i wish i could see this picture for the first time again

Every time I see some gamerbro edit of a female video game character to make her 'prettier', I always see something I have mentally dubbed Cockroach Wife Syndrome (in honor of the guy who accidentally conditioned himself to only be aroused by a fantasy of his cockroach wife Ogtha).

That is to say, there is a certain subset of gamerbro who interacts so rarely with real women, that his primary touchstone for how women look is fiction: often video games and anime. So when a video game woman looks too realistic--too close to having traits that one might find in real flesh and blood women--this is foreign to them. This is unattractive. They have been jacking it to hentai and blender animation porn for too many years, and have inadvertently conditioned themselves to only be sexually aroused by the exaggerated cartoonish traits of animated women.

So now every time I see one such edit, I can't help but think. My. What a coincidence you've made her look more like an anime waifu. Truly dedicated to your cockroach wife.

We've already did a throwback of our original post about this hilarious redesign before, but in light of what we discussed re: Silent Hill 2 and Stellar Blade nerdbro meltdowns lately, @azzandra summarizes this sadly topical problem perfectly.

People who insist on those sorts of edits, or who photoshop smiles on Marvel movie heroines, or throw a hissy fit because two square inches of pixel cleavage or butt were "censored" with character model update, clearly have a case of "literally divorced my sexual preference from real life humans and will make it everyone else's problem" disease. I'd prescribe touching some grass for that.

And no, frankly, it doesn't really matter if they're in fact irony-poisoned or otherwise insincere, as long as they're acting so loudly and publicly as if they truly felt that way. Ironic incel is still, for all intents and purposes, just another incel.

BTW, if you haven't heard of the tulpa Cockroach Wife Ogtha story and are feeling morbidly curious, please be warned of how potentially disturbing it is before googling the details.

~Ozzie

Vengeance Paladin ⚔️ my PC Raine

Raine is definitely the hero the fantasy genre needs, the paladin who will make us look deep within ourselves and ask why don't we dress all fictional men like this?

The empowerment, the armor that lets him be super agile but also equipped to deflect attacks.

Truly inspiring.

-wincenworks

tfw you make a whole set of custom brushes just because you wanted to paint one (1) artwork that contains fancy knight armor.

I'll never get people who even imply that you can't make a character look beautiful in a non-boobastic full plate armor. Seems like a skill issue to me. Take notes from @foervraengd!

Found this piece via inquiring the author about their other piece, The Porcelain Prince, which depicts a less sensible, but incredibly aesthetic idea of (ceremonial) porcelain armor:

~Ozzie

Your first mistake in art is thinking you draw men and women inherently differently

I'm serious, this is genuinely not a joke. There's no wrong way to do art but you do make a mistake when you think that you draw men and women differently without any overlap or gray area, like they're two opposites and that's how they'll always be FOREVER. Treating two genders as vastly different is absolutely the incorrect way to think about things and considering how anatomy is one of the first things you practice when you start drawing human or human adjacent characters, it becomes harder and harder to unlearn as time goes on

When learning to draw, you need to understand that there's more body types for ALL genders than just "flat as a board with no hips" and "slightly thinner waist with larger chest"

There's more ways to look than androgyny you fucks

The continued comments saying "I draw both of them with big tits" or "I draw both of them as cute" or "I draw both of them the exact same" are literally missing part of my goddamn point here. I'm not saying you draw every character you ever draw exactly the same, I'm saying that when you draw characters differently based on their gender is where you're messing up

You're all also forgetting about, ya know. FAT PEOPLE. AND I AM A FAT PERSON. That one stings with disgust as well as disappointment on a lot of you. Do better.

You should be drawing characters differently, with different body shapes, with different hair colors, from different places around the world. But what you SHOULDN'T do is draw them differently strictly based on their gender and how you perceive a gendered body to be.

There is more ways to look than androgyny. There is more ways to draw than exactly the same.

OP's original point refers to how suspicious dimorphism in character design, as well as (tangentially) all the bullshit excuses for double standards in costumes, are born.

It's a serious and good art advice: Do NOT get caught up in bio-essentialism when designing characters of different sexes and/or genders, and NEVER take pointers on what features read as masculine vs feminine as gospel or as unbreakable rules, because neither life nor art works that way! And yes, making everyone uniformly androgynous isn't the answer either. Genuine diversity, as always, is the key to avoiding both the Sameface/Samebody Syndrome as well as the obsessively binary thinking about how people look.

~Ozzie

Fantasy Classes series by Forrest Imel: Warrior, Warlock, Priest, Paladin, Druid, Mage, Ranger, Thief

*slams fist on table* THIS IS THE SORT OF GENDER EQUAL CHARACTER DESIGN I LIKE TO SEE.

We posted the warlocks before, but the entire set is an amazing example of equitable character and costume design!

And the artist is on Tumblr! @forrestimel

~Ozzie

My redesign hot take is that if you’re aiming to “desexualize” a female character, don’t make her boobs smaller. You’re implying a lot here.

Instead of shrinking her boobs, try:

There are probably lots more options too! I’m not an artist! Just a person with a big chest and back pain!

Important points all around!

One crucial addition: do know the difference between shrinking the boobs as part of the anatomy and containing the boobs within chest wear, like a layered armor or a sports bra (a.k.a. don't be like the dudebros who cried about Tifa getting a "breast reduction" via sports bra in FF7 remake).

~Ozzie

leggomywaffle submitted:

I was really hoping that this cover would not summarize the content of the book, which is the combining of many great heroines from the Golden Age of comics - but sadly the contents of the book do seem to send a clear message from Dynamite Entertainment: Women are only worth putting in comics if they visually coded as sex objects first:

Nostalgia has a massive influence on comics, largely because only a few creative people are involved in making them (compared with video games and movies) and most of them are specialist skill sets. This combined with general risk aversion, means that sadly none of the “big” titles are prone to challenging their old conventions. 

This is particularly disappointing for Dynamite since the company only started in 2005 - but has huge gallery of golden age characters they purchased but have continued to make them generic copies of what made them so unsuccessful they were up for sale.

I mean you want to know how generic this cover is? Let’s compare it to another heroine based book J Scott Campbell was recruited to do the cover for:

So, while I want to be really excited about having a big story that is a lot of Golden Age heroines getting together, it’s really hard to do that when the art is basically reduces them all down to the same Barbie dolls with the same “How do we dodge the censors?” costume design ideas.

I love nostalgia as much as the next comic book fan - but at some point we have to ask what is the point of continuing the art if we don’t really advance it? And what is the point of doing a girl power comic if the introduction to it could be used as a textbook example of male gaze in comics?

- wincenworks

More on comic books | More on Red Sonja | more on J. Scott Campbell

Just in case anyone still thought J. Scott Campbell somehow was a skilled artist rather than a hack who never gets out of his extremely narrow, male-gazey comfort zone... No, the above covers were not a coincidence. I just stumbled upon another Generic Melted Barbies Posing Group Shot of his by chance:

I so totally can tell how those three dominatrix-looking ladies are different from one another... or even from ladies from the last two covers... I mean, one is red, one pale blue and one has the rebel haircut! So unique! /s 🙃

He just keeps drawing the same shit over and over and publishers seem happy enough with continuing the partnership. And we really could keep going...

Dear gods, those poses never get any less awkward either...

~Ozzie

PS: Another reason for this celebratory throwback is this post no longer being hidden by Tumblr's weird anti-porn algorithm (we appealed it). We'll see if it sticks with more images!

A warrrior with abundant osteoptimism and one more skeleptical re: bone toughness.

There are two kinds of characters...

Once again @mcnostril takes a much funnier spin on explaining skimpy armor than any apologist fanboy or self-righteous artist does with their thermian arguments and such.

~Ozzie

h/t: @caelonaut

there is a huge difference between criticizing an institution and criticizing individual behavior. i can criticize the makeup industry without criticizing the 14 year old girl who uses concealer because she’s self-conscious about her acne; i can criticize the plastic surgery industry without vilifying the woman who decided to get a nose job after two decades of pointed comments and bullying. it is intellectually dishonest to respond to an institutional criticism as if it were a personal attack; on the flip side, it is cruel and unnecessary to leverage personal attacks in the name of institutional criticism

if i see one (1) more person respond to a perfectly reasonable beauty-industry-critical sentiment with “but i personally enjoy eyeshadow. why are you attacking people who like eyeshadow :(” or “exactly, all women who wear makeup are miserable and brainwashed” i am going to climb a tree and bite the top of it

no it absolutely is not

It really applies to pop media as well. We get occasional "but I really like playing as a sexy female warrior" responses to our content, and they're just missing forest for the trees.

Liking individual examples or having a personal preference towards part of a bigger problematic trend doesn't justify the trend as a whole. You're allowed to (and even should) enjoy something while being critical of what tropes it contributes to on a bigger scale.

You're not a bad person for liking it, of course, as long as you're cognizant of its implications. It also helps to note whether the problematic trope is played straight or heightened in some way, via satire, stylization or deconstruction.

Taking a statement like "bikini armor is sexist" as a personal attack, because you're, say, a World of Warcraft megafan, says a lot more about you than about the person who made the statement.

~Ozzie

PS: Just as the OP, we denounce this post being appropriated by radfems, SWEFRs, TERFs and similar scum*. If you're one of them and see this reblog, keep scrolling.

PPS: Tumblr fucked up and posted this early on Friday when it was still a draft and I was showing it for a friend to beta-read. Re-posting it on Saturday.

*glossary for uninitiated under the cut

Originally published at: https://www.eschergirls.com/photo/2022/07/12/tfw-you-put-your-legs-backwards-morning

Um, Valiant Force girls are doing that optical illusion pose torso forward, legs backwards pose again.  Maybe they’re taught this at knight school.

This one is at least not as confusing as Mulan’s, it just looks like she has her legs on backwards.

(Game art of Victoria Bloodknight from Valiant Force, XII Braves, submitted by anonymous)

Im not great at anatomy either tbh but i was overcome with the urge to edit her

Nice edit! I noticed you fixed her armor a bit too. The pose definitely makes a lot more sense than the original where she literally looks like she put her legs on backwards. Also the edit kinda highlights how tiny her torso is despite how armored it is.

Some art is nearly beyond redemption, some needs just a few edits and some, like this, would require extensive fixes to address ALL of its anatomy and costuming problems. @dr-teatime focused on the couple most crucial edits and that already highlighted how there's still hope for this design, and even the pose... Just let the artist use some anatomy reference (no, lingerie catalogue doesn't really count) next time.

~Ozzie