Snake-Eyes ShotgunSnake-Eyes Matchlock RifleThe Corrupted Monk, YaoLady ButterflyEmma

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Speaking of the Sengoku period, this ultra-violent game set in that period has a variety of female warriors with different ages, backgrounds, etc and they all look amazing.in their own ways.  Their particular natures showing through.

Of course, FromSoft has an amazing history of positive examples in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, but its particularly interesting that they did it with this game given so many other creators treat the period as free license to go completely off the rails with designs and the game taking the historical context seriously.

And of course, it is particularly delightful to those of us who get people trying to tell us “well actually, its different in Asia…

– wincenworks

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

So, what Noelle is referring to is the silver lining to various shitbags crying that an imaginary woman had bigger guns than them – their meltdown a week or so ago leading to a glorious trend for real life buff women to share photos of their beautiful physiques.  Including this viral tweet debunking the claims that a woman couldn’t get swole within a few years

Now, the Last of Us 2 is (assume spoilers in all the links)

a very contentious piece of art  – with a wide spectrum of opinions about the role of violence (1,2), depictions of a trans character (1, 2) and so much more. However, there are some parts are indisputably positive: the graphics are amazingly beautiful, the accessibility is leaps and bounds ahead of so many AAA titles, and the outfits for the female characters are excellent. 

Someone is frantically typing a comment about how “they’re just clothes” but they’re really so much more, these are outfits specifically chosen and tweaked to reflect the world the characters live in, and the demands of their lifestyles. 

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The outfits and the way they change to reflect the changes in the mood and the characters – all without distracting from the rest of the narrative.  It’s a great example of how much story telling potential you can get out of clothes when you’re not limiting yourself to the most T&A possible. 

– wincenworks 

edit: fixed first Polygon link (right after spoiler warning)

Speaking of men who feel the need to scream, shit their pants an cry in public – its always worth remembering that the same people who insist it’s “just like that” and “people like it, get used to it” are the same ones who have a meltdown when it turns out people like literally anything other than bikini babes.

So it’s always worth restating that you can, definitely get massive sales and piles of awards for not engaging in bikini armor silliness.

It’s true! No matter what Creepy Marketing Guy or the guy who won’t leave the comic book store and hasn’t bathed this week tell you.

No I’m going to go back to staring at Abby’s arms because reasons.

– wincenworks

Selected art of Bryan Syme

I was originally going to feature Siobhan largely due to excitement about the consistency applied to celtic imagery (including using braids instead of locs).

However I felt this selection of his work showcases how once you get away from the expectation that your female characters must be sexy and wear poorly observed/designed bikinis.

Heroic, sinister, rebellious, elegantly powerful, knife gremlin…

…when you commit first and foremost to character design, the potential is limitless.

After all, you can always have them show some skin (nsfw) under more personal circumstances.

– wincenworks

Saoirse from Empires and Puzzles
Referred by @jesuswasbatman

This one is particularly interesting, because Saoirse does have many traits that we don’t often get to see in heroines.

  • Advanced age
  • Powerful stance
  • Evidence of experience (scars and muscles)

However, when juxtaposed with, Anzogh, the first male barbarian I could find, looking in the 5 star heroes, she also serves as a great example of how media tends to present female barbarians differently.

The key consideration on this work is why is the armor and why the specific placement and design of the armor? Why this design? Particularly if its a more complicated design than regular armor.

Anzogh has a ridiculous cow skull on his belt, and a strap across his chest, bone bracelets to emphasise how little he has – it conveys that his is powerful and needs none of the convenience of civilization (like armor). Sometimes these characters have massive pauldrons to give them a more menacing silhouette

Saoirse has armor on her arms, and bits of her legs, the gaps in her armor are not to show power or independence, but to showcase her body from tits to hips. It’s to assure you that despite these weapons, her age and being on the battlefield… she’s got it going on. Generally when characters like this get shoulder, hip or thigh armor it’s to accentuate their hips and frame their torso pleasingly.

This is, of course, completely redundant. She’s got it going on, she’s an experienced woman with immense power – that is a guaranteed recipe for unmitigated horniness from large portions of the audience. Her appeal comes not despite these things, but because of them. There is absolutely no need to give her a battle bikini with a flimsy loincloth.

In conclusion, she’s better than the average bikini armor babe, but still such a missed opportunity for a genuinely great design due to general trends of female armor design that lead to the prevalence of the bikini armor babes (and the shortage of truly empowered men).

A powerful topless barbarian woman she ain’t.

– wincenworks

Okay Google… show me what happens when Nier: Automata imagery gets to outright fetish levels….

Now, my housemate assures me to that 2P is a quality character but this is really an eye gouging example of what happens when certain types of executives lean into a particular mythical aspect of a complex work of media that happens to have some uniquely honest rhetoric.

Particularly I would like to draw attention to who’s not present in this marketing material ignores literally some of the most important characters in Nier: Automata.

This is why we don’t trust explanations for why female protagonists have to have convoluted sexy costumes…. because if nothing else it means that they’ve decided they’re comfortable with making that a cornerstone of their brand.

And… I don’t even know what to do with this except cringe.

– wincenworks

So, as you or may not have seen the hilarity of brodudes shitting themselves in anger that the new iteration of Lola Bunny which is going to appear in Ready PlayerSpace Jam was designed to be family friendly and appeal to young girls, rather than be a recreation of porny fan art of the character. (They literally claimed a fan art by a smut artist was the “original”) (VICE article here)

This magnificent tweet by InspectorNerd highlights why what we talk about on Bikini Armor Battle Damage is an important and often overlooked aspect of design for female characters (never male characters) and also another brief point I want to cover first.

Every now and again we do get people spamming us with out of context links to quotes from large busted women who, generally speaking, enjoy been seen as attractive but are sick of being reduced down to their bust size. They supply these as though it is absolute proof that the male gaze is perfect, and if you critique the design of fictional characters – you’re attacking these real women.

Even if that fictional character is a rabbit.

Lola’s sexiness in the original Space Jam (a phrase I never wanted to type) was primarily because the first thing we learn about her when she’s introduced, is that Bugs (who is naked) wants to bang her.

However, she is distinctly wearing a “hot girl” outfit rather than a “sports girl” outfit that is a strange mix of sports bra and crop top.

It turns out in real life, female basketball players wear… almost exactly the same thing as male players do.

This is because they are focused on playing the sport, not trying to look sexy for the crowd. And as covered before, when they do seem to be posing its generally so they can obtain sponsorship from creepy marketing guys who don’t really care about the sport, just fapping off and collecting pay for repeating their catch phrase.

Thus creating the perception that women’s sports are not as “serious” as men’s sports, even when female teams outperform their male colleagues.

And how do we feel about?

– wincenworks

The line up currently... as per Overwatch standard there are multiple body types for men and one thin, conventionally attractive one for women.Something something sexy back, a hood without a cape is certainly a decisionThe most important thing when aiming a bow is to show off as much leg as possible

Hello Diablo my old friend.

They recently announced the latest class, the rogue, with a bizarre trailer and an even more bizarre costume as the iconic look which seems to try to hedge in a few ideas in bizarre contradiction.

  • An Assassin’s Creed style hood without any cape attached
  • Two part thigh highs that are cloth from the top of the calf up

But of course, they have most of the classics as well.

  • A Xena style combat corset with pauldrons and bracers, but no pants or helmet
  • Extremely high profile, attention grabbing outfit for someone who supposedly pick pockets and moves unseen
  • Combat style is sexy dancing with knives
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Also, while she does look ambiguously brown in the final videos and character model… it seems pretty clearly this was a last minute decision based off the concept art.

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Because brown women apparently need more media depicting them as morally bankrupt sexy thieves… according to Blizzard.

So I would like to take this opportunity to draw attention to this quote from November 2014, regarding Blizzard’s intentions with another game.

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They really need to stop getting celebrated for talking the talk while they do the opposite of walking the walk.

– wincenworks

More on Blizzard on BABD

In it’s “golden age”, the pen and paper Vampire: The Masquerade was distinct from Dungeon and Dragons (and copycats) due to its heavy focus on social and other non-combat solutions.  The game of course had combat, but much like in the original Bloodlines game it was generally fairly clumsy and heavy focus on it was generally heavy focus on making it as short and decisive as possible.

This made it notably popular with people who were sick of dealing with people who’d taken to expressing their toxic masculinity through superior knowledge of statistic math – and that included a lot of women.

I say all this so you’ll see that it makes perfect sense that they’d incorporate a Battle Royale variant of the upcoming Bloodlines game, and naturally show that this was going to apparently involve running around in lingerie and a leather jacket with a reverse grip on two swords in over the top action scenes.

Even more logical that in this modern fantasy game, where they could use countless items of real world gear as inspiration they apparently decided to go with this bizarre mix up gear that looks like it was randomly selected by an AI with a list of “cool” items.

This is truly the apex of Creepy Marketing Guy’s influence.

– wincenworks

Good news everyone, dudes in the fandom agree that Morathi’s bingo breaking design needs some revision.  

Bad news everyone, dudes in the fandom specifically want her hands and bare feet to be cleaned up.

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There’s already a mod for that, but for some reason it also cleans up her make-up (which, like the darkness on her digits, is supposed to be an expression of her internal corruption).

Not to make it look like she’s not wearing any makeup but rather to make her look like she’s wearing a different, more low profile style of make-up that is frequently undetectable to my fellow straight dudes

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Something to think about the next time you see people claiming that it’s people who propose that diversity in representation is “pandering”.

– wincenworks

Return to Soul Calibur: Cassandra, Part  2

Soul Calibur IV/V: The Worst One

I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I decided to tackle the worst out of Cassandra’s outfits. The design started kind of silly at first, with me giving her a butt armor plating pretty much immediately. If she’s going to have a bunch of butt attacks, she might as well pack a real punch with those cheeks.

But as I was trying to figure out how to redo her entire upper half, which I hated all of, I ended up looking up some traditional Greek clothing for inspiration. Even though this is a while after Cass left home, I still wanted to include something that tied her back there. As I was explaining during a stream, SC has all these varied characters from all over the world, all with their own motivations, and yet their designs (especially in the later games) are so focused on the fan-service that any actual storytelling is lost.

In the end, I maintained the color scheme, and even the overall shape spread, with the legs being the biggest shapes (although reversed), and the small shapes breaking up the larger shape of the jacket. I guess the only shape I really broke up were in the arms, because I hate her stupid gloves lol.

I got rid of all of her pink ribbons because they just seem out-of-place no matter how you look at it. Guess they were tying the pink of the shield into her outfit, but they were too stupid. Rest in Pieces, ribbons.

This design would probably suit an earlier game, but whatevs. Overall, it’s pretty passable, if I do say so myself.

-Icy