Heroes of Newerth – SEXYFIED EDITION! (NSFW)

We redesigned female Heroes of Newerth characters so many times at this point that we figured it’s the gentlemens’ turn! 

Warlock dude and Tentacle-kun 

Previously compared to his female counterpart’s bingo here

I decided I wanted to make a monster-y guy Hot, cause that’s what the people want, so I chose this nameless tentacle-y spellcaster(?) dude. He already wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I expanded upon that by shortening his veil and giving him some rocking abs. I left the ribs despite the muscles because who needs to know how anatomy works when they’re drawing Sexy Things?

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I gave him 4 male-presenting nipples, since he is a Monster Boi, as well as a smoother face with a bit of a blush. I also made all of his pointy tentacles rounded, so that he doesn’t have to worry about scratching people when he’s hugging them. 

And, of course, I gave him a visible dick that’s only covered by one of his belt chains. No close-ups of that for this post.

Finally, I made his other one-eyed monster, nicknamed Tentacle-kun on the stream, cuter and innocent-looking. After all, this is now a friendly duo of warlock and tentacle.

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-Icy 

Judge NON-Dredd 

If anyone forgot, casual reminder that HoN’s concept art gallery is a cesspool of plagiarism. How they haven’t yet been stricken with cease and desist requests by multiple IP owners is a mystery to me. 

Case in point, this character is so overtly ripped off from Judge Dredd that they couldn’t be arsed to even change his helmet’s visor design – only added a tacky fin-shaped piece on top. 

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My fixed version got his dreadful (no regrets ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)) expression replaced by a friendly smile. His lips are also now much bigger, softer and made-up with red lipstick, so that the smile reads clearly on such a small head in the scale of the whole image.
Also because he’s just secure in his masculinity – I mean, look how he flaunts his body!

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NON-Dredd’s original clothes were already borderline bodypaint thin, so it only took repainting them in his skin tone and adding the male-presenting nipples to make him truly empowered. Also, he’s not shy about his junk, therefore no more loincloth – you can see the crotch in all its undetailed glory. 

For an added touch, his shoes gained some high heels and the weird smoke coming off his left pauldron is now hot pink – again communicating that he doesn’t need to drown in shades of blue to remember his gender. 

One thing I regret is that I haven’t used the giant book chained to his waist to recreate Magilou’s book skirt! That would have been a great throwback to my first stream redesign

~Ozzie 

A Quick Return to Heroes of Newerth 

While Icy was working on her list of WIPs (some judgment, mostly from Icy herself), Ozzie trekked beyond the usual Heroes of Newerth gallery and found some officially posted concepts on Art Station. And they were all great, right? …. Right?


Looking at this set of character concepts I noticed certain… discrepancy between male and female-coded ones. It seems that the designs are pretty nice and geometrical, and work pretty well overall. Until a woman is being designed, where the priorities seemed to be cleavage and leg over a cohesive overall look.

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I believe it was one of the technical difficulty/limited time streams (also the pics were relatively low-res), so I opted to do very simple, minimal changes – just by covering up this pink/teal Grim Reaper-y (?) lady’s bare skin and giving her wearable shoes. 

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Bonus for no more “eye” designs on her boobs. I kinda like the skirt I gave her. Not much to say beyond that.

~Ozzie 

Heroes of Newerth’s Boudica Legionnaire Cleavage Johnson 

This redesign happened on a day of very annoying technical difficulties. Since my computer was refusing to cooperate, I ended up reaching for some easy fix material to Heroes of Newerth, a game prominent for its creative bankruptcy. HoN’s image gallery is our emergency stash of subjects for bingos and/or streams. 


This boobtastic, vaguely-Pict lady looked so amazingly generic that we didn’t care to look up whether she’s an actual named character (apparently she’s supposed to be queen Boudica’s legionnaire). Instead, we dubbed her Cleavage Johnson and I proceeded to fix her namesake. 

All it did to make her look like a somewhat competent warrior was to cover her cleavage and belly (while making her armor not-boobplate and adding a bit of girth to her improbable waist), then giving her kilt a couple more inches and getting rid of its shmexy thigh cutout. 

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Frankly, while the changes were deliberately small and easy to do, I think just that little made her silhouette stand out from the background a bit more. Amazingly, bare skin and meaningless tribal tattoos* somehow didn’t prevent her from blending with the environment. 

~Ozzie 

*While I’m in no way versed in design and meaning of Pict body art, I can safely assume that HoN pulled those straight out of their butts, considering its hugely racist record of “exotic” culture depictions.

Yesterday – while looking with Icy through Heroes of Newerth’s art page, the endless depository of painfully generic, often plagiarized, and even more often super sexist and racist artwork – we found this fairy… thing and agreed she’s a perfect bingo material. And boy is she! 

If not for her weird furry feet, she’d very likely get a bingo with high heels.

~Ozzie

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 

can be found here, here and here

on costumecommunityservice