Speaking of things randomly glued to the nipples…
Basia submitted:
I don’t know if you’ve seen it, there’s a pink-hair deadface girl dressed in one banana and two strawberries D:
May be of interest for your blog.
Onechanbara seems to be a franchise where they sort of do reverse brainstorming. They scribble down every idea that comes to their head, then they throw out the good ones and try to make the bad ones worse. I mean, those costumes look pretty terrible but they’re not much of a leap from the regular costumes.
In addition to the ridiculous fruit costumes, this latest installment seems to feature antagonist who appears to be black girl with a chain around her ankle… what could possibly go wrong?
– wincenworks
It’s one of those designs that makes me think there should be a custom bingo card for it. A bingo that includes squares like “WTF am I looking at?!”, “Over-accessorizing” and, of course, “Extreme racial/cultural insensitivity”.
~Ozzie
You know – most designers are happy commodifying and dehumanizing one culture at a time… in this case it’s like they were trying to cram as many as possible into one drawing of a generic pretty white girl.
That’s impressive… in a sickening, terrible kind of way.
– wincenworks
more about exotification in character design on BABD | more about cultural appropriation in costume design
While this costume does score fairly low on the bingo, mostly due to lack of attempt to make it even look protective, I wanted to bingo it because it highlights another example of exotification.
We recently promoted a petition taking a stance against extofication in roleplaying games, and there have been important developments since.
When Resident Evil 5 was first released everyone from games reviewers to the British Rating Board rushed to assure us it was officially “not racist” – however when the game creates a “tribal” outfit like this for the elite counter-terrorist operative who happens to be a woman in “Africa” (rather than a specific country on the continent, thus eliminating any sort of expectation of accuracy/research).
There are numerous cultural groups spread across the many nations of Africa who have different styles and standards of dress – the only ones that would have this are westernized elite who are essentially parodying the traditional residents. That’s not a good image to promote.
(Before anyone… I see you, rushes to tell me how this shouldn’t count because it’s an “extra” please consider that this costume is not nearly as offensive as one of the main groups of antagonists in RE5)
– wincenworks