Tag: rhetoric

Posted on

pressfirmlytoclose:

When Samus was in armor, guys respected her (and even said they wanted her armor). But girls didn’t give a damn. They still don’t give a damn about her in armor, whenever I see fanart of it, the artist is almost always a guy. But now that Nintendo is pushing her as a big-breasted latex model with a nice butt, fangirls are drawing her, saying they idolize her and want to be her (and saying they want her SHOES). Care to weigh in on what’s up with that?

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

image

So… since I haven’t heard anything like this… I went and asked one of my gamer friends who happens to be a woman what she thought. Here’s how she started her response:

“Please provide sources, if you’re going to attempt to tar girls with the same brush that is clearly lubricated by entitled male gamer tears, then you must provide the burden of proof.”

From there the rage intensifies and it gets kinda nerdy, so I shall just share the highlights:

“You’re referencing art of ZERO SUIT Samus, which rose to popularity with Super Smash Bros, which has targeted a younger demographic.  It’s become commonplace to see Samus OUT of her suit rather than in it, despite it being an iconic image of Metroid. Back in itty bitty pixels, we saw as a bonus at the end of a game that Samus was a girl, thats it.”

“If they’d spent any time actually IN the gaming community of tumblr … then they’d be aware that the community ISN’T vocal in favour of Samus’ new look”

“She’s 6 foot 3 too, mind you, and weighs 90kg. The recent sexualisation/slimming of Samus is a move on NINTENDO’S part, not the gamer fangirl base.”

 So to make sure this wasn’t a one off, I asked another friend:

“Firstly, Dudebro McFedora, you have no basis to say that women don’t like Samus.  The odds are that you’ve probably never talked to a girl that’s played the games.”

From there the rage intensifies – so I will just share some of the highlights:

“I will say that I particularly want her shoes. They’re spark shooting death heels  to beat up people.  It’s wonderful; who wouldn’t want that?

They are not appropriate for SSB though BECAUSE THEY’RE FUCKING PUMPS.  You can’t run around in that shit!”

“Samus in her armor is fantastic because it creates this unique position where anyone can play her and entitled ‘macho boiz’ never think to say, “Oh shit I don’t want to play as the girl” or “Sweet, the girl character is fucking hot.””

“Samus Aran is my role model.”

Also, I seem to recall seeing amazing fan art by women:

image

And amazing cosplays:

image

This is not to say there aren’t female gamers who only discovered Samus when they announced her high heels of doom, female gamers who really want to cosplay Samus in heels because they’ll look cute and sexy or female gamers who like the Zero Suit better than the armors for other reasons.

I say this theoretically because I did look to try to find some of them, and between quick searches for them and searches to find choice examples of art and cosplays… I didn’t find a single woman who suggested that she only became interested in Samus due to the Jet Boot heels.

So if you have come across women who only got into Samus due to the high heels, it’s still quite ridiculous to decide those particular women are somehow representative of women or female gamers as a whole.  Particularly since the character first appeared in 1986 – so has had quite a while to grow a diverse fan base.

Trying to dismiss and/or erase huge numbers of female fans just so that you can try to pretend gender stereotypes are facts is pretty much the reason why the rage intensified. 

– wincenworks

Fan Artworks:

Cosplays

Bringing this old ask post back, because I couldn’t help but be reminded of it while browsing through other people’s reblogs of the Kitana/Jade redesign post. 

The “Girls didn’t give a shit about Samus before she became sexy and therefore cosplayable!” rhetoric makes just as much sense as “Women in Mortal Kombat are floss-bikini titninjas because it’s the female power fantasy and the cosplayers want that!”, which seems to be the go-to contrarian reaction to Brendan George’s slightly less misogynistic art direction in Mortal Kombat 11. 

image

[image related to a Soul Calibur, not Mortal Kombat, character, but the “argument” is literally the same] 

Once again, all the props to @wincenworks​’ friends for how eloquently they described the nonsense of the asker’s (and, by proxy, all the other Dudebros McFedora’s) “logic”. 

TL;DR: People who obviously never spoke with any woman sure do feel the most eager to mansplain what women really want from female video game characters. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 

~Ozzie 

notice: This is a reposting of this throwback, due to Tumblr queue being a total goober and initially publishing the Throwback Thursday post on Wednesday. 

Posted on

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

cheezbuckets:

lindira:

Fantasy does NOT have to follow real world rules. Fantasy does NOT have to relate to some real world event, country, concept, law, or history. Fantasy does NOT have to mirror any particular time period or country, even if you’re basing your world on a real world one. There is NO SUCH THING as “historical accuracy” in fantasy as it relates to the real world.

THE ONLY THING Fantasy has to do to be believable is follow the established rules OF ITS OWN WORLD. Fantasy can literally be anything you imagine it to be.

If your fantasy world excludes people of color or those belonging to the LGBT+ community, if it’s grossly misogynistic and white cis-male centric, that’s because YOU made it that way. Stop blaming “historical accuracy” or “believability”. It’s not the genre; it’s YOU.

@bikiniarmorbattledamage I believe this is highly relevant to the rhetoric you guys often combat.

image

Indeed all of this relates to all the stuff we talk about on BABD.

In the same vein, “that’s how this particular fantasy setting works” is just as bad excuse for gross in-story stuff as “that’s the way real world was once”. 

Ultimately, no matter the justifying rhetoric, it’s the creative decisions that will be under scrutiny, not some superficially “objective” rules regarding a fictional setting.

~Ozzie

The cool thing (that people sometimes forget), is that a fantasy setting, rather than being historical fiction (somehow), instead illuminates the values of its creator. Sure, it feels bad to be called out, but it really does make you a better creator if you ask yourself: why are all my characters light skinned/skinny/cis/straight/male/etc? 

Sometimes, there are good reasons, like if the story is about (to use a basic example) race-based oppression, and all the characters are on one side of that. But sometimes the reason is just “cause that’s what i like.” And honestly, besides being a bad reason, that’s just boring.

If I hadn’t gone through this process myself, I wouldn’t have my favorite Pathfinder OCs! Just sayin’.

-Icy

Posted on

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

nitoriaiichirou:

yeah but, cartoon women, any drawn women, aren’t wearing those skimpy and sexual clothes out of choice, they’re wearing it because someone drew them that way, normally for a reason. so so don’t go “oh maybe she chooses to fight crime in a bikini and high heels” bc a man sat at a desk and decided she was gunna wear those clothes, for a reason, for the audience or his gaze. so no, its not slut shaming, its creepy man shaming

*applause* A point that sadly needs to be constantly reiterated.
I’ve been saying exactly this for a long time now!

Bolded by yours truly.

Six years of doing this blog and I still can’t stress enough that literally no argument about a fictional woman “choosing” to dress skimpily for combat is valid in any way. 

We’d appreciate never again having this nonsense rhetoric thrown at us. 

~Ozzie 

As a well-known cartoon woman once said:

image

I get it; people get attached to fictional characters. I do it a lot, too. But that doesn’t mean that they’re real and sentient. All I think of when I hear a creator justify a character design with “she chose to dress that way,” is that they probably only sees the character as an object with no actual motivations.

-Icy

Posted on

baddreamslimbo:

poisonivyys:

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

Speaking of boobs in fighting games…

@pointandclickbait as usual has a really great take on the case: 

image

Remember that time when dudebros declared that Fury in Darkseiders III, sporting a (vaguely jiggly) metal boobplate, was “unfeminine and almost no more clearly recognized as woman”? 

Well, now we have a version of that devoted to sexualization of the undead. How… precious. 

Bonus fun fact based only on what some people in reblogs claim: those OneAngryGamer tweets are supposed to be “satire”. Riiight. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 

image

If this is that dude’s idea of “satire”, I prescribe him reading more Point and Clickbait before attempting again to commit his comedic genius to a keyboard. 

~Ozzie 

Posted on

muslimgamer:

idle-animations:

It’s what she deserves

@bikiniarmorbattledamage behold justice

Speaking of My Hero Academia, the official stage play costume designers also agree that Momo would not dress like that if she was a real person. 

It’s almost as if suspiciously many of female comic/cartoon character outfits were not designed to be worn by actual humans… 

And for those already furiously replying how her power set requires exposed skin, note the life-action version’s most crucial improvement: a zipper.
Wow, now she can just unzip to do the freaky shit with her chest and belly skin and just zip back after she’s done? Who would have thought? ╮(╯ل͜╰)╭

~Ozzie

also h/t: @athelind

PS: We didn’t bring attention to that in our last MHA post, because the OP, @bumbleshark, already said in in their part – but most of those characters are middle-school aged. Let that sink in. 

Posted on

whiteraven13:

starbuckssollux:

bumbleshark:

bumbleshark:

i wanted to fix some things that made me uncomfortable…also it was fun kinda redesigning these ladies from bnha cuz god damn their original suits are shit and dont make sense according to their quirks…. 

@bonedragonsans 

first off: shutup omg. yall forgetting these are fictional women written by a man. “they design their own outfits” is a dumb argument. these women dont exist and didnt decide anything. the artist/writer did. get smart.

second. the only thing different with momo is i took away the tittyshow of a 15 yr old. she still has a window on her chest and tummy but a lot of the shit she forms from her body comes from her back and limbs. there’s an inch long difference between her weird ass skirt and the shorts i gave her– i think she’ll make do.

ashido is a disaster. her quirk is secreting acids so why are the parts of her body that show as much skin covered? legs take up a lot of the body. the only other difference in her uniform is–once again— i took away the tittyshow of a 15 yr old. i literally gave her MORE skin to show.

let me wrap it up with nemuri since yer argument to this was by far the dumbest. nemuri can still rip off her clothes. she is STILL showing the same amount of skin as the original. I just changed the color and design so it looked like this bitch didnt just roll outta bed and throw over a hot topic lingerie set over a white lace onesie.  

die mad about me. 

this post is literally the embodiment of this

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

Those are very awesome redesigns of some of the worst female costumes in current mainstream anime. Thank you, @bumbleshark, for saving those poor heroines. 

And no thank you to the rhetoric bingo scorer who actually thinks that anime waifus have any say in their character design (ﾉಠ_ಠ)ﾉ 

image

And it’s not like My Hero Academia can’t do female costumes well. It just seems to mysteriously give up when a certain threshold of boob size is crossed ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°) 

image

~Ozzie 

Well yeah, Ozzie; at a certain boob size, you gotta give them a window to breathe through. Then you strap them in with your boob sealbelt. And MHA’s got both!

-Icy 

See also: last time we had this @prozdvoices video on BABD 

Posted on

falconlord5:

Would you mind going into further detail on the convex shape of breastplates versus the concave shape of the ‘boob plate’? Please and thank you.

whiteraven13:

its-spelled-maille:

burning-skull:

its-spelled-maille:

Certainly. 

It’s all about what your armor does with kinetic energy. As you may know if you’ve ever played croquet, kinetic energy can transfer through one solid object into another solid object. 

In the case of a weapon hitting a breastplate, the red ball is your armor and the green ball is your body, and what you don’t want is a whole hammer worth of kinetic energy transferring through the armor into your body. A good way to prevent this is by making your breastplate convex instead of concave, so that the force can more easily glance off. 

Take these two shapes for instance, and humor me in another metaphor. Say you left these two objects out in the rain for a day. What would you come back to? The concave one would have collected almost 100% of the rain that fell on it, while the convex one would still be a little wet but most of the rain would have slid off of its surface onto the ground. Now imagine that the rain is actually a battleaxe or something else heavy-ended. Do you want your armor to collect all the kinetic energy and transfer it to you, or do you want your armor to make sure that most of the kinetic energy slides off, like the rainwater sliding off onto the ground?

A good breastplate will cause blows to slide off to the sides because it is convex, as shown in this breastplate from Witcher 3 that I drew on to emphasize its shape.

Now, compare that to one of the boobplates from Skyrim, which I also drew on to emphasize its shape. 

Now, each individual boob is a convex shape, which means that weapons will slide off them, but unlike the big rounded shape of the Witcher 3 breastplate I showed, which makes the weapons and the kinetic energy they bring with them slide off into empty space at Geralt’s sides, the individual boobs of the boobplate create a little valley in the middle of the chest where the weapons will end up. So the boobs on a boobplate deflect blows off the armor…right back into the armor. 

Here’s another graphic to help further visualize the problem, wherein the blue arrows represent the incoming weapon and all the kinetic energy it brings with it: 

– mod Sallet

tits armor is historical

What you’ve got there is a “heroic cuirass” or “muscle cuirass”, the kind worm by military commanders who wouldn’t normally see combat on the front line. It’s just for show, not meant to be a significant means of protection.

– mod Sallet

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

I’d like to add that not only is there no evidence of the heroic cuirass ever actually being used in battle – but they are an artifact from an era when the mightiest weapon one might by expect to be struck with was a heavy spear with a bronze tip, being wielded one handed. (That’s why it’s got that green discoloration, it’s literally from the Bronze Age, ie before they had iron or steel).

Once steel and stirrups were introduced, the impact that one could experience on the battlefield rose dramatically, because the amount of force a guy on a horse with a steel tipped lance could inflict was dramatically greater than a soldier with a spear in one hand and a shield in the other could ever even hope to inflict on their best day.

So steel armor, became the standard to protect against the guys on the horseback and so soldiers had to start carrying weapons that could hurt people in steel armor (maces, war picks, polearms, etc).  

Hence the convex shape and design elements to prevent blows being deflected into bad places became a bigger and bigger focus.

It’s almost like weapons and armor have evolved over time because ancient civilizations didn’t have access to all the knowledge and science we do today…

– wincenworks

Posted on

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

feministgamingmatters:

Somebody used this gif to “prove” that Metal Gear sexualises men the same as women:

Do people really think this is equivalent to Quiet (et al.) or are they being disingenuous?

I find it hilarious how dudes will insist that if people really knew about Metal Gear Solid they’d know about Raiden and that he was (allegedly) as objectified as Quiet… despite the fact Raiden and his butt run (very late in the game) were both surprises to the player (and the development team) and Quiet was used heavily as marketing material a year in advance of MGS V being released.

That and well, I could only find one figure of Raiden breathing through his skin:

image

It’s almost like he wasn’t intended to titillate or something.

– wincenworks

#nakedness doesn’t equal sexualisation

Continuing the theme of false equivalence… yes, we have seen (and commented on) people who proudly claim that Raiden’s naked run justifies Quiet’s “breathing through skin” un-costume. 

We’re also familiar with the general confusion between sexualization and nudity. Vast majority of the Status Quo Warriors conflate bare skin with being sexual, so by that logic, Conan/Kratos/Zangief are equally, if not more sexualized than their scantily-clad female peers and therefore sexism is “solved”.

This, of course, willfully ignores the simple fact that not only so much more goes into sexualization than nudity (like framing, posing, expressions etc.) or that there are different ‘decency’ standards for bodies of different sexes

(especially nipples), but also how bare skin itself doesn’t yet guarantee sexyness. 

That’s why @partsal‘s female barbarian comparison is still a perfect example of how completely different character premise can be conveyed with the same amount of bare body:

image

~Ozzie

After long weeks of fighting Tumblr’s amazingly absurd flagging and appeal system, this post finally became visible again, so we can bring it up. 

YES, DESPITE ALL ODDS, PEOPLE STILL UNIRONICALLY ARGUE THAT NEKKID RAIDEN IS AS SEXUALIZED AS QUIET IS. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

So here’s our brief reminder about the (not really) subtle difference between nudity and objectification. 

~Ozzie 

Posted on

6 BS Excuses Developers Gave For Adding Boobs To Video Games

6 BS Excuses Developers Gave For Adding Boobs To Video Games

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

Unsurprisingly five out of the six are in regards to attire (the odd one out is in relation to shower scenes) and none of these justifications are really that unusual.

Of course, we’ve already discussed the beyond questionable explanation of why were’s supposed to be ashamed of not supporting Quiet’s “breathing through my skin” lifestyle.

The most interesting one of the batch may be the one that’s tried a unique variant of “She was designed in a country where sexualization is cultural!” specifically…

image

It’s kind of the reverse of when people rush in to tell us that we shouldn’t question their strange belief that Asia is a fantasy land of boobs and anime.

– wincenworks

Throwback time: A list of toootally valid “reasons” for reducing female presence in video games to walking pair of boobs (sometimes almost literally… remember Haydee?).

~Ozzie

Posted on

Tidy Up Tuesday #90

Just a quick one this week.

Yes we are aware that a certain YouTuber has made a video giving their predictable “I like it because as a man it doesn’t effect me and I like sexy women” opinion via a video in which they also defend their “men are sexualized too and women are supposed to be sexy while men are supposed to be strong” video.  We’re not going to link to it directly since pretty much it says nothing new and its entire contents can be summed up in one helpful bingo card.

If you’re still unconvinced however, we do highly recommend this video by Ian Laspina (apparently not watched by the YouTuber) on how breastplates are actually designed, along with these comics (1, 2) from years ago explaining some of the realities of the terrible designs.

If you are curious about us addressing a long time existing title of some sort, please do try the search function as odds are good we have and we do try to tag everything as completely as we can.

~Ozzie, – wincenworks & -Icy