Tag: Saint Seiya Online

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Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 2: Empowering the gentlemen! 

In the latter part of our Saint Seiya redesign stream (or, for Ozzie, out of technical difficulties, last Saturday >_>), we doubled down on the switcheroo aspect and swapped armors around. Icy did the sexy male version of the blue knight, while Ozzie took on the male bronze knight. 

Well, considering the blue lady’s… creative design, I had no shortage of material to work with. Besides transplanting the boob window breastplate and giving him the same mankini-adjacent undergarment, I decided to switch the original boring stockings out for more interesting ones, with lace! Premium stockings.

I gave him a softer facial expression, to match our lady’s pout, and made his right hand less aggressive. I decided not to give him heels, but I gave him a booty. And last but not least, I gave him glorious mustache-shaped body hair! Thank you to the person who suggested it! 

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Does every sexy boy I redesign for this blog have very defined junk? … The answer is probably yes. I definitely had a lot of fun with this one, despite this shading style that I had a hard time emulating.

-Icy 

Despite the ugly “muscular wide-shouldered male is equivalent to a lady with big boobs and wide hips” motif, the bronze knights had one thing in their favor… the dude has his oblique muscles exposed equally to the female version! Now all I had to do is to recreate all the other weirdly exposed spots from her costume on his. 

First thing I decided to do was to make his pose more equal to hers without just straight-up copypasting her legs onto him. Instead, I switched his leg position to simulate her sexy strut, then slightly changed forearm position to be closer to hers. Then I allowed myself to replace his right hand with hers, which is posed less aggresively. And of course, I left the long nails on 😉 

His pants are now just underpants and thigh-high stockings. He also acquired high heels. I wondered for a while how to turn his breastplate into something similar to the boobplate with window for each breasts, and finally decided just to copy her piece and reshape it to match his pecs. 

Major negative (other than double standard, that is), was the armor’s color scheme that blends with their skin tone. If it wasn’t against the idea of our exercise, I’d probably slightly adjust those colors to contrast better, then the pec windows would be more obvious. Oh well.

~Ozzie 

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Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 1: Armoring the ladies!

This stream redraw session was heavily inspired by this reblog we did from @amusing-saint-seiya and the exercise @costumecommunityservice proposed in the post we reblogged ages ago. 

The idea is to take two gender disparate version of the same costume and make them equal to one another, by either basing male version on female’s or the other way round. 

We concluded that Saint Seiya Online, which we bingoed twice since, is a perfect material to try this out on, as their concept art (credit to @saintseiya-zone for posting them!) includes most armors in both male and female version, which are basically always textbook examples of double standard in costume design.

Prepare for this being a double feature. Today we’re posting female knights equalized with their male counterparts. On Friday come the same male knights sexified to be as empowered as original forms of their female equivalents.

First thing I noticed about the blue-white knights is that since the dude one happens to be rather androgynous and strikes a flamboyant pose, designers doubled down on “feminizing” the lady one with pigeon-toed pose and super bingo-able version of the outfit. The two share very similar body type, so I concluded that pasting his parts onto her verbatim would work perfectly. 

First thing to do was to give her his legs and right hand, so she can strike a power pose instead of generic dainty passive body language completely disparate from her male counterpart’s. 

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Then the task was relatively easy: paint over all those completely out of place holes in her outfit, give her waist a little more plausible girth and shrink her high heels to be exactly the same size as the guy’s. 

It’s actually quite upsetting how the developers put in an active effort into ruining perfectly fine costume just to communicate that the lady version is different. 

~Ozzie 

I will fully admit that I probably? cheated by cutting the red guy’s chest right off of him (misandry?) and pasting it onto the lady, but I have good reason! We so often see strong women characters who are supposed to have a more “masculine” muscled look, but it never actually gets to the part where they don’t have an hourglass figure with the same old narrow shoulders. (See Overwatch’s Zarya and her most narrow shoulders.) So I wanted this lady to be beefy as heck. 

To me, it seems like the artists’ definition of “beefy” for women was just a bigger rack and thiccer hips, and that wasn’t doing it for me. I made her shoulders way wider, stole the guy’s entire torso, and narrowed her hips. You also can’t ever have too much biceps. There are women who look like this, believe it or not.

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(A minor thing, but I shortened her nails as well.)

For people who may not like this one because she looks too much like a dude… sometimes people do look like that. And maybe the problem is with our definitions of “manly” and “girly.” Why even cisnormativity.

-Icy 

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Saint Seiya Online makes a comeback to the bingo, again with lots of stabby bits, gendered posing and shameless double standard in design, yay!

~Ozzie

I love how the little lotus posed armor totally just sits there pretending like the woman armor is even close to resembling it. It really shows that they either didn’t realize or didn’t care about anything more than showing some skin. SMH.

-Icy

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That equal opportunity fan redesign of one Saint Seiya Online armor we reblogged on Friday made us look up more double standard armors from that game… and let’s say we won’t be running out of potential Female Armor Bingo material for some time. 

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This thing really aimed for the stars with all the shamelessly applied bikini armor tropes. I don’t think we got so much of the bingo card cleared in a while! 

Also “nice” bonus of how even when a guy on the model sheets get a pose with more personality, like this one, the lady’s pose still is some variation of “Come play, my lord!”.

~Ozzie