Hyrule Warriors – A Link to the Pants, Part 1
Hyrule Warriors has been on our radar for some time, so we finally decided to try making its female characters live up to the game’s name.
Basically only Impa is anywhere close to consistent with how male warriors are depicted, while other ladies at best look like they’re on a runway rather than battlefield, and at worse are Cia the Boobplate Witch.
Linkle
First planned either as female version of Link or his sister, Linke apparently ended up as a separate character who just happens to be very similar to him… And also to many other green archer ladies, especially the Elf from Dragon’s Crown.
Reminder that, based on concept art released before inclusion of the character in the game, it could have always been much worse than just cute and vaguely derivative. Bingo-worthy worse [image source]:
Her final costume is quite fashionable, just not very functional when directly compared to how Link presents in this game, wearing layers of armor, including chainmail under his green tunic.
While all she gets is short poofy sleeves and the fetishy “absolute territory” of bared flesh between a her skirt/shorts and thigh-high boots.
So, of course, my aim with her redesign was to give her some layers and basic armor while retaining her individual fashion sense.
Now her poofy white blouse is gambeson padding that she wears chainmail over, much like Link does. And the poofy sleeves are bigger, cause why not?
Speaking of sleeves, she also gets some additional orange undershirt that matches her skirt. And her gloves got a lot longer, to cover her forearms from harm.
Sorry for the botched shading on chainmail, I copied it from Link, but didn’t have time to re-shade properly… or to layer it in a way that makes sense ?
Finally, poofy pants, to match the sleeves, and to properly protect her legs. Covered with some more layering of chainmal and longer skirt. And the boots have functional knee-high length now.
All in all, with the amount of edits this went through, I’m not unhappy with the results. Hope you guys like it too!
~Ozzie
h/t for post title: @filipfatalattractionrblog
So, the creators of Divinity 2: Save the Boobplate … sorry Divinity 2: Girls don’t play video games… sorry Divinity 2: Original Sin have shown off a couple of hours gameplay for Baldur’s Gate 3… and this is the iconic character in the intro sequence before you pick/create a character.
Which means aside from being in this atrocity, she also gets the dubious honor of being the character who we see as a fellow prisoner having a parasite implanted via her eye (then the first person scene implies its happening to you, even though she is playable as one of the pre-generated characters).
Aside from the obvious mountain of baggage to unpack about women as victims, ridiculous armor for women – accurate for men, etc. There’s something else I’d like to point out which is probably not going to be obvious for anyone who isn’t a huge Dungeons and Dragons nerd.
Lae’zel is a githyanki, basically a near human but not human “alien” race from another dimension with a long history and pile of lore which actually makes the whole scene worse. However, what I wanted to cover is this is what female githyanki look like in the current 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons art:
So for this character, Larian Studio’s entire design process has been:
- Remove all muscle tone and threatening aspects of appearance
- Make the worst armor more ridiculous but cutesy and hyper-feminine
Great job at depicting a race where all members are raised as warrior from birth.
Why are people calling the people story tellers again?
– wincenworks
Disgaea’s Beastmaster
As far as I can tell, Disgaea’s character designs are the general off-the wall JRPG goodness… and badness. In fact, some character concept art makes it look like straight-up hentai game (which no, it isn’t), and out of them, this is one of the few I feel comfortable with bingoing without sliding BABD straight into NSFW category or breaking Tumblr’s hilarious nipple ban rule (yes, really – do not open in public).
Fun fact: Beastmaster, who can at least afford underwear, is a “humanoid” class
while
the creepily naked-looking Felynn and Succubus are counted as “monster” classes. Coincidentally, all the other monster classes appear actually monstrous. Weird that the only female-coded ones look like humans with some beastly features ? Gives me Digimon flashbacks.
I’ll give them that – putting a really strange top/suspender/garter on a regular bikini, so that it holds up lower halves of otherwise nonexistent pants (how do they keep shape?), is at least creative way to display all that gratuitous flesh.
I just feel sorry for how chilly she must be all the time. And for her upper spine, cause, wow, that suspender thing is held up entirely just by her neck, not even shoulders. So uncomfortable!
Oh yeah, and in case the usual suspects started typing – no, having some shirtless dudes in the franchise is neither by itself equal to, nor a justification for blatant objectification of female characters.
~Ozzie
h/t: @piranhaguppy
Whilst Overwatch does have some diversity in its female cast, I find myself incredulous that people can’t see the sexism in the predominant tropes: skin tight outfits; boob plates; and very skinny women are the most commonly occuring design choices. There are no conventionally unattractive female heroes, whereas there are male heroes like Winston, Junkrat, and Roadhog. There are good elements to Overwatch’s character design too, but plenty to critique.
THANK YOU and THANK YOU for the tag about the racism
The pants aren’t just tight, either, they’re so tight they practically go up into their assholes, like a reverse camel toe (I wouldn’t be surprised if they made versions with camel toe, just like the artists kept naughty drawings of Jessica Rabbit on their cubical walls). I won’t get into the sexism too much except to add that the combination of infantilizing and sexualising women at the same time disturbs the fuck outta me, and Blizzard did it unashamedly. You can make a character sexy without turning them into a sexual object but apparently Blizzard didn’t get that memo.
And then there’s the racism. What I find absolutely outstanding is that this game was Blizzard’s attempt at diversity and being less sexist. And people (mostly white people, I’ve noticed) have just lapped it the fuck up. As a non-white, non-American I’d like to tell Blizzard to stay in its fucking lane because it’s so painfully obvious that they looked at other cultures and races through a white ‘murican lens that I want to break something. But of course, the fans are very quick to jump on anyone who claims or even mentions it. Nah, there’s nooo problem with the offensive skins, no problem with the white-washing of characters, no problem with the fact that some skins are from the wrong fucking culture to the character it’s on! We’re just being over sensitive! It’s just a fun game! It’s just a stereotype! Eat my entire ass. People would rather bury their heads in the sand than admit that they like something racist. Fun fact, we have an Indigenous tv show here called Cleverman and the writers and producers are Indigenous and had to ask their elders for permission to show the world parts of their culture/history/knowledge before they could begin the project. They had to earn the right to make a tv show like this. Because funnily enough, just having diversity doesn’t get you a get out of jail free card on racism. If the characters and their culture aren’t treated with respect, it means dick all.
In particular, Symmetra broke my fucking heart. My dad is from India, I get a lot of news from India. I grew up with a lot of stories. I have Indian friends. The rape culture is – bad. Very bad. Worse than you can imagine. And I stand with the women of India, who have to fight tooth and nail to be treated like human beings not their fathers/husband’s possessions. Who have to fight even outside of the country. So when I saw her design and broken-doll pose, I felt my heart sink. And when I saw the pathetic attempt at a Kali skin I felt my face get hot with anger. Kali is supposed to be like this:
“
Kali is represented with perhaps the fiercest features amongst all the world’s deities. She has four arms, with a sword in one hand and the head of a demon in another. The other two hands bless her worshippers, and say, “fear not”! She has two dead heads for her earrings, a string of skulls as necklace, and a girdle made of human hands as her clothing. Her tongue protrudes from her mouth, her eyes are red, and her face and breasts are sullied with blood. She stands with one foot on the thigh, and another on the chest of her husband, Shiva.
“ –Subhamoy Das
She’s ferocious power, she’s terrifying, she’s empowering – and what did Blizzard do? Ignore all that (like most men do) and turn the skin into an utterly incorrect, utterly ignorant pinup costume. A sexual object yet again, one of the many things Indian women are fighting against. Her skulls aren’t even on her neck! She only has two arms! They moved her skulls to her hip so they didn’t cover her breasts! The fact that people are going around calling it “the devi skin” says volumes about the utter ignorance surrounding this. Ignorance might not be done maliciously, but it doesn’t excuse people or make it less racist. It just proves that the majority of people don’t care about the cultures that Blizzard is using for profit.
Thank you for this really important addition.
This post has picked up almost 5,000 notes since the addition which I’m super glad about because the added detail deserves all the attention; but I just want to point out that this is the post where the first thousand reblogs (and my inbox) are full of people telling me that no one cares, or that it’s just a game.
Well, clearly, we care. Don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t.
Hey, @bikiniarmorbattledamage, what are your thoughts on this?
Anyone who followed us for extended amount of time would know that we agree entirely. We’re sick of Overwatch being given all the credit for doing diversity right/doing women better when at best it’s just the minimal token effort, sprinkled generously with overt sexism and racism on top.
All the while competing games with comparably more care about representation fall into obscurity, by the virtue of not being made by a huge studio with big marketing budget and overzealous fanbase.
Speaking of which, Blizzard fandom is easily one of the most belligerent ones, consistently replying to any post we make about their games with defiance, trolling and abuse. And often insisting that their headcanons should be accounted for in judging the quality of OW’s designs, story and characters.
@feministgamingmatters‘ and @flamingtrashcans’ posts above are almost 4 years old and no less topical than they were back in 2016. If anything, the amount of problems with Overwatch piled on since then and we have an archive of posts to prove it.
Further BABD reading on the game’s problems with representation and diversity:
- Doing women better
- Blizzard “progress”
- The Rigged Slot Machine – Overwatch’s Female Character Creating Engine
- Whitewashing the undead of color
- Blizz’s toxic, homophobic fanboys react to Tracer WLW reveal
- Video game industry’s baffling definiton of “diverse” female silhouette
- Brigitte’s frustrating costume and character design
- Ashe vs. refusal of Black female representation + follow-up regarding all the racist concern trolling rhetoric
- Sigma’s feet vs. mental illness representation
(Note that vast majority of the links here are dated after the original publication of the above post. And it’s by no means a complete list of all the problems with sexism/racism the game has.)
~Ozzie
Some stats, counting out of 30 heroes, since Bastion doesn’t have gendered pronouns:
Total female-coded characters: 14
Women of color (robots don’t count): 6
Lady characters who are not human: 1 (counting the robot) (vs 3 men)
Lady characters whose entire face is hidden: big fat 0 (not counting the robot) (vs 5 men, also no robots)
-Icy
Mortal Kombat Post-11 Sexy Fix, Part 2
Sub-Zero, the Blue PecNinja
As my name might imply (it’s subtle, I know), I love me some icy bois. And who better to give an empowered cold-weather outfit than Sub-Zero himself!
Basically, I just used what he already had on, except I took away…. most of it. He looks so much more comfortable now though. I did take some inspiration from MK9, for that corset look. Of course, Sub-Zero is a bit more conservative in his dress than Scorpion, so he covers his nips.
I also changed his mask, face, and hair. The mask I made more sensual, so that people he’s fighting are distracted no matter if they look at his Hot Bod, or his face. I also removed his face wrinkles, because we can’t have men be wrinkly. Gross. And I let his hair down to give him that mysterious look. I can just see his entrance being like, flipping his bangs and flexing his pecs, with little snowflakes popping out from the cleavage. ???
At the time we streamed this, I couldn’t find a good full-body picture of him, so I had to do with this hips-up one. I did take his pants away, and gave him a bubble butt, but feel free to add your ideas for what he’d wear on his leggies.
-Icy