A note about Female Armor Bingo Sundays
We have previously updated some bingos after they have been posted, however we will not be doing this unless there is an important reason.
Here’s why:
- Female Armor Bingo is intended as a fun way to encourage critique of popular media and thus draw attention to troubling tropes. Too much pressure to make every bingo perfect takes away the fun and derails the conversation away from the intended purpose.
- Many of the terms are deliberately vague so as to cover the many forms the trope takes and thus it can become very subjective.
Nitpicking over details again derails and also encourages the mentality that “No one can criticize you for x, provided you do y.” - When people submit bingo cards to us, they’re marking off the points they see – if they miss a point or two on a card that’s already over half full then it doesn’t really diminish from the core point: The armor is disrespectful to women in general and part of a prevalent and harmful trope.
- Sadly, Female Armor Bingo is not an empirical measuring device – we’ve had absurdly objectifying outfits that didn’t score bingos either due to technicalities or how the squares happened to be filled out. They were still objectifying and deserving ridicule.
Just like the famous Bechdel Test, the bingo is supposed to shed light on a bigger trend in popculture, not to meticulously analyze who and what “passes”. - Finding new content for the blog, checking submissions, researching and writing posts, etc. is time consuming and a much higher priority than tweaking bingos that are already entertaining and on-point.
While it’s great fun to joke about the exact score and keep a tally of the highest scoring bingos it’s not essential for every bingo to be 100% accurate and correct.
So from now on we’ll be limiting edits after posting to important and noteworthy events – like that time we discover that against all odds, Fran’s outfit was worse than we dreamed.
~Ozzie & – wincenworks
Isn’t it interesting how often the response to criticisms such as the armor bingo card boil down to “but I have to keep using these tired offensive cliches because creativity”? Are they even listening to themselves? Why not take it as a challenge? “How can I create beautiful and original character designs without falling back on tropes that thousands and thousands of artists have used before me?” Now that would be creative.
Defending your “right” to use offensive tropes in character design (or writing, or whatever your creative endeavor of choice) isn’t “artistic integrity”. It’s laziness.
Yup. This^ Pretty much. Emphasis mine.
Whenever someone uses those arguments I’m all like:
The above reblog belongs with this one and this one, that’s why their mutual subject, creative freedom, gets its own tag now!
~Ozzie
weerlegion replied to your photo: “Since Shia from Hyrule Warriors, or as I prefer to call her, the…”:
That can’t be boobplate. Boob something for sure, but it doesn’t even attempt to come close to enough coverage to be called a plate.
Frankly, winceworks proposed that once I make version 2.0 of the bingo, a square named “wtf is this?” should be there for the unidentifiable pieces of the outfit.
For now, though, this is close enough for me to count as a boobplate. It “covers” boobs, is clearly made of sturdier material and generally looks and works on boobs like a boobplate would… but has a giant piece missing.
~Ozzie
