bikiniarmorbattledamage:

Thank you to icykitty for sharing the trauma of a set of armor that may actually be worse than the infamous outfit of Shahde from Prince of Persia.

– wincenworks

I like to think that the all-around badness of

this figure

kinda makes it an unintentional piece of commentary art. As if the designer/sculptor/company behind it was trying to say “You though you saw the worst of sexy female warriors? Nope, they could look like THIS!”.

And it just gets better when you turn it around and consider the anatomy… not only is her whole shoulder clearly dislocated and torso unnaturally swiveled, the sculpt of her underboobastic top makes it look as if she had an extra breast right under her armpit!

~Ozzie

Ah, sweet memories, of when I was cruising the internet for cursed content only part-time. : )

I was actually feeling optimistic lately about the state of miniatures nowadays. All the board games I play avoided this kind of low-effort designing for their lady characters. Were board game developers finally embracing the endless possibilities that not necessitating “Tiddy Out” provided??

But then I discovered that I actually living in a bubble and that a board game RPG got kickstarted in the year of our lord 2019 with this as a promised character/mini:

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That’ll teach me to have barely-mid-tier standards! 

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-Icy

Hyrule Warriors – A Link to the Pants, Part 2

Well, this one was definitely a journey. I’ve wanted to redesign this unfortunate “armor” ever since it was posted on this blog. Those who joined us while we worked on these pieces will know how much I struggled with certain aspects of this, and how much I hate the original. I had to change something about almost every element in this. I’m just so glad it’s done and I can move on with my life.

The first things I knew I wanted to do are the breastplate and pants. Then I gave her the sleeves to match her “skirt.” That was the easy part.

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After that I didn’t know what to do about her midriff, so I focused on her hair and face. I put her hair up so it doesn’t get in the way, and I just took some of her makeup away. I do this a lot, and it’s not because I hate makeup; it’s to show that you can have lady characters look good and cool and strong without giving them false eyelashes and a contour to rival Kim Kardashian. Also because women are always expected by society to wear makeup (but not look like it, that’s important), and screw that, so….

After that, the last thing to do was get rid of that idiotic corset. I had no real ideas, so I just extended her tabbard and gave her a belt to hold her tassets. It’s kind of a hack job, but I had no better ideas, and I had spent way too much time trying to come up with something. I wanted to just keep the plate armor and not add chainmail or anything… so here we are.

I still feel like I could have done better, but at least I don’t feel my blood boiling when I look at my redesign, as opposed to the original. Now I can believe that this is a woman that actually goes out into combat, while maintaining her regal air.

-Icy

Hyrule Warriors – A Link to the Pants, Part 1 

Hyrule Warriors has been on our radar for some time, so we finally decided to try making its female characters live up to the game’s name.
Basically only Impa is anywhere close to consistent with how male warriors are depicted, while other ladies at best look like they’re on a runway rather than battlefield, and at worse are Cia the Boobplate Witch

Linkle 

First planned either as female version of Link or his sister, Linke apparently ended up as a separate character who just happens to be very similar to him… And also to many other green archer ladies, especially the Elf from Dragon’s Crown

Reminder that, based on concept art released before inclusion of the character in the game, it could have always been much worse than just cute and vaguely derivative. Bingo-worthy worse [image source]:

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Her final costume is quite fashionable, just not very functional when directly compared to how Link presents in this game, wearing layers of armor, including chainmail under his green tunic. 

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While all she gets is short poofy sleeves and the fetishy “absolute territory” of bared flesh between a her skirt/shorts and thigh-high boots. 

So, of course, my aim with her redesign was to give her some layers and basic armor while retaining her individual fashion sense. 

Now her poofy white blouse is gambeson padding that she wears chainmail over, much like Link does. And the poofy sleeves  are bigger, cause why not? 

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Speaking of sleeves, she also gets some additional orange undershirt that matches her skirt. And her gloves got a lot longer, to cover her forearms from harm.
Sorry for the botched shading on chainmail, I copied it from Link, but didn’t have time to  re-shade properly… or to layer it in a way that makes sense ?

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Finally, poofy pants, to match the sleeves, and to properly protect her legs. Covered with some more layering of chainmal and longer skirt. And the boots have functional knee-high length now. 

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All in all, with the amount of edits this went through, I’m not unhappy with the results. Hope you guys like it too! 

~Ozzie

h/t for post title: @filipfatalattractionrblog​ 

kame-tan:

mysweetvilllain:

glorious-spoon:

mortuarybees:

yes i am a big advocate for realistic clothes and armor in media like

this is perfect and? extremely fucking hot

but also ive never seen anything hotter than when geralt is fighting without his armor and instead in tight pants and several of his shirt’s buttons undone and i want every fight scene from here on like that

Put the women in full plate armor, put the men in open-front shirts and tight leather pants.

Seriously. Both are sexy. Give me full plate armored women. PLEASE.

Give me open shirt, tight pants on men who wield a sword.

I will fucking eat that up like it’s my last meal.

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

This ties in quite nicely to a recent fiasco where a guy named Andrew Klavan, who is apparently an author of some sort, made an even more ignorant than usual rant.  It was about about how he hated the show because he considered it “unrealistic” that the women – particularly GoddessQueen Calanthe, were shown as capable of winning sword fights or doing a sword fight (it’s not clear).

Swords YouTube was united in their rejection of this notion – not just for his hilariously inaccurate claims about equipment but also because they unanimously agreed there are three major factors that decide who’s likely to come out of a battle second-best, and who gets to live:

  • Quality of training
  • Quality of equipment
  • Luck

Obviously a queen of a nation that regularly has battles and skirmishes would certainly have access to the best training, and commission the best quality armor – and we can all agree to that anyone who is born into royalty is lucky.

So really, if this author and those like him were upset at having to suspend disbelief about sword fighting, in a world with literal dragons, they’d be mad at these scenes with Geralt kicking ass in just a shirt.

Weird that he’s bothered by a realistic depiction of a powerful woman, but not a comically unrealistic power fantasy of a man.

Links to various YouTube videos discussing the matter below¹.

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– wincenworks

¹ If you’re wondering why one of the bigger, more self important names may be missing, its because hes already made his stance on women pretty clear – and it’s bad.

More of The Witcher on BABD 

So, the creators of Divinity 2: Save the Boobplate … sorry Divinity 2: Girls don’t play video games… sorry Divinity 2: Original Sin have shown off a couple of hours gameplay for Baldur’s Gate 3… and this is the iconic character in the intro sequence before you pick/create a character.

Which means aside from being in this atrocity, she also gets the dubious honor of being the character who we see as a fellow prisoner having a parasite implanted via her eye (then the first person scene implies its happening to you, even though she is playable as one of the pre-generated characters).

Aside from the obvious mountain of baggage to unpack about women as victims, ridiculous armor for women – accurate for men, etc.  There’s something else I’d like to point out which is probably not going to be obvious for anyone who isn’t a huge Dungeons and Dragons nerd.

Lae’zel is a githyanki, basically a near human but not human “alien” race from another dimension with a long history and pile of lore which actually makes the whole scene worse.  However, what I wanted to cover is this is what female githyanki look like in the current 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons art:

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So for this character, Larian Studio’s entire design process has been:

  • Remove all muscle tone and threatening aspects of appearance
  • Make the worst armor more ridiculous but cutesy and hyper-feminine

Great job at depicting a race where all members are raised as warrior from birth.

Why are people calling the people story tellers again?

– wincenworks