Blossom – Bikini Armor Battle Damage

Blossom and the Sliding Scale of Furry Breast

As a person who created some faun-adjacent characters I felt personally offended with how Blossom from Battlerite is handled, particularly her body. Icy’s poncho idea was cute, but obscured all the interesting things about her half-deer nature, which I wanted to explore more in-depth.

If her unwearable bikini top didn’t make it clear, her suspiciously furless torso was obviously delegated to be the “sexy” area of her body, reminding the players that women be sexy and, obviously, sexy and feminine = hairless (?)… Despite her legs and face being covered with brown fur.

I couldn’t erase that awful bra without deciding what to do with her breasts, so I settled on not only making this nature-loving character topless and furry, but also that a deer-person should not be endowed with human female breast tissue. Blossom is far enough on the animal-human scale to not have udders, but not far enough to have chest as a secondary sex characteristic.
Indeed, while drawing this redesign I concluded that the character reads as so androgynous that they should be non-binary in my version.

As for clothes that remain, I replaced the ugly and vaguely thong-like

loincloth

with bright-colored skirt that matches their birb friend’s design. I also upped saturation on the jewelry, so it stands out better and matches both Maxwell’s plumage and Blossom’s optimistic personality.

Also looking at the image I chose made me realize how weirdly receded Blossom’s chin was from this angle. I gave them an actual jaw line and did some minor other edits to the face, adjusting proportions of the nose, position of the mouth and eye makeup (no more black mascara for a magical forest creature).

Not sure if I gave them my all, especially in the costume department, but I’m pretty satisfied with how much difference even the subtlest changes to their body made.

~Ozzie

PLACEHOLDER

BattleWrong – We’re sure that Joke hasn’t been done before!

Battlerite’s a bit of a disappointment in its character design. They seem to have cool ideas (for the male characters and Iva), and their art style is cute and colorful… and yet. So why not try to fix some of their more uninspired designs?

Blossom

To be honest, my desire to redesign Blossom was from my deep-seated frustration with animal-looking characters having a humanoid body shape. Why couldn’t she just be like Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies? Just a deer that stands on her back legs, without breasts and a skinny waist and hips. I realize that she’s a “faun” according to the wiki, which means human/animal hybrid, but the fact that she has both hair and fur on her head/face makes it look like they just slapped some tits on an upright deer. Maybe they were going for something new, but boy did it not work.

I tried to give her more clothes at first, but then decided…. screw it. She’s a deer now. Why does she wear clothes? So in the end, I just gave her a simple poncho. I did want to show off her deer-ness, so I left her shoulders uncovered and gave her upper body some fur, so it’s not weird that she has the same on her face.

I also changed her face to be less Generic Cute Girl.

After I finished the edits, we started making jokes about just Photoshopping a deer head on her instead, so I did that. Got some images of a deer and a birb off the internet, and so Blossom’s True Form came to be. (You can still see the lines from the stock image watermark.)

[She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’ll throw an acorn at your face.]

The result is fairly simple and could probably use some embroidery or patches of different-colored cloth, and some people might say this was an easy cop-out on my part. But I just want her to be a deer, not a deer with boobs; is that too much to ask for?

-Icy

Freya

Thing about Freya’s original design is that I don’t actually find it overall bad – the random bikini top that looks like coconut shells strapped to a choker is the only thing that ruins it.
As mentioned back when we bingo’d her pre-update design (with even worse, sideboob-y bikini top!), she looks pretty great from waist down. Also, while far from unique, her face shape is allowed to be a tiny bit more angular… when viewed from certain angles, at least.

(basically it’s Zarya level of safe approach to diversity in female facial features – still conveniently attractive and wears makeup, but allowed to have square-ish jawline, given that you tilt your head and squint)

But since I couldn’t spend 2 hours of stream only painting her a decent top, I decided to build upon what’s there and add some more actually distinct features.

Of course, the boobplate had to go first. Since it bore some resemblance to Angela’s (coincidentally, also character associated with Norse mythology), I decided to base Freya’s new breastplate on my earlier Angela redesign. Also a blue tank top matching her bracer and tassets, for minimal layering. Left her shoulders bare, just gave them a tiny bit more heft.

I approached tweaking her face to create a more believable character. No makeup (which, unfortunately made her blue eyes with orange eyebrows stand out less), more prominent freckles, bigger nose, more sunken cheeks… All to create an image of a warrior who’s more concerned with surviving battles than spending hours in front of the mirror.

I’m rather pleased with the subtle changes to this design and my painting technique in this piece. Hope you guys like it too.

~Ozzie

PS: I didn’t know that while doing this redesign, but apparently some genius on Reddit, upon seeing slightly more boob coverage on Freya’s official updated design decided to “fix” her back to her original bikini. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Tag: Blossom

Old Redesign Stwitcheroo Part 1

Blossom and the Sliding Scale of Furry Breast

BattleWrong – We’re sure that Joke hasn’t been done before!