It’s bad enough when a sci-fi setting has all the ladies wearing painted-on tights so snug that you can see all the way up their respective buttcracks, but then they go and do it with the armour, too.
Like, it’s armour.
It’s a solid chunk of heavy, rigid material.
How does that work?
How do you walk with a pair of inflexible domes tightly cupping your glutes?
Hell, how do you even stand when you’ve got a quarter-inch durasteel plate wedged so far up your ass you’re tasting metal?
That said, butts or no butts, armor so snug it looks like shiny bodypaint/metal spandex is a blight on costume design that should be stopped.
~Ozzie
As we throwback this nightmare fuel this week, I’d just like to casually remind everyone that, at least when it comes to 3D modeling, giving a character individual butt cheeks and individual boobs is way more work than giving them actual Real Person clothes. So there are still people in the gaming industry who look at their budget, look at their specs, and then decide that, yes, spending that money on individually-modeled boobs and butts is a Good Investment.
That’s not even metal, and even it looks physically painful.
So, I was watching the Smite 4.21 patch notes, and I was really impressed by the quality of the skins.
Nemesis’ new skin actually looks like half decent armor, minus the high heels.
Discordia looked cute and mage-y.
And then there was this.
This is “Exterminator Kali”, who is supposed to have a “superhero feel”. She looks like one of those flag girls from car races. Had me going there for a minute with the improvement, Smite…
Ok, that Nemesis skin looks surprisingly interesting and not particularly sexualized in SMITE’s very low standards, especially compared to her default design. It’s not perfect, of course – you mentioned high heels, but there’s also spandex chainmail on her legs and skin-tight material around waist… Though this is probably the closest they ever got to practical female breastplate.
Dicordia could use a longer skirt, but her design at least has some personality, something nonexistent among other goddesses in this game. As a side note, her lore starts as a coherent story (Eris flees Troy after successfully spreading chaos of war there, reinvents herself as Dicordia) and quickly spirals into something that spits into face of everyone even remotely familiar with Greco-Roman myths and history (she makes a character who is neitherthe ancestor of Romulus nor
and
Remus the original founder of Rome instead of the twins). Sometimes I feel this game exists only to troll mythology nerds with blatant disregard for everything that makes those stories and characters special.
Speaking of which, can we ALL, as the humanity, please stop sexualizing the Hindu goddess Kali FOREVER? What’s video games’ problem with her? There was a super-porny version (NSFW link!) in Rise of the Incarnates (the game doesn’t seem to exist anymore). Overwatch also felt justified in turning this powerful female deity of a living religion into a “sexy”skin for Symmetra, because the character is Indian.
We referenced SMITE’s disgusting treatment of Kali in this 2015 post about exotification and it’s as topical now as it was then:
Other than sporting four arms and blue flesh, that “Exterminator” skin doesn’t even have anything to do with Kali’s default SMITE design. And what’s “superhero” about it, too? The biggest connection I can think of is that she looks like an ultrasexualized Guardians of the Galaxy reject.
~Ozzie
edit:A reader informed us that SMITE Wiki misspells the character’s name in Discordia’s lore: the article says Aeneus, an unrelated Greek mythology character, rather than Aeneas, the protagonist of Virgil’s Aeneid, bridge between Greek and Roman myths and ancestor of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome.
Just so we’re clear, Chandra, Torch of Defiance wears the most practical version of her armor to date. (The least practical goes to the manga adaptation of The Purifying Fire.) But compared to the armor designs worn by other residents of Kaladesh, it seems a little out of place.
For those curious regarding the fore-mentioned manga:
Essentially the spectrum highlights the problems that happens if a company like Wizards sets a vague design for a character then tries to “fix” it (depending on their priorities on any given day) without ever changing it in a meaningful way.
In this case, if you compare to the previous images of Chandra from the official Magic the Gathering imagery, the changes are:
Sad part is, this spandex chainmail/cleavage-y cardigan set is possibly the best (and least physics-defying) female armor we’ve seen from TERA.
~Ozzie
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Chandra Nalaar’s costume never ceases to amaze us in how unapologetically it ignores even the most basic things about how armor (or any material involved in making it) works.
Let’s once again list all the nonsense here that goes beyond the usual sexualized armor tropes:
It’s bad enough when a sci-fi setting has all the ladies wearing painted-on tights so snug that you can see all the way up their respective buttcracks, but then they go and do it with the armour, too.
Like, it’s armour.
It’s a solid chunk of heavy, rigid material.
How does that work?
How do you walk with a pair of inflexible domes tightly cupping your glutes?
Hell, how do you even stand when you’ve got a quarter-inch durasteel plate wedged so far up your ass you’re tasting metal?
And it’s kind of congealed together into something that could, potentially quite interesting… if you hadn’t been introduced to them initially as something creepily childlike and harmless.
