozzie

Posted on

How do you feel about Proctor Ingram in the new Fallout game?

For anyone not familiar, this is Proctor Ingram *:

image

Short answer:

image

The longer answer is someone more complex and has the necessity of spoilers, so pretty much all of this response sits below a cut.

Spoilers for Fallout 4 below the cut.

Proctor Ingram is a high ranking officer within the Brotherhood of Steel who happens to also be living with a major disability – she lost her legs and is instead relying on a specially modified suit of power armor for mobility. 

We’re not really qualified to talk about how this reflects in terms of representation of said disability and unfortunately have not been able to find any helpful opinions or well informed articles talking about it. (If you know any please do link us to one)

However, the use of her armor as a prosthetic is, from an armor design perspective, very awesome and one with a lot of historical precedent.  The MET Museum has an iron prosthetic hand (sadly no image available) from the 17th century. Below is another prosthetic hand made to be used in battle (circa 1580) for a man who was renown as a great warrior:

image

Despite the wide spread belief that soldiers are always super strong, in perfect condition etc the reality is that if you fight a lot you run a good risk of getting hurt, and sometimes you’re expected to fight even if you’re not in perfect condition or even fully abled in the first place.

Dr Tobias Capwell did a talk about Richard III’s scoliosis and how armorers built around scoliosis and a plethora of other issues.  To quote Dr Capwell, “Armorers are biomechanics.” We’ve also mentioned it briefly in How Do I Armor.

Designing armor to assist wearers with disabilities and to allow further inclusion of characters living with disabilities is most certainly a much overlooked aspect of the art and one that we’re always glad to see more emphasis put on for improving diversity and appreciation of armoring.

– wincenworks

* Image via Tauriq Moosa.

Posted on

gearydigit:

How do you feel about Proctor Ingram in the new Fallout game?

For anyone not familiar, this is Proctor Ingram *:

image

Short answer:

image

The longer answer is someone more complex and has the necessity of spoilers, so pretty much all of this response sits below a cut.

Spoilers for Fallout 4 below the cut.

Proctor Ingram is a high ranking officer within the Brotherhood of Steel who happens to also be living with a major disability – she lost her legs and is instead relying on a specially modified suit of power armor for mobility. 

We’re not really qualified to talk about how this reflects in terms of representation of said disability and unfortunately have not been able to find any helpful opinions or well informed articles talking about it. (If you know any please do link us to one)

However, the use of her armor as a prosthetic is, from an armor design perspective, very awesome and one with a lot of historical precedent.  The MET Museum has an iron prosthetic hand (sadly no image available) from the 17th century. Below is another prosthetic hand made to be used in battle (circa 1580) for a man who was renown as a great warrior:

image

Despite the wide spread belief that soldiers are always super strong, in perfect condition etc the reality is that if you fight a lot you run a good risk of getting hurt, and sometimes you’re expected to fight even if you’re not in perfect condition or even fully abled in the first place.

Dr Tobias Capwell did a talk about Richard III’s scoliosis and how armorers built around scoliosis and a plethora of other issues.  To quote Dr Capwell, “Armorers are biomechanics.” We’ve also mentioned it briefly in How Do I Armor.

Designing armor to assist wearers with disabilities and to allow further inclusion of characters living with disabilities is most certainly a much overlooked aspect of the art and one that we’re always glad to see more emphasis put on for improving diversity and appreciation of armoring.

– wincenworks

* Image via Tauriq Moosa.

Posted on

Hey there! I mentioned to my boyfriend (a pretty avid gamer) how ridiculous and useless female armor usually is in games, and he responded that “women would get mad if they wore the same armor as the men”. I’m not sure how one would prove such a claim, so I thought I’d ask here. How would you respond to that?

How would I respond?

image

I remember nearly two years ago, someone tried to tell us that women didn’t like Samus until got those (aesthetically awful) high heels and well it seems that that person was wrong.  Very wrong. Profanity outburst inducingly wrong.  It’s also more or less got it’s own Rhetoric Bingo square:

image

Consider:

While it is certainly true that some women greatly enjoy some heavily sexualised female characters (and we’re totally okay with that), the notion that somehow there isn’t a demand for different types of female characters and different armor options in games and other media is just absurd.

A three volume anthology of stories to provide “characters with feminist overtones” (many, many of them seem to be armored very much like men…) was fully funded! Over a quarter of a million dollars has been pledged to the project – that doesn’t happen unless there is massive demand.

There are plenty of women out there who want big, hulking suits of armor and the ones who don’t are hardly going to get mad at a game that respects the notion of gender equality. 

image

– wincenworks

Posted on

dailypesk:

Hey there! I mentioned to my boyfriend (a pretty avid gamer) how ridiculous and useless female armor usually is in games, and he responded that “women would get mad if they wore the same armor as the men”. I’m not sure how one would prove such a claim, so I thought I’d ask here. How would you respond to that?

How would I respond?

image

I remember nearly two years ago, someone tried to tell us that women didn’t like Samus until got those (aesthetically awful) high heels and well it seems that that person was wrong.  Very wrong. Profanity outburst inducingly wrong.  It’s also more or less got it’s own Rhetoric Bingo square:

image

Consider:

While it is certainly true that some women greatly enjoy some heavily sexualised female characters (and we’re totally okay with that), the notion that somehow there isn’t a demand for different types of female characters and different armor options in games and other media is just absurd.

A three volume anthology of stories to provide “characters with feminist overtones” (many, many of them seem to be armored very much like men…) was fully funded! Over a quarter of a million dollars has been pledged to the project – that doesn’t happen unless there is massive demand.

There are plenty of women out there who want big, hulking suits of armor and the ones who don’t are hardly going to get mad at a game that respects the notion of gender equality. 

image

– wincenworks