Tag: Throwback Thursday

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Anonymous:

Sometimes when I’m watching a review for a Marvel movie and they start talking about how hot the female lead is, I briefly think “Seriously? Gross pigs”. But then I take a look at my desktop and see screen caps of almost all of Chris Evans’ ass shots from his Marvel movies, and I realize I have absolutely no right to judge. I am no better. That’s not to say nobody else has the right to judge, because they do. Just putting it into perspective so both sides can understand one another better.

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

kissingcullens:

kehinki:

Not really. Who even cares about objectifying Steve Rogers when he gets 3 of his very own movies and there isn’t even a SINGLE movie for ANY female character. Who cares about women on tumblr objectifying him prettyyyy much harmlessly when entertainment shows/sites seen by millions gush about Steve’s character development or Chris’ acting, while the only thing they say about the SOLE woman is her new hair/her weight loss or gain/how hot she looked. Sometimes, women are ONLY put in movies to be the token “eye candy”, (regardless of whether or not she’s underage) and this happens a lot. Look at the massive franchise that is Transformers.

It’s not the same thing… Men objectify women and it leads to real life violence against women—fuelled by already rampant misogyny. Women objectify men and it leads to gifsets of Chris Evans’ ass.

Yuppppp
And no one respects sexy men less for being “objectified” if you can even apply the term the same way to a guy- if anything, being objectified is glorifying for men.  

What’s that thing Joe Mangianello said about how he doesn’t feel like men can be objectified? Cuz women are viewed as sex objects, but men are viewed as power objects?

A guy who takes off his shirt and shows off his buff bod in a movie has power, he’s displaying his value and attractiveness

I mean, the culture isn’t NEARLY the same; I’ve been thinking lately about how no matter how much we “objectify” men, it’s always an empowering thing for the man.  

He’s sexy: it’s an achievement.

 And a lot of our attraction is also about fawning over the man’s personality, his expressions, the nuances of the character he plays- cute jokes about Doritoes…. 

I can go from posting ten close-ups of Chris Evan’s ass (accompanied by praise and self-deprecating jokes)
To a picture of him in a sweater-vest, looking pensive and talking about his love of golden retrievers in the same ten minutes (with commentary about what a darling angel he is)

None of it is demeaning or objectifying in remotely the way female objectification is, and your point about Chris Evans starring in three Cap solo movies is really right on….
…while women can barely scrape past the damn Bechdel test half the time, and half the time are reduced to T&A and get assaulted or fridged or show up in their undies for no reason…

Some wise words about gendered double standards and false equivalence between objectifying male and female characters.

~Ozzie

Following yesterday’s post about the far-from-perfect female costume designs in MCU, throwing back this week some nice analysis of the asker’s blatant false equivalence in regards to objectifying female vs male movie superheroes. 

Keep in mind that this post is at least five years old and since then we had barely two mainstream superhero movies with female leads released, one of which was about Wonder Woman in an unmistakably sexualized costume. 

~Ozzie 

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

bluuuuuh-im-a-fucking-car:

glitterpill:

Idea for artists designing female superhero costumes.

Start with a sports bra. Any sports bra. 

If your design cannot incorporate that underneath or including it, you’re probably fucking it up.

@bikiniarmorbattledamage I’m sure someone else probably tagged you in this already but hey. This sounds like a really good piece of advice !

Amazingly, no-one before sent this our way. Thank you for doing this, because this is an AMAZING rule of thumb!

Love how simple and on-point it is! PREACH

~Ozzie

Bringing this back as a reminder that if more women were to design superhero costumes, we’d definitely get to see things actually referenced from athletic wear, including, but not limited to, sports bras.

~Ozzie

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big-wired:

transgladstone:

things that don’t break white male gamer’s immersion: dragons, magic, made up metals, impossibly large weapons, eating 50 potatoes while in combat, riding a horse up a 90 degree cliff

things that break white male gamer’s immersion: realistic armor for women, black people

Also, transgender people.

This week’s throwback: a post we originally reblogged from ever-invaluable @medievalpoc​. Bringing it back as it’s basically text version of that Kasia Babis comic we featured last weekend. 

This time reblogging from @big-wired, who was smart enough to convert it from garbage chat post format into a text one AND made a valuable addition to the list of things that (cis) white males can’t handle in games (and other media) because ‘historical accuracy’… in largely fantasy worlds.

Though we would be here all day if we were to list ALL the common and perfectly normal (often historically accurate) kinds of things and people that “ruin” the immersion of a Status Quo Warrior gamer dudebro. 

~Ozzie 

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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. 

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So I’ve been spending time in the female armor tag

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

fuckyouplanetearth:

New rule for female armor: if you design female armor and you wouldnt be willing to cosplay it, you’re making a mistake.

I’d like to propose an expansion of rule:

If you’re a guy and you’d wear it because “it’d be funny” but you wouldn’t respect a female cosplayer who wore it: You are a mistake.

– wincenworks 

Another caveat to the rule, inspired by an article we linked in the past: if a costume is (near*) impossible to replicate or too uncomfortable to wear for cosplayers – it fails as a costume. 

~Ozzie

Honestly, if a cosplayer would need to use double-sided tape in order to maintain their decency while wearing your costume, maybe just… don’t.

-Icy

*”Near impossible” only because cosplayers are amazing and can somehow make even the most absurd shit work on human bodies somehow. But at what cost?

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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

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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

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

I remember when Fortnite first came out I had a look and felt that while it was kind of nice they were doing a little body diversity, they had a pretty clear agenda when it came to the Female Constructor design:

image

Apparently there are still those out there for whom this is not sufficient conformity to traditional pandering, even if this character is also an option in the original game (no PhotoShop required)

image

Have to say though, I feel pretty proud that “tumblrization” is credited for any sort of deviation from these designs. Another bright side is this has pretty great meme potential (with a few great ones in the Twitter thread already).

– wincenworks 

It’s quite telling about attitudes towards beauty standards when a slightly cartoony female character of average human built, with tan skin tone and clad in regular street clothes (and not the “unfeminine” full battle gear) is such an unbearable level of SJW pandering which the status quo warriors find necessary to “fix” with whitewashing, bikini tops and photoshop-based plastic surgery. 

image

Just imagine how they would “un-tumblrize” Constructor if her original design wore a bulletproof vest, had darker skin and hair, zero makeup, fatter body and more detailed, less smooth facial features.

~Ozzie 

Credit to icantatricks and mitotic for the discovering of the photoshopped image, 

Vitaliy Naymushin for the original concept/promo art.
Artist for the photoshopped image unknown and probably not someone we want to promote.

So, as well as just to remind the world in general what the kind of people who complain that their female characters in battle royale games are “not sexy enough” are like… before Tumblr turns to ash and we all forget it existed except as a cautionary tale: I thought it’d be nice to bring this one back.

Not just because of its content, but because well when @gailsimone (who would never troll ANYONE) made a similar series of posts about the Punisher… well certain demographics did not show it the kind of support you’d expect.  At all.

So much for equality.  Oh well, at least there’s always one tag you can rely on.

– wincenworks

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There was a very strange article I recently read on video games that involve fighting and “jiggle physics”

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

Cal submitted:

http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2014/mar/19/harada-breast-jiggle-physics-were-originally-banned-tekken-games-designer-sneaked-it-5th-game/

The quotes near the bottom are what concerned me the most…

“Anyway, as it turns out, a female martial arts instructor I was talking to recently revealed to me over a Skype chat that ‘no matter how much you try to prevent it from happening, you can’t stop them from jiggling’.

‘They’ll jiggle?” I inquired.

‘Yes, they will,’ she replied, ‘in my case, they absolutely will jiggle.

‘When they jiggle, how is the movement like?’ I inquired further.

We went back and forth like this for about 15 minutes, before I was forced to conclude that, no matter how much you try to control it, it’s only natural for them to jiggle.”

I feel like this kind of stuff entitles the developers from Namco (They make Tekken and Soul Calibur) and other companies to add over the top and ridiculous breast physics.

Some of the comments on that page from the users also made me pretty uncomfortable…

image

I can’t get over the idea that comical jiggle physics in Tekken are for “realism” but none of the realism advocates want the female characters to dress in that would have a chance of containing their boobs.

Rooster Teeth did a video testing the “realism” of costumes in Tekken’s competitor Soul Calibur.  Why yes they did to put censor bars up to block accidental nudity, how did you guess!?

And to think, there are people who wonder why video games aren’t taken seriously as an art form.

– wincenworks 

Acknowledging that real boobs do, in fact, jiggle doesn’t make video game jiggle physics pass as “realistic”…

Ask any boob-haver who takes part in athletic activities (like, I dunno, martial arts? that thing Tekken is about?!) and they’ll confirm that for a person

to

freely move around, breasts need to be bound with something like a sports bra… or two… or three.

~Ozzie 

edit: Updated the Jimquisition link

This week’s throwback: the totally scientific assessment that boobs have to excessively jiggle in fighting video games because realism… But no-one is wearing any sort of sports bra (or any bra, really) because… realism? 

~Ozzie 

PS: People who reblogged it while the post still had two redundant parapgraphs: PLEASE delete and reblog the current version. This is what I get for blogging while sick.