grubwizard:

if your female character doesn’t look like she has lived the life she leads and you can’t get a sense for her actual personality by looking at her because you’re too focused on making her pretty and perfect and palatable it’s bad character design and you should feel bad

It’s worth noting that, generally speaking – this is why concept artists want to be concept artists. They want to convey feelings, story and inspire the imagination. It’s not uncommon for concept artists to do staggering amounts of research in order to find ways to convey a type of character in a type of time period.

So, if you come across a product created by a major studio where they have extensive executive and production staff – it’s safe to say that any aggressively boring female character designs are done at the behest of a particular type of individual pushing a ridiculous myth to try to seem like a genius.

It is important to call out this kind of absurdity, not just to try to reduce the amount of gratuitous objectification in media – but to also spare these poor artists the indignity of having a guy try to convince them he invented anime tiddy.

– wincenworks

geistaku0719:

A while back, I found the Female Armor Bingo Card by @bikiniarmorbattledamage and I remember seeing a particular candidate for that while binge watching Anime America. So I went ahead and did the bingo card with Dragon Half’s main character, Mink! Afterwards, I thought it would be fun to do a redesign of her, and even if it took me a while to finish, here she is! I love her color pallette, btw. ;D

Now this is a legit bingo contender! I think we could also mark “Boob window” and “Sharp ornamental pieces” too, scoring another row.

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And just in case we get responses from people claiming that it’s ecchi comedy series, so any sort of non-porn sexualization goes… NOPE. Armor bikinis don’t start making more sense just because the series is made mostly of slapstic and fanservice

I really enjoy the redesign, it’s cute and simple. Amazingly, giving her pants and a shirt doesn’t make this half-dragon heroine look any less like a fantasy character. And golden greaves, bracers, pauldrons and ornamentation still communicate both fantasy aesthetic and that she has a capacity to fight.

Thank you for the bingo contribution, @geistaku0719!

~Ozzie

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

fandomsandfeminism:

arcana-heights:

“Women should be respected and accepted as they are, don’t shame them regardless of what they look like and what they wear. Do whatever you want, ladies!”
*virtual ladies in bikinis*
“Um, this is infringing on my rights. How dare you? Keep this misogynistic filth away from me.”

Do you not understand the difference between a fictional character, created by men, to be seen as sexually pleasing for men in fiction and…like…REAL WOMEN who are ALIVE and are able to make CHOICES for themselves? 

Like, women have some key differences with fictional depictions of women. 

Ah agency, one of so many issues that bikini armor apologists work so hard to avoid understanding.  Of course, it doesn’t help that there’s a trend with developers to try to have it both ways and insult their creations for being… how they created them.

– wincenworks

Thanks to @giantpurplecat we now have new and exciting insight into just how some creators assume women do choose their outfits [big image here]. 

“This? I designed it myself. It allows me to communicate quickly with my blade and control it whether sword or whip… I’ve never really thought deeply on why though, to be quite honest.” – Ivy in the latest Soul Calibur

Remember – testing shows that not only can Ivy not control her weapon, she basically can’t even give her opponent a brisk shove without a wardrobe malfunction or two.  

Even the new game’s character creator classifies her outfit as underwear – her underwear lets her control her weapon better… so she doesn’t wear anything on top… even though it’s underwear.

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Ultimately the most insulting part about the people who rush to support this kind of double standard is that they have so little respect for women that they will accept nonsense like this (or worse) as great writing.  

Nine times out of ten, this particular demographic will also have nothing but contempt for real women who actually want to express their own sexuality on their own terms. (As well as contempt for the same fictional women)

– wincenworks

GIF Source

signalacoustic:

theclawedking:

francisxie:

filling up more rule 63 request!

mystique & emma frost~

Daken approves of this bold new character choice 

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

Another venture into the world of sexy gender-swapped superheroines and villainesses! Somehow, for some reason, never a type of design choice made in canon with characters who are male in-story… ζ༼Ɵ͆ل͜Ɵ͆༽ᶘ
Just imagine Gambit or Nightcrawler being this fashionable! 

Funny, because Emma Frost in particular is second only to Bayonetta among (dubious) examples that are thrown our way as a female character expressing her sexuality “done right”. Yet other than fans turning her into a dude, there’s no direct male equivalent to her brand of sexy empowerment.

~Ozzie

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

So, Divinity: Original Sin 2 started off looking kind of promising.  Despite their head animator throwing a public tantrum on deviantArt, Larian Studios did seem to be making a fairly attempt to improve next time, after all someone had instructed Thierry to fix the artwork (to his great upset) in the first place.

So on 1 October 2015, their Kickstarter finished successfully.

On 11 February 2016, they published results of a survey they did which showed completely unsurprising results for a studio where creative leads can post rants about their right to be paid to objectify:

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On 10 August 2016, it became pretty clear that Larian Studios decided the thing to do with this information was to double down and go back to their regular double standards:

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Around May 2017 they started using their current iconic line up, the front and center lead of which has such a ridiculous costume it appears their advertising team feels the need to hide it:

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Ironically, despite this apparently being less of Creepy Marketing Guy and more part of the studio culture, a lot of the content could be pretty good and they could probably get a lot more female players if they didn’t strive to save the booplate.

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Alas, it seems to commitment knows no bounds:

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Can’t imagine why they have so few female players…

– wincenworks

Since we’re in an era where a video game company had to issue a statement about having women in their game (by default… you can adjust them out via the game options) it’s worth remember that large parts of media have been fully invested in a ridiculous myth for so long that certain demographics are now shocked when anything isn’t made to be essentially hostile to women.

(Also for anyone rushing to accuse us of being selective of images… the comparison images are the ones Larian picked for themselves, unsurprisingly)

This is the world we live in.

– wincenworks