The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Nothing says quality gameplay by assuring people that you don’t have to worry about actually playing! The game plays itself while you’re not playiing!
But it comes coupled with reassurances that if you do deign to actually learn to play their game, there’ll be more boobs.
Oh well, at least this bizarre combination of bikini armor, promises of gameplay and promises that you don’t need to play is unique right…
Oh…
– wincenworks
A few things to tidy up this week:
Our tag cloud is courtesy of Post-Theory.
For those of you arguing that the guys in Final Fantasy XV are equally sexualized and objectified as Cindy: I hate to break it to you but you’re clearly getting it confused with Final Fantasy XIV.
If you have written an article, column, etc for somewhere else but you want to share it and you’re free to do you may absolutely submit it (or a link to the original publishing if it’s online and accessible).
– wincenworks & ~Ozzie
Cindy is basically the first female character you get to have significant interaction with in Final Fantasy XV, and while she’s not a warrior I’m going to make an exception here because.
1. She’s supposed to be the lead mechanic who can fix anything
2. So far I haven’t been able to find any noteworthy warrior women in Final Fantasy XV
3. Most of the female characters wear slightly differently styled clothes based off everyday and formal clothing from the real world
I think it’s safe to say there’s no way that we’re supposed to believe this is an outfit a third generation mechanic would wear to work (particularly in a world where monsters roam about just a hundred feet or so from truck stops)
If you have any doubts, I suggest checking out this great project where a fan artist gender flipped the cast and check out how Cindy came out:
– wincenworks
@spiraldrawsstuff submitted:
I saw this on twitter and thought it relevant to your blog.
There’s so much in this casting call that we’ve talked about indirectly before:
- Casting so that women are, at most, as big as the smallest men
- The strange belief that fictional characters and actresses cast by executives get to decide the costuming (also here)
- The assumption that sexy men are in a movie means everything is automatically fine and equal (also here)
- The generic female character production line and how it carries on into merchandise and costumes.
And this was a movie where I was kind of kind of excited about because it had Gamora in it!
– wincenworks
It’s one of those cases that disappoints, but doesn’t surprise me. Especially since with the first movie, not unlike with Avengers, they reduced female team member count to one, despite there being more women in the comics.
For all the praise Marvel Cinematic Univese gets, it still has a really hard time letting go of tired tropes and conventions, like the Smurfette Principle and Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty.
And we should be always pointing that out, for as long as it remains the status quo.
~Ozzie
As the follow up to last week’s throwback, it’s worth remembering that the general differences between men and women in mainstream media are most certainly not the result of “how things are”.
Major studios hire casting teams to generate calls like this and then carefully curate everyone who gets to be in front of a camera. Sometimes this is for specific effects (making 5′9″ Lucy Lawless look like a towering glamazon) but more often it’s just to re-enforce harmful ideals and perceptions.
Like that men should be complicated and diverse – and women should be sexy.
– wincenworks
@3dphoto submitted:
The two “android investigators” available as KS exclusives look strangely dissimilar.
More fun here (see “Diver”): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/diemensiongames/deep-madness
(it’s a co-op board game, which comes closest to “RPS” in your tag list. Mayebe time to add a “board game” tag?)
We received this submission a while ago but wanted to wait until the Kickstarter had expired. Not only is this game a textbook example of double standards, it’s also a textbook example of the creativity we see in so many of these productions:
The canonical blonde Black Widow is Yelena Belova and a completely different person to Natasha Romanov (played by Scarlett Johansson in the movies) and looks, almost exactly like this model:
So I’m not sure if they just outright stole or if they had the some genius idea for how to make them “totally different” that Marvel did. Either way, she’s still a better design than the fore-mentioned “the Diver”:
Even there shameless Ripley rip-off has to have boobsocks:
And the worst part is, based off the default Investigators that come with the game’s most basic package – it looks like they started with an intention to make all the designs actually just… be good.
I guess somewhere along the way they got led astray by Creepy Marketing Guy and lost in an old myth with no basis in reality.
– wincenworks
(Also in response to the suggestion in this submission, we’re now using the tag “tabletop games” for all board games, tabletop wargames and the like.)
It seems a popular trend in trying to defend terrible costume designs with random pictures of female wrestlers or MMA fighters. Usually accompanied by some sort of rant about how anyone who questions the perfection of these costumes is the sexist one!
Yes, there are many sexualized costumes in women’s sports. It’s not because the costumes are flawless. Rather it is a sign that female athletes often suffer under the tyranny of Creepy Marketing Guy too.
At the end of the day, justifying sexist double standards in the media by pointing to more sexist double standards in the media only showcases how wide spread the problem is.
More under the cut.
– wincenworks
Since we’ve just covered how plate armor can be worn by basically anyone who has the training,it’s probably good for us to address a popular defense of very suspicious dimorphism.
There’s nothing natural about it, it’s simply the result of thousands of media producers all buying into the same convenient myth that has no basis in reality and every basis in trying to feel good about objectifying women.
– wincenworks
i had a lot of fun with this
I genuinely think Camilla and Xander fit each other’s brand of empowerment great.
Especially the crotch hole.
~Ozzie
In case someone would think last week’s Zombicide Paolo Parente expansion bingos were unusually sexist for the game, here’s another bikini warrior from an expansion by a different guest artist, Neil Adams.
To be completely fair, Zombicide expansions are a huge mixed bag when it comes to creativity. Mark Simonetti’s one, for example, features three great female character designs:
While Edouard Guiton’s has a non-sexualized lady next to a sexualized one:
And those are only a few examples from the medieval fantasy-themed Black Plague option for Zombicide.
This game, no matter the version, is sure to provide us both with bingo material and positive examples for future posts. No sexy male heroes so far, though.
~Ozzie
