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.
Arguing over whether she’s a “true” albino or not completely misses the point of the whole discussion. Even if Ashe was (and her design, even when accounted for makeup, makes a shitty job of conveying albinism in person of any ethnicity), this changes absolutely nothing about Blizzard electing to give another pale, thin conventionally attractive woman spot in the cast rather than finally creating a playable Black woman. Especially since she’s clearly not a PoC albino, as many rebloggers pointed out.
People claiming that racebending a supposed albino to be Black is somehow taking away from albino representation are concern trolls.
Literally all “arguments” about Overwatch “already having” playable Black female representation are neatly listed and debunkedin this handy masterpost by @geegee-wellplayed. Please go read it and hand the link to anyone who claims that Symmetra/theAmaris/Sombra/Efi/Lucio is all that Black women need to identify with in the game.
“Ashe is a gang leader, so making her black would be a bad look” rhetoric makes as much sense as any Thermian argument – she doesn’t have to be made as an antagonistic gang leader or to be (extremely) white. It was entirely Blizzard’s choice to release a character like that instead of literally anyone else.
If you actually think that @darthputa or anyone (particularly PoC) doing race-bent redesigns of white characters from predominantly white media is the real racist and you still follow this blog, please unfollow immediately. Or at the very least tell us, so we can block you.
Since it wasn’t the first time we discussed the matter, with the Ashe post we introduced the representation and diversity tags. We’re still working on re-tagging old posts with them, so if you guys spot in our archives something related to those topics and not yet tagged, please drop us a note!
A while back, I found the Female Armor Bingo Card by @bikiniarmorbattledamage and I remember seeing a particular candidate for that while binge watching Anime America. So I went ahead and did the bingo card with Dragon Half’s main character, Mink! Afterwards, I thought it would be fun to do a redesign of her, and even if it took me a while to finish, here she is! I love her color pallette, btw. ;D
Now this is a legit bingo contender! I think we could also mark “Boob window” and “Sharp ornamental pieces” too, scoring another row.
And just in case we get responses from people claiming that it’s ecchi comedy series, so any sort of non-porn sexualization goes… NOPE. Armor bikinis don’t start making more sense just because the series is made mostly of slapstic and fanservice.
I really enjoy the redesign, it’s cute and simple. Amazingly, giving her pants and a shirt doesn’t make this half-dragon heroine look any less like a fantasy character. And golden greaves, bracers, pauldrons and ornamentation still communicate both fantasy aesthetic and that she has a capacity to fight.
Thank you for the bingo contribution, @geistaku0719!
By far the most common certain demographic response seems to have been to claim that it’s fine that literally none of Overwatch’s 25 playable characters is a black woman because line up includes robots, an ape and a hamster… so naturally is the most diverse range possible.
That of course, is not even vaguely what “diversity” is about and even Blizzard executives Chris Metzen (now retired) and Jeff Kaplan (definitely not retired) understand that:
The problem is: Overwatch got prematurely rubber stamped for “good diversity” primarily for having higher than the (abysmal) industry standard for female, brown and old lady characters. (ie, some characters exist).
Now they’ve got that kudos, they’re not interested in actually delivering on promises or even maintaining the baseline.
Well it’s either that, or they decided that a key demographic who needs over representation is conventionally sexually attractive white women. Specifically ones who are almost identical to Widowmaker. [link]
Blizzard already has a bad track record for disregarding concepts of characters of color in favor of making them white and blonde (specifically Mercy and Junkrat) and otherwise ignored concepts for characters of color that they’ve showcased for PR but apparently will never develop
There is seriously no way that anyone can believe that Blizzard, as a company, have any interest in good representation and making everyone feel welcome beyond sound bytes and quick stunts they can do to seek publicity boosts.
“Women should be respected and accepted as they are, don’t shame them regardless of what they look like and what they wear. Do whatever you want, ladies!”
*virtual ladies in bikinis*
“Um, this is infringing on my rights. How dare you? Keep this misogynistic filth away from me.”
Do you not understand the difference between a fictional character, created by men, to be seen as sexually pleasing for men in fiction and…like…REAL WOMEN who are ALIVE and are able to make CHOICES for themselves?
Like, women have some key differences with fictional depictions of women.
Thanks to @giantpurplecat we now have new and exciting insight into just how some creators assume women do choose their outfits [big image here].
“This? I designed it myself. It allows me to communicate quickly with my blade and control it whether sword or whip… I’ve never really thought deeply on why though, to be quite honest.” – Ivy in the latest Soul Calibur
Even the new game’s character creator classifies her outfit as underwear – her underwear lets her control her weapon better… so she doesn’t wear anything on top… even though it’s underwear.
Ultimately the most insulting part about the people who rush to support this kind of double standard is that they have so little respect for women that they will accept nonsense like this (or worse) as great writing.
So, what does the original give us? Amazingly washed out monochromatic color palette, generic witch hat, bare thighs and shoulders, majorly over-designed bone ornamentation that looks super stabby (not to mention, frames her boobs)… and, of course, male version which looks nothing alike.
After covering the gratuitous bare skin parts with poofy pants and sleeves, I decided to stick to two priorities:
Make her color scheme more balanced (original, especially model sheet version I found on GW2 Wiki, is basically all just one shade of emerald!). Hope that dark teal, moss green and ebony compliment each other better when not so washed out.
Turn those needless small ornamental shapes into bigger, less distracting and less likely to stab her if she leans down. Obviously most of what was on her chest had to go in favor of something that doesn’t focus on the bebws.
All the actual design details and shapes were mostly incidental, as I was changing everything as I moved along, over two or three separate streaming sessions.
I guess I could have gone the path of whatwe did to Saint Seiya Online and change the lady’s design to that of her spooky (warlock? lich?) skeleton male version, but I don’t like his design either, just for reasons different than overt sexism. His bone motif is somehow even more overdone than hers (three little skulls on chest, one on right arm, another one on his… crotch?) and there’s the vague “witch doctor” vibe to him that puts this in exotification category.
I decided to go with the traditional sexified male armor path of stripping him down to as little clothing as possible without changing the silhouette. And gave him face skin, because if lady witch doesn’t have a skull head, why should he?
Also made that weirdly suggestive crotch skull actually frame his package with its scary jaw, because we would never miss such opportunity.
You might have noticed that lately, especially two weeks ago, we neglected to post on our regular schedule. Some personal issues fell on us and took more attention than we could spare for the blog. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep the queue going now.
Unfortunately though, our schedules still do not permit to come back to weekly redesign streams. If anything about that changes, we’ll announce it as soon as possible!
use search function to check if we posted on your subject matter already.
We’re grateful for all submissions, messages and mentions BABD gets from readers, however the amount of repeats we’re sent makes it exponentially harder to sift through all of them and preparing posts with new topics.
~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy
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Elvenar continues to be the kind of game with very standard, unsexy strategy gameplay and completely unrelated marketing imagery that is basically Fantasy Porn™ (read: standard for web ads).
And this is the sort of design that amazes me. The kind that covers over half of the Female Armor Bingo card, but doesn’t manage to score a single row. All while not being a full body image. We can only assume whether it would score high heels and/or thigh-high boots if we saw more of this poor poor lady.
~Ozzie
That is very uncomfortable-looking bondage clothing
