We’re so close to the big 100, and we decided to tackle one of the worst collection of designs we’ve talked about on this blog. This will probably be a multi-week project.
Hi LG. So on the female power fantasy thing: I agree that the sexy warrior babe thing is overused, and women should have WAY more options. But, in interractive media-video games & rpgs, shouldn’t women have the OPTION of playing that, as well as not?
Please remember that I’m a dude, and my opinion on what media “should” or “shoudl not” look like in regards to a) how women are portrayed and b) what women should enjoy is pretty close to irrelevant. I try to throw in a cheap joke here or there, or offer some practical application for what women (or any other group regularly discrimnated against) have said about it. I’m not about to start criticizing women for liking what they like or how they interact with video games.
I will say that any game that markets itself on it’s ability to appeal to the male gaze (especially through super-sexy / absurdly revealing clothing on its female characters) isn’t doing it for their female audience. I’m all for fully-featured, rich, comprehensive character customization, both in physical traits and clothing. Let folks do what they want with their character (including skin tone, muscle & fat composition, size, height, weight, etc). I’m more suspicious of a game in which it is incredibly difficult to find female clothing that is both functional and non-revealing.
I’m guessing @bikiniarmorbattledamage can offer better insight into this, but for me, I’m casting a side-eye to any video game that markets itself using half-clad women as marketing gimmicks.
This is a nice summary of the quoted post and of what our response to things like “do you want to ban all sexyness in media?” is.
In a perfect world, all RPGs will give the player the ability to play as any gender, and wear armor in all levels of protection/nudity. But that’s not the world we live in.
We don’t want to remove all sexiness from all mediums in past, present and future. What we want is for the media’s default representationof women toNOT just be “hot chicks” for the presumed cis het male audience to consume as objects. We just want women in media to be treated with as much respect, complexity and care as the men. And maybe then we can also explore more male power fantasies besides just “big muscle.”
-Icy
Posted on
Powdered ShitBrown Dust Brave Nine, Part 1: Frellea
Speaking ofBrown D… I mean Brave Nine, whatever the changes to the game’s name, story and character roster, it still remains a confusing mess, seemingly made only for the sake of its exploitative waifu art. So of course I proposed to Icy that we stream redesigns from it! We’re definitely alright after staring at them for hours ?
This character is Frellea, older sister to the backstory comic’s protagonist demigoddess Eda and, I guess, from how well-endowed she is, a very powerful deity. I think, judging by character names (is Frellea a corrupted take on Freya?), they’re Norse mythology-inspired, like Odin’s Sphere’s butt-wing Valkyrie. And of course, literally nothing else about the designs communicates that.
It was SO HARD to decide what should take priority in fixing this mess, but the mix of boobplate and scalemailboobsocks went first. I reshaped her breastplate into something plausible and decided to extend the scalemail into a long-sleeved tunic (though that one’s tight fit is mostly my artistic license).
Next step was to tidy up the messy design composition, including the color scheme. Both me and Icy concluded those huge feathery… trains? tails? were purely decorative, so we got rid of them. I decided to balance out the contrast by making that ribbon white (instead of the shade shade of grey as her hair), reusing redness of the other ribbon (and the feathers) on new pants and, most of all, recoloring her non-mail armor to brass color of her bracers.*
Easily one of my favorite redesigns, but also one of the most work-intensive ones, too. Hope you enjoy it!
~Ozzie
PS: *In the comic the helmet and greaves are slightly different metal shade from the rest of armor, so it seems like different artists couldn’t agree on the color. Pic below, for the interested.
Posted on
Posted on
‘Brown Dust’s (now renamed to Brave Nine) Kiria. Hope you didn’t think the other bingos we did for this game were the worst they got!
Based on her description blurb, I think she is an ex-patrol guard in an empire, turned…. assassin? Which her design definitely communicates. Um. She’s the “black scorpion” which is on her scarf. And her entire ass being out I guess communicates her… desire for justice being loud and clear. Or something. I’m also not super sure how her ass is turned 90 without the rest of her leg rotating also… We’ll chalk it up to ninja powers.
And this is the less ridiculous (though not by much) version of her. Behold, the “improved” version!
The only thing that got an upgrade is that scorpion hood, and it doesn’t even look that good.
if your female character doesn’t look like she has lived the life she leads and you can’t get a sense for her actual personality by looking at her because you’re too focused on making her pretty and perfect and palatable it’s bad character design and you should feel bad
It’s worth noting that, generally speaking – this is why concept artists want to be concept artists. They want to convey feelings, story and inspire the imagination. It’s not uncommon for concept artists to do staggering amounts of research in order to find ways to convey a type of character in a type of time period.
So, if you come across a product created by a major studio where they have extensive executive and production staff – it’s safe to say that any aggressively boring female character designs are done at the behest of a particular type of individual pushing a ridiculous myth to try to seem like a genius.
It is important to call out this kind of absurdity, not just to try to reduce the amount of gratuitous objectification in media – but to also spare these poor artists the indignity of having a guy try to convince them he invented anime tiddy.
– wincenworks
Also to note, some creators try to “justify” their boring, pandering designs. Character design should speak for itself. You shouldn’t need someone there to explain it, unless there’s worldly lore the viewer needs to know (like family crests, or magic stuff, etc).
Does the character look nothing like a sniper, while the creator insists that she is? Probably a bad design. Is the character’s backstory strangely convoluted, while also not impacting the character at all besides making an excuse for her to look hot? Probably a bad design. Is the character wearing clothes anachronistic with the setting, just to look hot? Definitely a bad design, unless she sneaked in some stockings from a parallel future universe. (Looking at you, Witcher 1.)
