edit: We’ve been informed that Poundstone was at one point charged with (but not convicted of) child abuse. I’m sorry I failed to do research on her felony.
~Ozzie
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Bingo-ing her was a bit of a challenge. Not necessarily because Slash checks out too little or too many squares, but because a lot of elements, like the original’s crotch window and the new version’s crotch belt would require custom bingo to actually score.
~Ozzie
So, some of my friends started Quake Champions and I figured… this should be relatively safe game. I mean, the original Quake guy had a cube for a head and Quake 3 was… well for you kids who don’t remember the 20th century, it was what we killed our friends in before Fortnite and PUBG. The games industry has moved on in a lot of ways since then.
But apparently Slash’s outfit design (originally from Quake 3) has not moved on… just like, weirdly sideways and swapping out a garter-belt dress for a crotch belt. (and like… a leather garter belt under spandex shorts as well)
Please take a moment to consider how uncomfortable that would be to wear normally. Like, just standing around.
Now remember that Quake is the property that originally popularized (in first person shooters anyway) the gaming stunt we know as the “rocket jump” where one sets off an explosion underneath themselves mid-jump so the force of the explosion will launch them up.
For those of you typing comments frantically, yes it is true that Quake has never placed much emphasis on realism or even making sense – but I’m supposed to grimace in pain when I get gibbed with a rocket… not when I open up the character selection screen.
Hence it is now one of the few games/properties/products which I truly wish would return all the way back to it’s roots and the glory of 1996.
Join us for our stream at our regular BABD time on Saturday 10 AM PST / 7 PM CEST!
~Ozzie and Icy
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Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 2: Empowering the gentlemen!
In the latter part of our Saint Seiya redesign stream (or, for Ozzie, out of technical difficulties, last Saturday >_>), we doubled down on the switcheroo aspect and swapped armors around. Icy did the sexy male version of the blue knight, while Ozzie took on the male bronze knight.
Well, considering the blue lady’s… creative design, I had no shortage of material to work with. Besides transplanting the boob window breastplate and giving him the same mankini-adjacent undergarment, I decided to switch the original boring stockings out for more interesting ones, with lace! Premium stockings.
I gave him a softer facial expression, to match our lady’s pout, and made his right hand less aggressive. I decided not to give him heels, but I gave him a booty. And last but not least, I gave him glorious mustache-shaped body hair! Thank you to the person who suggested it!
Does every sexy boy I redesign for this blog have very defined junk? … The answer is probably yes. I definitely had a lot of fun with this one, despite this shading style that I had a hard time emulating.
-Icy
Despite the ugly “muscular wide-shouldered male is equivalent to a lady with big boobs and wide hips” motif, the bronze knights had one thing in their favor… the dude has his oblique muscles exposed equally to the female version! Now all I had to do is to recreate all the other weirdly exposed spots from her costume on his.
First thing I decided to do was to make his pose more equal to hers without just straight-up copypasting her legs onto him. Instead, I switched his leg position to simulate her sexy strut, then slightly changed forearm position to be closer to hers. Then I allowed myself to replace his right hand with hers, which is posed less aggresively. And of course, I left the long nails on 😉
His pants are now just underpants and thigh-high stockings. He also acquired high heels. I wondered for a while how to turn his breastplate into something similar to the boobplate with window for each breasts, and finally decided just to copy her piece and reshape it to match his pecs.
Major negative (other than double standard, that is), was the armor’s color scheme that blends with their skin tone. If it wasn’t against the idea of our exercise, I’d probably slightly adjust those colors to contrast better, then the pec windows would be more obvious. Oh well.
As a blog focused on criticism, there’s something we come across regularly in responses to our writing – insistence that we’re “never happy” no matter how much better a particular example is than most media we feature on BABD.
Readers (though mostly detractors) question why we can’t qualify something (mostly games) as 100% positive example if it does one thing better than the rest in its medium/genre/etc.
Examples:
Samus Aran is a formidable fighter and legendary female game protagonist, so it’s totally not a big deal that with every iteration of the character she gets designed as daintier, more conventionally feminine and runs around in skin-tight undersuit and impossible heels rather than her classic power armor.
Overwatch has cast with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, therefore we should ignore how, despite that, most of its female characters are a very slight variation on the same “pretty” character mold and have costumes and poses that put gratuitous emphasis on their boobs and butts.
NieR Automata’s creator admits the main character is another skinny chick in high heels and with boob window, because of his personal preference instead of some convoluted lore-specific excuse… and that honesty means her design is beyond criticism?
It’s quite disheartening to have the audience insist that we should settle for media to be tiny bit better than mediocre and call it a day. That a game or its creator not being as bad as they could deserve to be awarded and held up as an example for the rest of the industry.
We refuse to set our standards so low that “her battle costume isn’t a literal bikini” or “has characters who are female in it” or “shows a male butt/chest sometimes” qualify a title as good, equal gender representation with no room for improvement.
Being better than a random asset-flipping game with stolen artwork in their web ads isn’t hard. Being better than your last project and learning from its mistakes should be a given. Simply not makingasinine excuses for poor representation shouldn’t be applauded. No-one is asking for perfection, but all creators should be held accountable for the product they’re selling, with its good and bad sides.
BABD in particular, instead of doing comprehensive reviews, is focused on female costume and character design compared to male ones. Yet even such specific topic can’t be talked about from both angles without someone decrying unfairness. Does it really say more about us being negative and cynical or the fans being entitled and blind to any challenging point of view?
~Ozzie
*The link leads to a satirical @pointandclickbait article, but the satire is not really all that exaggerated. Yes, really.
We must be doing pretty well lately, given that the majority of totally legit criticism we receive seems to be around the idea that there is really nothing wrong with anything… so naturally we must be deluded or clueless to think there’s some sort of issue with depictions of female characters.
(My personal favorite for this has been people rushing in to tell us since we don’t, allegedly, know enough about a male character in a scene – we clearly can’t tell if a female character’s outfit is ridiculous)
All of this, of course, coming back to the same statement when properly translated: “I am comfortable with the level and quality of representation other people are being given, so fuck them if they’re not.”
When really, the overall goal shouldn’t be to make everyone begrudgingly accepting of the state of global media. The goal should be to make everyone excited about the state of global media.
Because right now every major professionally produced piece of media has so much potential to explore long neglected opportunities and break away from painfully boring cliches. That they’re not doing that isn’t some sort of mild disappointment, it’s just ridiculous.
– wincenworks
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Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 1: Armoring the ladies!
The idea is to take two gender disparate version of the same costume and make them equal to one another, by either basing male version on female’s or the other way round.
We concluded that Saint Seiya Online, which we bingoed twice since, is a perfect material to try this out on, as their concept art (credit to @saintseiya-zone for posting them!) includes most armors in both male and female version, which are basically always textbook examples of double standard in costume design.
Prepare for this being a double feature. Today we’re posting female knights equalized with their male counterparts. On Friday come the same male knights sexified to be as empowered as original forms of their female equivalents.
First thing I noticed about the blue-white knights is that since the dude one happens to be rather androgynous and strikes a flamboyant pose, designers doubled down on “feminizing” the lady one with pigeon-toed pose and super bingo-able version of the outfit. The two share very similar body type, so I concluded that pasting his parts onto her verbatim would work perfectly.
First thing to do was to give her his legs and right hand, so she can strike a power pose instead of generic dainty passive body language completely disparate from her male counterpart’s.
Then the task was relatively easy: paint over all those completely out of place holes in her outfit, give her waist a little more plausible girth and shrink her high heels to be exactly the same size as the guy’s.
It’s actually quite upsetting how the developers put in an active effort into ruining perfectly fine costume just to communicate that the lady version is different.
~Ozzie
I will fully admit that I probably? cheated by cutting the red guy’s chest right off of him (misandry?) and pasting it onto the lady, but I have good reason! We so often see strong women characters who are supposed to have a more “masculine” muscled look, but it never actually gets to the part where they don’t have an hourglass figure with the same old narrow shoulders. (See Overwatch’s Zarya and her most narrow shoulders.) So I wanted this lady to be beefy as heck.
To me, it seems like the artists’ definition of “beefy” for women was just a bigger rack and thiccer hips, and that wasn’t doing it for me. I made her shoulders way wider, stole the guy’s entire torso, and narrowed her hips. You also can’t ever have too much biceps. There are women who look like this, believe it or not.
(A minor thing, but I shortened her nails as well.)
For people who may not like this one because she looks too much like a dude… sometimes people do look like that. And maybe the problem is with our definitions of “manly” and “girly.” Why even cisnormativity.
Please remember to always provide sources with any submissions as there is no guarantee we’ll be able to trace the origin of any images without some help.
thaumaturgists (formerly durendals) actually rephrased its old text after a couple of years to have better wording regarding the notions of individual character agency:
on a textual level, a female character can dress however she wants and shouldn’t be shamed and hated for what she prefers to wear.
on a metatextual level, she might still have been designed with an intention to provide fanservice.
this means that criticising a design and the person/people who created it, as opposed to a character, is not misogyny. being displeased about the way a character has been designed is not synonymous with hating her. it is impotant to recognise that character designs don’t exist in a vacuum.
On related note, “slut shaming” is a term that refers to being shitty to real people who posses their own agency, not fictional characters. For further commentary on the matter, read any of those posts.
