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.

But hey… we have the diversity of hamster version of D.va now so…

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~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

Tidy Up Tuesday #78

A couple things to tidy up this week!

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!

Topics we addressed before on the blog: 

~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

Tidy Up Tuesday #77

Just one small note this week:

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.

~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

Tidy Up Tuesday #74

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! 


Topics we addressed before: 


~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

more tidy-ups | more FAQ-themed posts

Tidy Up Tuesday #74

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! 


Topics we addressed before: 


~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

more tidy-ups | more FAQ-themed posts

But is it really porn?

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

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).

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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:

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It’s been covered before, but I really feel the need to restate that the main reason for this is a very simple reasoning: x genre is a for (straight cis) men so we need to market exclusively to them and make sure they know we’re doing it (even if they think it’s already being overdone and kind of insulting).

(Evidence suggests this works… but only in the sense that it does make a lot of people think that the product is not for them and hence don’t buy it. Or just have more fun mocking it than they’d have playing it.)

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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:

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If publishers want to produce porn, then they should be confident enough to own that and to try produce good porn.

If publishers want to cram porny designs into other products and pretend that it’s just how things are they should be called out on it – particularly if they are simutaneously having fans defend the quality of their work and insisting more research is required to fully understand a two minute trailer.

– wincenworks

Tidy Up Tuesday #73

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)


Things we addressed before: 


– wincenworks, ~Ozzie & -Icy

Layperson’s perspective and criticism credentials

“Newbies should be seen and not heard”

Our long-time reader @red-queen-on-the-heathen-throne recently brought up important point we never put to words on BABD. It’s related to the “You never played/saw/read this (so shut up)!” rhetoric.
Namely, it’s the fact that perspective of someone who never consumed media in question is just as (if not more!) valid as the fans who knows all the lore, including Thermian arguments which supposedly justify bad design  decisions. 

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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. 

Also please remember that parody/satire needs to keep their intent even more clear than stuff that plays the same tropes straight, otherwise Poe’s Law and “ironic” reproduction happens instead of insightful criticism.

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“Hand me your geek card!”

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 ashamed of 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.

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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. 

~Ozzie 

Comic-only rebloggable post HERE

Tidy Up Tuesday #68


A few subjects we addressed before:


~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy

Tidy Up Tuesday #67

A couple things to catch up to this week:


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.


We have a new affiliated site in our Related section: FemHype (also on Tumblr) – a feminist gaming blog that is a safe space for women and non-binary readers.


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.


Apparently Tekken 7′s designs are so close to how erotica looks that our today’s post about it got flagged as NSFW (h/t: @kyaranflowers)


Things we addressed before: 


~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy