Tag: LONG POST

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While this video by Movie Bob came out relatively long ago, in anticipation for the first pics of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, it still tackles some meaningful issues for our blog: how adding pants and/or covering skin on a female character redesign doesn’t yet fix the problems inherent with her old, more revealing costume and in-story presentation.

That’s why we ridiculed J. Scott Campbell’s outrage over Wonder Woman’s new shoulderpads

pauldrons, but didn’t go so far to praise the covering new costume he hated so much. 

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It’s an adequate superheroine outfit and has Diana’s iconic elements intact, but its supposedly biggest change, the skin-covering catsuit, seems indeed like an uninspired, colored-in afterthought.

While, as Bob points out in the video, there will always be a crowd unsatisfied with the changes (especially for such a popular character), I say it’s crucial to just PUT AN EFFORT into a redesign. Only then things can begin to work out.

See, for the record, BABD’s favorite re-imaginings of Wonder Woman:

~Ozzie

As Bob said, there’s a lot to unpack and while we’ve seen that it’s certainly possible to cover  female character head-to-toe and still have her be ridiculously sexualized.  I also feel that arbitrary statements like “makes her less like the other two” are at least as responsible for bad re-designs.

Ironically when it comes to characters like Diana, a large part of this is that the comics industry is influenced by unhealthy amounts of nostalgia so instead of doing completely fresh re-designs they tend to insist on homaging the original.

And when the outfit was as ridiculous as Wonder Woman’s original outfit it’s kind of hard to make something that looks credible.  Particularly since people aware of her origins tend to go with “sexy pinup dominatrix” rather than “genuinely intimidating and dominant woman”.

I will say this though, if you really want to take the stance against “modesty” approach and tell people that it should all just be allowed to hang out – there’s someone who should be wearing a lot less than Wonder Woman.  No. Really.

– wincenworks

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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And so I saw another EOS Echo of Soul ad and it compelled me to bingo it.

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For a moment there I confused this game for ELOA (bingo’ed last week), another very original MMO that keeps throwing browser ads at me.
Clearly that’s the mistake on my part. Those anime-sque MMOs that market themselves with double standard armor and have abbreviated titles starting with E are SO CREATIVELY DISTINCT!

Also what is wrong with how her legs are drawn? No matter which one is supposed to be attached to that knee in the front, something must be really broken in there!

~Ozzie

Posted on

Hey, I’m just wondering, is the “male empowerment” a bad thing? Maybe I am just missing some of the subtleties, but, if I may be frank “So what?” I went through a few pages of the tag “Sexy Male Armor”, and I’m not sure what I should feel. From your tone, you often seemed like you were trying to show these costumes in a negative light. On the other hand, I saw JoJo and DIO, so I knew you weren’t saying they were bad.

While we touched upon the subject of male empowerment before, we never discussed it in detail. Also, our tone in sexy male armor posts shifts a lot between sarcasm and talking straight, so can I understand the confusion.

Let’s start with why BABD even posts examples of “empowered men”.

To us, the intent of showing men in skimpy/sexualized armor is satire through contrast. The “Women NEED to be sexy (read: show a lot of skin and do sultry poses)” mentality is so deeply ingrained in our culture that many just assume it to be the natural order of things, that “sexyness” is inherent part of the female gender. But not of the male one.

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The “This is NOT a man!” reactions to the initial Mobius Final Fantasy protagonist design come from this line of thinking. Dudebros refuse to accept that men can be unironically sexualized.
Funnily, it’s often paired with the insistence that any shirtless man balances out all the scantily clad ladies. As long as he’s not too sexy, that is. Textbook doublethink.

With such widespread double standard, it takes reversing the scenario to highlight its inherent problem. The big picture gets clearer when the shoe is on the other foot.

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GIF source (x)

That’s why blogs/movements like @theliberationofmanfire, @thehawkeyeinitiative or @magicmeatweek were created. And why we post sexy male warriors every Friday. To make men empathize with women’s problem.

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Comic source (x)

As for the empowerment itself, we discussed before that both women and men can feel empowered in various ways, but media skews it strongly based on gender stereotypes: women in fiction usually draw power from being sexy, while men from being strong (and/or violent). 

And while there’s slow shift towards giving women more varied representation, men (who have

otherwise

very diverse presence) rarely get to be the overtly sexy characters. And those who are usually get to be the villains, which feeds into “evil is sexy” trope as well as to villain gay coding, both ugly concepts that should die.

We have yet to see genuine, non-incidental sexy male empowerment in mainstream media that doesn’t come off as some sort of mockery. 

~Ozzie

Also worth remembering that a lot of our commentary on sexy male armor is tongue-in-cheek parody of the kind of rhetoric we regularly receive in our ask box, in reblogs and in broad-spectrum posts that conflate us with other critics.

Because let be clear, if we tried to keep the “sexy male armor” tag stocked with images I came across naturally through my typical cishet male surfing, it wouldn’t happen every Friday or even every month.

But it seems we will never stop hearing that eighteen years ago a game with a villain in briefs was released, fourteen years ago a unpopular video game protagonist did a nudey run and sometimes they get funny feelings during the glimpses of male butt in spandex – so clearly the market is constantly over-saturated and it’s only fair every game have c-string clad warrior women in it.

– wincenworks

Posted on

boom-de-yaadaa:

Hey, I’m just wondering, is the “male empowerment” a bad thing? Maybe I am just missing some of the subtleties, but, if I may be frank “So what?” I went through a few pages of the tag “Sexy Male Armor”, and I’m not sure what I should feel. From your tone, you often seemed like you were trying to show these costumes in a negative light. On the other hand, I saw JoJo and DIO, so I knew you weren’t saying they were bad.

While we touched upon the subject of male empowerment before, we never discussed it in detail. Also, our tone in sexy male armor posts shifts a lot between sarcasm and talking straight, so can I understand the confusion.

Let’s start with why BABD even posts examples of “empowered men”.

To us, the intent of showing men in skimpy/sexualized armor is satire through contrast. The “Women NEED to be sexy (read: show a lot of skin and do sultry poses)” mentality is so deeply ingrained in our culture that many just assume it to be the natural order of things, that “sexyness” is inherent part of the female gender. But not of the male one.

image

The “This is NOT a man!” reactions to the initial Mobius Final Fantasy protagonist design come from this line of thinking. Dudebros refuse to accept that men can be unironically sexualized.
Funnily, it’s often paired with the insistence that any shirtless man balances out all the scantily clad ladies. As long as he’s not too sexy, that is. Textbook doublethink.

With such widespread double standard, it takes reversing the scenario to highlight its inherent problem. The big picture gets clearer when the shoe is on the other foot.

image
image

GIF source (x)

That’s why blogs/movements like @theliberationofmanfire, @thehawkeyeinitiative or @magicmeatweek were created. And why we post sexy male warriors every Friday. To make men empathize with women’s problem.

image

Comic source (x)

As for the empowerment itself, we discussed before that both women and men can feel empowered in various ways, but media skews it strongly based on gender stereotypes: women in fiction usually draw power from being sexy, while men from being strong (and/or violent). 

And while there’s slow shift towards giving women more varied representation, men (who have

otherwise

very diverse presence) rarely get to be the overtly sexy characters. And those who are usually get to be the villains, which feeds into “evil is sexy” trope as well as to villain gay coding, both ugly concepts that should die.

We have yet to see genuine, non-incidental sexy male empowerment in mainstream media that doesn’t come off as some sort of mockery. 

~Ozzie

Also worth remembering that a lot of our commentary on sexy male armor is tongue-in-cheek parody of the kind of rhetoric we regularly receive in our ask box, in reblogs and in broad-spectrum posts that conflate us with other critics.

Because let be clear, if we tried to keep the “sexy male armor” tag stocked with images I came across naturally through my typical cishet male surfing, it wouldn’t happen every Friday or even every month.

But it seems we will never stop hearing that eighteen years ago a game with a villain in briefs was released, fourteen years ago a unpopular video game protagonist did a nudey run and sometimes they get funny feelings during the glimpses of male butt in spandex – so clearly the market is constantly over-saturated and it’s only fair every game have c-string clad warrior women in it.

– wincenworks

Posted on

I never got around to bingo-ing the Amazon from Dragon’s Crown, seeing as:

a) her anatomy and posing are a MUCH more noticeable issue (hence she’s been featured on @eschergirls​ frequently)
b) her outfit is a very plain (if gravity-defying) scalemail (?) bikini 

But seeing as we brought some new attention to that character with a post on a figure that makes all the problems with her design tangible and 3-dimensional, I figured “why not?”. At the very least we’ll learn how much a generic, non-fancy bikini armor scores on average.

I checked “Looks nothing like male version of the same outfit”, because while there are obviously no male Amazons, her male playable equivalent, the Fighter, wears a full suit of armor, including a helmet that obscures his bishounen face. If they were equals, he’d look closer to this: 

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(artwork courtesy of invaluable @psdo )

Guess that’s my second Dragon’s Crown Bingo this month, oh well. Both those designs are terrible in different areas.

~Ozzie

more Dragon’s Crown on BABD | more Female Armor Bingo on BABD