The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Tag: thigh highs
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‘Brown Dust’s (now renamed to Brave Nine) Kiria. Hope you didn’t think the other bingos we did for this game were the worst they got!
Based on her description blurb, I think she is an ex-patrol guard in an empire, turned…. assassin? Which her design definitely communicates. Um. She’s the “black scorpion” which is on her scarf. And her entire ass being out I guess communicates her… desire for justice being loud and clear. Or something. I’m also not super sure how her ass is turned 90 without the rest of her leg rotating also… We’ll chalk it up to ninja powers.
And this is the less ridiculous (though not by much) version of her. Behold, the “improved” version!
The only thing that got an upgrade is that scorpion hood, and it doesn’t even look that good.
-Icy
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Contrary to her appearance, Arnice here is not in fact another card from Granblue Fantasy; she is actually the protagonist of a real RPG, Nights of Azure, where she transforms into various demon forms to fight things. This post is only about her main look, because each of her 5 alternate forms can warrant its own bingo.
Her design reminds me a bit of Velvet from Tales of Berseria, except they have the opposite problem in the front: Velvet has a bare stomach, and Arnice has bare sides and back. I suppose that putting them together will make one good design, at least from the waist-up.
Also, I checked whether that tiny piece of black fabric on her hips is a skirt or shorts, and it’s a skirt, because of course.
(The title is not a joke on Awakening, I know Nyx is not from that game.)
So, doing redesigns for the game series that keeps on giving… its lady characters no pants. I don’t even care if they’re garbage pants, can they please have something, so that they’re not riding frigging scaley wyverns with bARE LEGS-
Most of the edits I did involved giving her an actual shirt, rather than…. uhh?? … as well as some PANTS. I also broke up her shoes into two parts mostly for the design aspect. Such tall thigh-highs make any non-leggings look weird. The last big change was her veil, which I tried to make a little more realistic-looking. I’m not sure how, in the original, the veil is supposed to be hanging down, but then be behind her long bangs that fall close to her face??
The dark skin-tone parts on her clothes are opaque, by the way. I was just too lazy to come up with another color for them, to be honest. This was definitely one of those streams where I was struggling to work with what I had… I probably could have done a better job given more time, but I’m fairly happy with it as it is now. I promise I’ll do a non-mage the next time we redesign Fire Emblem ladies.
-Icy
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Uprooting the Sexy Flower Warriors
[We’re not sure how a draft gets posted without our permission, but Tumblr might as well start collapsing from all sides at this point. Here’s the actual full post!]
This dominatrix-looking lady apparently “evolved” by exchanging a short dress and no pants for short pants and two ribbons. Her previous form, for comparison:
Looking for inspiration, I just googled “fritillaria” and I learned that in Polish we call this kind of lily a “chessboard flower”, for pretty obvious reasons, once you look at its petals:
I decided that though this character seems based different species, fritillaria camschatcensis (there was no info on her being “chocolate lily” back then), fritillaria meleagris is much more striking visually, so I included its colors and chessboard pattern in my redesign. She doesn’t resemble her actual flower in the first place anyway.
While the costume is amazingly skimpy and objectifying (especially that excuse for a “bra”), it’s not without a potential. There’s promising metal cincher, which I decided to enlarge and turn into full breastplate, and she comes with POOFY PANTS, a staple of BABD redesign streams, which I adorned with tassets that compliment their shape and match the breastplate.
I got rid
of her long-ass pigtails and of all the action lines, which collectively made the composition more chaotic than dynamic. Minor thing that bothered me was her sword being stuck in the ground for some reason instead of fastened to her belt, so I quickly fixed that too. The final touch were, of course, sleeves and tights with purple chessboard pattern, which tie the whole thing together.
I found the abundance of fleur-de-lis symbols on her to be hilariously excessive, to the point I erased all of them during the stream. After some deliberation I figured that maybe the one on her hat fits, so I just muted its color, because magenta doesn’t fit the new scheme I gave her.
All in all, I find Fritillaria to be one of my most inspired redesigns, which makes me doubly disappointed in her creators, considering they could have just googled a flower photo to get some non-boring ideas.
Love how she’s apparently Maple by the fact that she has some maple leaf hair clips and a bit of a maple leaf pattern on one small part of her mini skirt. So for this one, I channeled my inner Blizzard character artist, in that I wanted to way overdo the whole maple leaf theme. (I used samurai armor as reference.)
I ended up redoing almost her entire torso, since I needed to give her an actual breastplate, instead of… I guess it’s a crop top camisole? (Do those exist?) Then I gave her actual kusazuri (the plates hanging down her legs), and made them maple leaf shaped!
I did give her a less traditional chest piece, but there are so many small shapes in the design that we needed the main armor pieces to be bigger, I think. I did break it up with a huge maple leaf on it though.
I also hated everything about her face and hair, so I gave her a more traditional hairstyle to match her more determined expression. There were also a lot of smaller edits, like flipping her foot around so she’s not standing as awkwardly, and adding some volume and muscle to her sword arm.
And finally, I added a few more small maple leafs to her “skirt,” to really reinforce that maple leaf theme. I’d hate for people to miss it. Though, honestly, after finishing this redesign, I think she should just wear a maple leaf costume.
So this character is supposed to be the highest ranking soldier among the Holy Knights (whatever they are in the game) and basically is supposed to be perfect leader and fighter, including über-pretentious part in character description:
There’s not a single hole in her fighting technique. The spear is actually a perfect metaphor for her existence itself. She very rarely takes center stage.
Mary-Sue-ish description aside, I gotta admit that Elmina’s stance and *parts* of uniform do inform what a confident authority figure she is. Then there are ridiculous patches of bare skin, schoolgirl face and ridiculously busy costume shape.
First, obvious thing to fix were the random cutouts. Then I decided that whatever that giant pauldron thingy on her right arm is supposed to be looks just too absurd and uncomfortable to leave it as it is. Instead I recreated her left pauldron best as I could, to make it a simple symmetrical uniform.
Next thing was to give her face conveying the experience and age you’d expect from a high ranking officer. I made her look older with a bigger nose, some minor wrinkles and a tiny bit more detailed lips and jawline. Crossing scars over the bridge of her nose communicate that she acquired her mastery of the spear at a cost – no real badass warrior authority should go scarless. Also she got a haircut. Her cape is epic enough to blow in the wind and the long hair just asked to get stuck in her weapons or armor.
The rest of the stream I spent reversing all those tiny little ornamental shapes from her uniform into simpler, bigger shapes that don’t tire the eye so quickly. Most such changes can be observed on her greaves, as her legs were the least exposed part of the costume.
I decided to tackle the lovingly-rendered but very unfortunately dressed Helga. She has no backstory that I found, so nothing was stopping me from doing whatever I wanted. Insert evil redesigner laugh!
I started by giving her an actual breastplate to replace the…. um. I’m not actually sure what she was supposed to be wearing in the original? It’s not pasties, but there’s not enough coverage to call it a bra… anyway. I got it outta there fast. I also gave her a sleeve while I was at it.
I used the same breastplate design as I used for my other Kanpani Girl redraw, because the metal bits under her breasts lead easily into it. I just moved it down to that it’s an actual armor. And thanks to feedback on the previous design, I knew to give her a brigandine under that breastplate: that’s what the metal rivets are.
Next, I debated over what to do with her legs. At first, I wanted to give her a tabbard and get rid of her massive skirt almost entirely, but I actually like the skirt. It goes well with her flowy sleeve, and I decided that she was a noblewoman who learned sword-fighting. No backstory, no rules!! It wouldn’t be the most practical, but I decided she still held onto vain nobility ideals and thus kept the skirt. I just made it a little less wide.
I also noticed that her short inside skirt had the beginning shapes of pants, and I ran with that. The trademark Poofy Pants™
make an appearance again, with white tights underneath for contrast. I moved her stocking decorations to her shins and made shoes out of them.
And finally, I made her actually look determined. She feels like a person who only recently picked up the sword, so no scars for her yet.
I definitely had fun rendering this out, though having to switch to a different idea part-way through once again meant that I didn’t finish this during the stream. I’m better about it now, I swear!
Thing I notice about Soul Calibur is that with every installment of the franchise new costume designs are introduced for established characters and they usually go the pretty straightforward path of de-evolution (see Sophitia as an example and keep in mind she’s far from the worst).
We already devoted a couple of bingos and stream redesigns to them, but with the SC’s momentum leading up to the prophecy, we will probably never catch up completely to every awful version of every female character in the games.
~Ozzie
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Harley’s Bad Joke of an… “Outfit”
One of my earlier redesigns that I finished recently because of things was for Harley Quinn from Injustice. So, the problems here are pretty obvious… Lots of pointless and impractical skin, shit color saturation…. everything….
I originally was going to make her outfit more like a jester’s, in the vein of the original Harley design. I was just using the original design as a jumping-off point, but it was becoming very dull and uninteresting.
[Pictured above: The diamond market crash]
I ended up scrapping it for a more DIY look. I figured Harley would have fun making a quirky outfit to commit crimes in.
I kept the color scheme, though upped the saturation by a bunch. The idea is that she bought 2 pairs of identical but differently colored pants, a biker jacket, a tank top and some fabric. Then she went home, cut the pants in half and sewed them together, cut out huge chunks of the jacket in diamond shapes, and cut the jacket sleeves so they’re not as restricting. Then she just sewed a bunch of diamonds on everything, without any particular care for making it look professional. I think adding some sequins to her jacket would also not go amiss.
I hated her hair, so I cut it off. I also changed her face a little bit, and gave her back her smile!
Since she’s not a super-powered person with tons of money, I didn’t want to go with the standard power suit look, especially since I don’t think she would prefer one as a character. However, I also don’t think she would prefer to wear a Victoria’s Secret ensemble but with leather belts rubbing against her bare skin. She’d stick to her theme, but in a fun way, and that’s what I tried to convey in the redesign.
-Icy
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King’s Raid is a mobile game with good graphics and artwork, typically addicting gameplay through psychologically rewarding progression mechanics, and a fun, cooperative Raid gameplay mode.
In other words, a Skinner box game with Sexy Girls, got it. Could have just said that, it’s much shorter.
I got an ad for this game the other day, so I decided to check out the wiki for some Bingo material, and now I’m feeling really bad for the poor Bingo card. This one is literally the first character listed under their first category in the Heroes tab: Aselica the Knight (she’s a Tank, can’t you tell??). Here’s a better look at her “armor:”
Good Graphics and Artwork™, as advertised.
And of course, this is what her lesser version looks like:
Here we go again… Kojima posted a new concept art on his Twitter (left), which is apparently a female version of Ludens, the character featured in the Kojima Productions logo (right.) Can’t wait to hear about her tragic skin condition that requires her to wear literally half the armor of her male counterpart
Given that he’s already over-used (which is to say, he used) the “she breathes through her skin” excuse, and, well, how most of Death Stranding’s promotion has gone thusfar: I’m pretty confident the explanation will 1. make no sense and 2. ensure we receive contradictory responses from his fans trying to defend it.
Of course, the first thing they always tell me is I don’t know enough about Kojima’s work so let’s look at some some of his fans are saying about the deep textual values of this complex piece:
– wincenworks
And let’s not forget that the experience of starting to understand Kojima’s genius ideas, including gratuitous definitely justified and not contrived female sexualization, takes only playing the whole game at least two times, preferably with complete familiarity of all his other work.
edit: Since it caused some confusion: we don’t know for sure whether female Ludens is just a “fun” variation on Kojima Productions mascot or a future character concept for Death Standing. It’s alleged she might be the latter, but either way both her design and the commentary about Kojima belong among topics we discuss on the blog.
