This is so frustrating, its like 50% okay and 50% "by gahd we gotta show off her womanly curves how else will they know she's a lady"?
I mean, it's not great, but at least it's not showing off her underwear...
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Why women criticise sexualised character designs (READ OP)
- Thread starter Persephone
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Note the usage of colour to suggest she's showing off more flesh than she actually is
Obviously, they don't need to be so subtle about it these days...
who stole effie's pants
I mean, it's not as bad as Camilla, but it's pretty close.
Echoes gave me some hope, but I feel we're going to be closer to Fates for FE Switch.
I mean, it's not as bad as Camilla, but it's pretty close.
Echoes gave me some hope, but I feel we're going to be closer to Fates for FE Switch.
The thing most likely to slit Effie's arteries open is the bottom corners of her lower chest armour. No, Fire Emblem, plate armour and a corset do not have the same purpose, thickness, restrictions or flexibility.
I actually quite like the depiction of layered plate/arming doublet on her arm, until you realise that one-woman-army Effie must have arms like pipe cleaners to fit into it. Which is another constant issue when depicting women in heavy armour, somehow it still has to look ridiculously thin.
Yeah, that's got to be one ill-fitting armor since she now has to run with her hips twisted like that...then again, apparently "can I masturbate to this" is more important than "will I survive in this"
It makes you wonder if the artists ever look to real world armour for inspiration, or just base their designs on those that came before, with each cycle of repetition growing ever more exaggerated and detached from reality...
IDK. I keep a collection of catalogues and stock photography for when I need to reference clothing design - and even then I'm cautious because there's always a clear bias towards certain ideals :/
IDK. I keep a collection of catalogues and stock photography for when I need to reference clothing design - and even then I'm cautious because there's always a clear bias towards certain ideals :/
One of the major criticisms of otaku-styled art design is that the artists derive their ideas from other otaku works rather than using real-world observations. Just look at the armor design for games like Monster Hunter - they're so over-busy that no real world equivalent is going to look anything like that. It really does feel like the artists are going for uniqueness (and mostly missing the boat), rather than looking at the purpose of design and what they're trying to communicate with it.
Looking at the random collection of either overblown plate armour that makes guys look like space marines or female 'plate' armour that looks like McGuyver has been told to slap it together out of a camping kitchenware set and four bits of elastic, I don't think many of the artists give a crap about how medieval armour, weapons or clothing worked at all. To be fair, it's often the same with cheaply-made TV, film, animation etc, where no one gives any thought to the idea that people several hundred years ago weren't stupid and may have dressed for comfort as well as protection. Scabbards for weapons and multiple layers of protection and undergarments perhaps interfere with artist's desire for sweeping arcs and dramatic poses, I suppose.
I understand that 'it's fantasy!' but for a series that has got a lot of mileage and hundreds of character designs out of European knights and archers etc, you'd think at least a mild nod to functional kit would be good. I mean, look at the young women of Valkyria Chronicles, proudly heading into Europa's trench warfare in miniski... Oh. Nevermind.
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Yeah but in Japan that's just how they dress! So for them Pyra IS dressed modestly!
(lol)
You know, as often as people bring up codpieces as an excuse for boobplate, I wanna see more guys with big ol' codpieces running around in games if we're not going to tone down the sexuality of the women's armor.
I realize it's not equivalent, and it goes deeper than the mere act of designing sexy armor, but put their money where their mouth is you know?
I realize it's not equivalent, and it goes deeper than the mere act of designing sexy armor, but put their money where their mouth is you know?
I could swear pretty much all armour in awakening had people without pants or no armour on the back. Looks like the knight class was spared. I'm pretty sure sully, cherche and co have really silly armour though.
No, she does have her ass hanging out in the original game too. If it's not her base class, then it's her promotion, but it's definitely there in the original too. I remember it very distinctly lmao.
I mean, it's not great, but at least it's not showing off her underwear...
I think that this is culturally based as well. Costume designers in the West will draw upon both history and fantasy artwork for armor and clothing designs, so they'll sometimes come up with something really silly. However, if you look at Chinese TV and film, their armor designs tend to be a lot more practical and effective looking. They tend to be less anachronistic as well, but that's probably a side effect of China making so many historical productions in the first place.
There is a point in that women wearing short skirts and showing off their legs is fairly common in Japan. However, it should have been obvious that a woman wearing armor in not-Medieval Europe isn't going to follow Japanese fashion trends!
Or just give men high heels! They started out as male fashion, so why not be historically authentic?
Eh conquest was still my favorite FE despite the story being trash and the character design too. Those things are fixable if the will is there.
I don't mind the pairing off of people. It's not for me but people like their ships, so whatever.
Interesting point, thanks for that, I remember loads of crazy fantasy kit from the 70s/80s. I do think that the workshops that made kit for the LotR Films and Game of Thrones have done a fair bit to set a modern benchmark for decent layered medieval fantasy kit, there's just something about the way the weight and mass of it hangs on the actor that adds a lot to the portrayal of a man/woman at war. Same goes for the better modern war flicks that show soldiers festooned with all kinds of webbing, most of which they don't need but, when they do need it, they tend to need very badly.
You hit the nail right on the head, anime is chock full of tropes built around having your (cheese)cake and eating it too, women often look like they shop for clothes at a sex shop, yet (except in hentai) nobody ever has any actual sex. Another prominent related trope is this:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AccidentalPervert
I guess this is why nurse, maid, etc. fetishes are so commonplace in anime too; it's an easy way of designing a character to be "sexy, but innocent".
That's already begun.
Bless you Lab Zero. (They're doing so much better than Skullgirls with Indivisible, insanely diverse too. Phoebe's the only female design that's a bit off but she's actually super duper built so, 50/50.)
I agree, however this was a bad pun and you should feel bad :D
Speaking of ladies that got shat on by Heroes, let's have a moment of silence for Gwendolyn aka Wendy. At least her lance doesn't look like a harmless stick now, I guess...
gotta protect that beautiful artistic vision of having female knights with their asses out *single tear rolls down cheek*
I live for bad puns. It's particularly satisfying making them in foreing languages (like English is for me). :D
Yeah, because she became the harmless stick.Speaking of ladies that got shat on by Heroes, let's have a moment of silence for Gwendolyn aka Wendy. At least her lance doesn't look like a harmless stick now, I guess...
.................... this, uh, this is in the actual game? Like, this isn't fanart or anything? I ask because of, um, reasons.
brutal
Lol. Just thinking about your point regarding 'hello nurse', I wonder if that's why JRPG healers are typically female, a way to relegate them to a support role (gotta let Timmy meet his destiny), make them as innocent, sexy and special all at the same time. Maybe it's just a side effect of a typically Male hero though. I don't know, haven't really thought it through, it just sprung to mind regarding medics.
I think it makes quite a bit of difference when real people have to wear those costumes. "My skin will get shredded if I wear this!" makes for a pretty good counterargument against the really bad designs!
But he isn't even showing off his calves, and his foot isn't pointed toward the viewer! Here, this is what a manly man is supposed to look like:
That's a Western thing as well. In fantasy stories, women are usually the healer, the mage, or the archer. Sometimes she's a thief as well, but fantasy character classes tend to be divided along gender lines.
Speaking of ladies that got shat on by Heroes, let's have a moment of silence for Gwendolyn aka Wendy. At least her lance doesn't look like a harmless stick now, I guess...
gotta protect that beautiful artistic vision of having female knights with their asses out *single tear rolls down cheek*
Ugh this trend of putting high-heels everywhere on female armor just because needs to disappear and fast, of all the things that get criticized about sexualized outfits this is THE thing that gets me xD
How else are you going to make all the female characters look like they have hooves instead of feet?
The artistic purity of the hallowed combat lingerie should be defended for all time, may tit ninjas save us all. For when thy waifu doth descend from thine body pillow to walk among us on ankles broken from lack of support in combat, long will they demonstrate gratitude towards the faithful that screamed 'artistic vision!', through the holy gesture of hands demurely clasped upon the chest and kneecaps smashed upon the concrete as they collapse before thee in divine gratitude. Animen.Speaking of ladies that got shat on by Heroes, let's have a moment of silence for Gwendolyn aka Wendy. At least her lance doesn't look like a harmless stick now, I guess...
gotta protect that beautiful artistic vision of having female knights with their asses out *single tear rolls down cheek*
Fair enough. Maybe I'm just thinking back to my adolescent tabletop days when we mostly had Male clerics. Along with Male Warriors. And thieves. And mages. And... :D
I was gonna say something about the idea of a hero who had to heal people, rather than kill them...but then I remembered the absurd lengths some games (hello again, XB2) go to to keep their hero "pure" by never killing anyone.
Except random soldiers.
Except, he still never kills them, even after stabbing them fifty times and blasting them in the face with three volleys of holy magic and a supernova - they're just stunned/incapacitated.
Wait, are female characters ever allowed to kill anyone, even when they're a villain?
This is something that bothered me about both Trials of Cold Steel and Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, the idea that you can have pitched battle between people using greatswords, guns, bolt throwers, wyverns, shotguns and a variety of every other ranged and melee weapon across a thousand years of history and yet nobody dies if the goodies say 'but we'll just knock them out'. If you want the 'cool' factor of showing your characters as special ops soldiers, professional knights and other highly capable warriors across history, giving them equipment designed only for killing, its ridiculous storytelling to then suggest such tools can only mildly incapacitate people at will. Either you are prepared for your characters to be part of an army or not, which is where the obsession with 'magic military academies' with all the consequences of a Saturday morning cartoon gets a bit silly if it's then paired with thousands dying off-screen.
Is this a sarcastic question? I'm pretty sure every female protagonist in any video game ever made kills lots of things, and there have been tons of nasty female villains in media history.
I feel like you'd have to honestly be purposefully ignoring them to suggest they don't exist.
Failing something happening like that one Final Fantasy game (which I doubt as he already got redesigned... to this and now he's skimpier), yep, that's what Ren's gonna look like in the final game.
Like those boots she's wearing amirite? Seriously they look extremely painful. And tiny. Geez.
Ah, silly me! :9
I think my biggest pet peeve with armor is when they lack full leggings, gambesons or just undergarments in general.
I don't know why the character designers can't stop and think for two seconds and go "hmm, how comfortable is steel rubbing directly on my body?"
I saw a commercial a while back (I think for a mobile game) that featured a young lady in a fight scene and she was wearing greaves directly on her legs. I cringed a bit.
Also, when they make women archers. Archers literally need so much back strength... I sort of doubt the average woman could handle using a bow for a long period of time without a large amount of weight lighting and training. A woman in medieval warfare is better suited for a spear or long sword due to how light they are. The bows always make me laugh.
I don't know why the character designers can't stop and think for two seconds and go "hmm, how comfortable is steel rubbing directly on my body?"
I saw a commercial a while back (I think for a mobile game) that featured a young lady in a fight scene and she was wearing greaves directly on her legs. I cringed a bit.
Also, when they make women archers. Archers literally need so much back strength... I sort of doubt the average woman could handle using a bow for a long period of time without a large amount of weight lighting and training. A woman in medieval warfare is better suited for a spear or long sword due to how light they are. The bows always make me laugh.
I mean, to be fair, the men who are archers rarely look like the should be doing it as well. Archers in video games are always portrayed as "weak" when in fact they're pretty freaking strong.
Take advantage of mods. The costumes I have for Mika are all DRAMATICALLY superior to her default outfits (and most of her paid DLC outfits for that matter).I went onto the Street Fighter V Steam community the other day to see if other people were reacting to certain changes the same way I did. I found a thread of people bitching about the game's "censorship." Is constructive criticism a Marxist conspiracy to these people or what?
Even with that so-called censorship, I'm still quite embarrassed with Cammy and Mika's default outfits. Like, does a secret agent really need a thin strap of leather riding up her ass? And Mika is so fun and has such a great characterization, but good god, the fact that her swimsuit costume is vastly more tasteful than her default speaks volumes.
I mean, hell, her tag team partner gets a better costume:
Oh that is actually legit disappointing. They really sexed her up for no reason huh?
Fire Emblem Heroes never fails to disappoint...
Violet Evergarden, an anime airing this season, has a dude who wears high heels.
Too bad the show is boring af, even if it is pretty.
Also, this character, wow. Gotta love that diagonal string holding her top together so her boobs don't just fall out.
Perhaps, in terms of a games influence rather than a historical one, it's descended from tabletop RPGs where it's associated with rangers, scouty, sneaky types etc. Which is quite funny when, even in D&D way back when, you still had to have a high strength stat to do any damage with a bow as you are still trading your personal strength for velocity/impact etc. I think some game designers think all ranged weapons just work like guns rather than the damage multiplier gained from the efficiencys of levers and pulleys.
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I was referring to that specific breed of story where the hero never kills anyone because they're "pure" or whatev - and fenale protagonists are often relegated to roles such as healer/white mage, archer etc.
At the same time, though, is there a female equivalent to, say, Sephiroth? One who deliberately, unambiguously kills a major hero without remorse?
It is the oddest thing. There are quite a few women warriors recorded in history, but I can't think of a single one who was known for her archery. I can understand where the Japanese get the idea of women archers come from, but it's a bit odd that the archetype is popular in the West as well. I imagine that it comes from a lot of fantasy female characters being elves, and elves are sort of archers by default. But it really is an odd archetype, and spears are way underrepresented in fiction. They were the most popular weapon for thousands of years for a reason.
I think that this stereotype comes from a lot of female characters being archers. Obviously, since it's a job suitable for women, strength can't be a major requirement! The funny thing is that archers were probably the strongest men on the battlefield. Constantly pulling a heavy-draw bow is so strenuous that it would actually warp an archer's skeleton!
I imagine that's because fictional characters tend to have weapons for winning in personal combat or for heroic killing shots at range, rather than being part an effective crowd. I always think it's a cool part of the background (often seen in Celtic, Norse or Greek sagas) that being part of a shieldwall means being part of something bigger, rather than being mr I'm-too-important-to-do-that. To be fair, how would their cloak (a different colour so the enemy know who they are, obviously!) billow heroically in the wind with a hundred other chaps crowded in around them :D
Bernard Cornwell's 'The Winter King' Saga (set in Britain, in the dark ages) does a good job of outlining this.
My biggest gripe with sexualized designs is that it seems to be a whole lot of excuse to not come up with imaginative designs and races. Look at the awesome weird designs in ARMS. Or the inklings in Splatoon, it's a whole other race.
But no, generic sexy girls. Generic sexy girls e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e ffs.
But no, generic sexy girls. Generic sexy girls e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e ffs.
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I'd mind the whole ridiculous 'artistic vision' argument less if there weren't whole legions of young female characters designed from a template of being thin and wearing stockings and a very short skirt with their thighs on show first. That seems to be the starting point whether you are designing a female foot Knight in a medieval fantasy war or a female soldier with a gun or a schoolgirl or a nurse or a lawyer or a nun or just about anything else. It's not creative or empowering, it's insanely restrictive but somehow defended as a reasonable way to start designing half your young cast.
What would be the male equivalent? Skinny bloke in boxer shorts and a nice pair of socks, you can add a chainmail shirt or a flak vest or a blazer or some cosy, chunky knitwear on after that if you like, but the most important thing is that the pants are on show and so are the upper legs. What a template, the artistic vision is flowing fast now.. come on Era, describe your best artistic vision based on that :D
The average race design for male and female:
Men: have a insect like lower half with multiple spider like legs, Upper half somewhat human but utterly bestial, four arms, claws for hands, mandilbles for mouths, 6 eyes.
Women: Generic hot women with some chitin forming a bra and panties.
So so annoying.
It's just so friggin' generic! It's especially bad in various MMORPGs around.
It used to be that in an old-school rpg, an old man would yell at you 'Hey you noobie, you think you got what it takes? Go kill ten slimes to prove your worth!'
But in way too many MMORPGs, it's a sexy girl who'd go 'oh great hero, please save use all! Go and kill that terrifying beast plaguing us all (that you can kill in one hit because it's the tutorial). Oh, you're done? Thank you great hero! Now please pick 10 golden berries! They're in the bush right behind me.'
Me: wtf?
Needless to say, I gave up on those pretty fast.
Xaszatm Exactly!
Speaking of which, it really is amazing but many table top games (D&D, 40k, Age of Sigmar, etc) are seemingly making a concentrated effort to being more inclusive in the past 2 years. D&D have been trying to be generic as possible when describing the player character and constantly alternate gender pronouns while trying to have functional yet interesting armor designs. Games-Workshop trying to include women into their models again and featuring women in their stories. I mean, its nowhere near perfect, but there is a concentrated effort there which has resulted in me being more into these things lately than before.
Well there's Velvet from Berseria. Despite her terrible design she does kill quite a few people and revel in it. It's pretty funny because you have this roaming sort of rival/Ally guy named Zaveed who despite helping you sometimes dosen't want to travel with you since he thinks it's screwed up how your group kills people so easily.
Well, male equivalents of Sephiroth are also rare ;) As in, villains that outright kill a major hero, because major heroes rarely die.
That said, I can't think of any specifically like that, but Mother in Wild ARMs is pretty remorselessly evil and destroys even her own children (the lesser antagonists) at some point. Miang is also ruthless and cold-blooded. Female villains do exist, not sure why that'd be particularly rare?
There are a lot of poor GW novels, but I've always liked Dan Abnett's 'Gaunts Ghosts' books. They follow an Imperial Guard unit that goes from being a men-only crowd from a forest world to absorbing survivors of other regiments as they are ground down over the years. There are female soldiers, snipers, NCOs, officers etc, and they use the same kit as the guys. Perhaps as the Administratum doesn't give enough of a shit to supply sexy combat lingerie when life expectancy is measured in weeks :D
If we're talking killing off a playable character, I struggle to think of many villains besides Sephiroth that do that. There's that one guy in Legend of Dragoon and I know a few Fire Emblem games do that, but IIRC those aren't done by main antagonists.
If we're just talking characters that do unambiguously evil stuff which may or may not include killing important characters without remorse, Sephiroth is actually pretty tame even when accounting for female villains. A certain ADV/visual novel series has two of the most vicious and disturbing main villains in gaming, both of which are female.
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