The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Tag: FAQ
Posted on
Tidy Up Tuesday #79
Things to address this week:
When submitting a bingo, please make sure you’re also submitting the image of its subject.
Yes, we agree there are some problematic aspects with the recent Hanzo pic, specifically the idea of masculine Japanese men being yakuza and the depiction of dominance of a Chinese and Korean woman.
The artist made questionable choices, however we find it difficult to put the blame entirely on them. Blizzard has created Hanzo as a combination of samurai, ninja and yakuza with essentially no supporting cast – to the extent the female East Asian characters are Mei and D.va.
A reader asked whether we can announce subjects our redesign streams beforehand. Sometimes the notification post hints at it, but usually not, considering we tend to pick the theme last minute…
…but this particular week we’re doing special #50 stream, in which we’ll be sexifying dudes from some particularly popular game. Hope that helps!
While we are happy to feature positive and commentary examples from a wild variety of sources, we will (with very few exceptions) only be featuring critical examples that come from verified commercial productions.
As such, we are unable to use images that are effectively unsourced (ones from Pintrest, Imgur, etc) – particularly given that the current state of reverse image searching rarely yields reliable results.
Please ensure all submissions are properly sourced so we can assign credit and blame alike to the deserving.
If you, a submitter, know where artwork comes from – tell us. If you don’t – look it up and only send it to us if you found the source.
When submitting, always remember to credit/source the subject. If we’re dropped a picture in our inbox with no way of finding its author/the media it comes from, there’s a very slim chance we’ll publish it here.
Please do not tag us under/submit to us fanart or personal projects as negative examples. We do not feel comfortable with bashing fan/amateur/non-commercial artwork in the same manner as commercial pieces. Positive examples are a fair game, though!
When submitting, always remember to credit/source the subject. If we’re dropped a picture in our inbox with no way of finding its author/the media it comes from, there’s a very slim chance we’ll publish it here.
Please do not tag us under/submit to us fanart or personal projects as negative examples. We do not feel comfortable with bashing fan/amateur/non-commercial artwork in the same manner as commercial pieces. Positive examples are a fair game, though!
So now and again we get people insist that x title shouldn’t be counted because it’s intended to be viewed as porn (especially if that product is from a country outside the English speaking world… because reasons).
Reasons for this assumption often include:
The presence of explicit fan service or sex scenes
The inclusion of ridiculous double standards
Fans having labelled it as an erotic product on their own wikis
The publisher having actual porn products in their catalog
But generally this just assumes that by shoehorning in some sexualized content a product immediately becomes excluded from criticism. Very few products exclude all content from their own genre (plenty of action movies have a romantic subplot for example).
Generally a lot of the cross genre trends have a pretty basic premise behind them, it helps improve the audience investment:
Comic relief in horror and thriller helps avoid the audience becoming desensitized or burnt out from the tension
Having a love interest can humanize a protagonist (or an antagonist) and increase your ability to get invested in them
Mixing a little mystery with your modern fantasy story reminds the audience of how little we really notice or know about the world around us and makes them more accepting to the idea of secret magic
So, what purpose does having ultrasexualized costumes for female characters and regular arbitrary fan service? Well, mostly it’s because of the general belief that certain demographics need a lot of reassurance that some products are okay for them, and in fact made exclusively for them:
That’s not to say that there aren’t products or stories where including sexual content gives it a boost, but generally you’ll want to do it in a way that makes sense and does actually improve the product and that still doesn’t make it porn.
You can physically eat a lot of things, but just as you wouldn’t call it food unless you buy it specifically to eat it, you shouldn’t call it porn unless you buy it specifically for sexual gratification.
– wincenworks
Given the responses to some recent posts, and the recent responses to some old posts, its probably worth bringing this back – particularly since we’re now more or less out of the “slow season” where companies assume everyone is still broke from Christmas shopping.
The general idea that companies should get a free pass for “its just cheesecake” or “that title/genre/etc has always been like that” is essentially a plea to two well and truly exhausted pieces of rhetoric:
If publishers want to produce porn, then they should be confident enough to own that and to try produce good porn.
Many of you will probably enjoy this recent video by Extra Credits about the badass woman who was also the greatest pirate that ever lived:
When submitting images please, whenever possible, host them on Tumblr directly. Failing that, please ensure any other hosts (Photobucket is a notable, but not only example)
do not block or throttle direct or indirect linking.
@prokopetz wrote an interesting post about suspicious dimorphism, regarding completely different sets of teeth on female and male characters of the same species. It’s a bit too anatomy-specific for a BABD reblog, but really worth a read from character design/world building standpoint. (h/t: @kiashi29)
If a design isn’t good enough to communicate its narrative purpose to someone completely unfamiliar with the story behind it
(so each and every bikini armor falls under this), it fails as a design. As Red Queen puts it:
It’s not the player’s job to figure out what the designer is trying to actually tell them, as opposed to taking what is being communicated through this image at face value, before the game even begins.
And continues:
If this is what the game chooses to present to people who don’t know anything about the game yet, maybe don’t be quite so flippant about it when people get the wrong idea. Because then it actually matters that they don’t know anything about the game.
So truly, insight of someone who doesn’t know yet how an element that looks ridiculous is explained in-universe (or even by the creators,in some additional material), is quite valuable, as it sheds light on potentially problematic things that lore-savvy fans and creators aren’t capable of noticing.
We’re often accused by detractors of not having credentials to talk about (usually) a game we’re criticizing, because we supposedly never played it. Putting aside a fact that with three of us being huge nerds and pop media consumers, at least one would be somewhat familiar (unless the product is super obscure) – why would that be relevant? No matter if we know the title well or just superficially, our criticism of female visual representation is always the same.
In-depth familiarity of a story behind combat lingerie hasn’t yet once made us ashamedof our words and deeds. If anything, the more we know about any particular Thermian argument, the better we are at picking it apart. So asking us to “do our homework” before we comment will make the commentary far more critical, not more lenient.
Whether or not we actually do comprehensive research for any particular piece of media depends on many factors, like:
how influential versus obscure the media in question is
how interesting the excuses for skimpy female costumes in it are
if we’re already familiar with it beforehand
if there’s a Wiki for it
if a submitter provided some info
how much time we have at the moment
So while we try to at least look up everything we talk about, the amount of lore-heavy commentary (and its relative accuracy) varies from post to post.
Because, again, as we put it in our FAQ, this is not a full review blog, but one discussing character and costume design in the very specific context of in-story combat and meta-level sexism. Finishing a game or knowing a TV/comic series full storyline isn’t necessary for us to point at a fictional lady who goes sword fighting in two pasties and a chainmail thong next to dudes in heavy plate armor and say this is an absurd image. It just is.
Thanks to everyone who sent this tumblr thread our way. We agree 100% with the points made there regarding false equivalence, though since it’s a long post reiterating what we have said on the blog before, and starts with a gross publicity stunt by Milo Namara and Frank Cho, we most likely won’t be reblogging it.
Something we should cover in this post about Female Armor Bingo’s purpose: the square placement, while not completely random, is largely incidental. All Ozzie was aiming for when putting it together is giving highly visible squares to most prevalent tropes and putting related tropes close, but not close enough to guarantee too-easy bingo rows.
