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?
Makes no sense.
While we’re certain skin-tight metal butt armor happens a lot in media (battle thong is by far more popular), the best, most literal examples of it from our blog were those chafiest short shorts ever:
And this full body atrocity (whole thing is arguably NSFW, open link at own risk):
We can also infer from some frontal images when a design probably includes a butt vacuum-sealed in metal, just like it has boobplate/metal boobsocks:
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
Y’know, even if there wasn’t a single woman in all of history who had fought in war or a single example of real, historical female armor, there would be no problem in pointing out fantasy armor is unrealistic because the complaint is not based on what women DID wear but what women WOULD wear.
Came across this amazing comment while archive binging our positive examples tag.
I think it perfectly sums up the basic flaw in the “women warriors aren’t historically accurate, so realism doesn’t matter when portraying them in media” kind of rhetoric.
~Ozzie
Remember when I said earlier that Kojima reference never gets old? Wish I meant it only as “mocking that tweet about Quiet is always funny”.
NOPE. Media creators actually keep using some variation of “Once you learn why her being half naked has convenient in-story reasons, you will feel ashamed about your comments” to preemptively shut down criticism they know they gonna get for creepy double standards in costume/character design.
So, again, let’s make it clear: designing fictional explanations for gratuitously creepy ideas in fiction does not mean they’re impervious from real-world critique.
~Ozzie
