Thursday, December 30, 2010

Fanart Hall of Shame: Stregatto10

I'm getting kind of tired of arguing on the internet of what is and isn't sexist when it comes to men in video games. I mean, has anyone noticed that the trolls in the previous post's comment thread (and on See Page XX) have us arguing about depictions of men? Heaven forbid that I should talk about the feelings of a marginalized minority on a blog devoted to talking about sexist depictions of women! That just won't do!

Whatever. I'm tired of beating my head against the wall for today, so I'm going to tackle something more cut and dry - improbable anatomy and big fake breasts!

So as always, legal boilerplate: All images you see here are the property of Dorotea Gizzi (Stregatto10). I don't own a thing. The artist's website can be found here and her DeviantArt profile can be found here. If you click on an image, it will take you to the DeviantArt page that it's linked from. (I should have done this previously. I will fix previous Fanart Hall of Shame posts when I have some time to go back and re-dig stuff up.)

Now that that's out of the way...

So Stregatto10 is proof that men don't have a monopoly on creating sexist art. She has quite an extensive gallery of commissions, as well as a long list of commissions in process - so she looks like she has quite the side business going. While not all of her commissions are video game characters, it looks like about half of them are, and out of all of those (there were quite a few) there are only TWO that I can show here, since the rest are pretty much entirely naked except for strategically covered ladybits.

As such, most of what I'm posting here is non-commissioned fanart (at least from what I can tell). But if you log into DeviantArt and investigate Stregatto10's profile, you can see for yourself that the commissions I'm not posting here are much, much worse than what I'm showing here.

First up is one of the two commissions that isn't too raunchy to post here - Zoey from Left4Dead:


(PROPERTY OF STREGATTO10, CLICK FOR LINK)

So, pretty classic example here of boobifying one of the rare non-sexualized female characters in video games. (If you're not familiar with Zoey, check out this image. She's pretty cool, design-wise.) Sexy "please bang me against this wall pose", check. Big fake perfectly spherical breasts, check. Passive expression, check. This is pretty much a how-to for everyone looking to dis-empower female characters with agency. But this is just the tip of the iceberg:


(PROPERTY OF STREGATTO10, CLICK FOR LINKS)

On the left we have the Taki picture that originally linked me to Stregatto10's profile, while on the left we have the only other commission that I could show here - Shura (also from Soul Calibur 4). So in both cases we have a pretty giant case of yuck, though Taki is inarguably more freakish than Shura since both her boobs and her ass look like over-inflated balloons. But Shura winds up being just as perplexing since it's a commission; clearly someone ASKED for this picture and paid money for it. But in what universe is either of these women even remotely sexy? Srsly, a universe of yuck.

And of course, things wouldn't be complete without Ivy:


(PROPERTY OF STREGATTO10, CLICK FOR LINKS)

Some days I can't decide if Samus' Zero Suit was the worst thing to happen to fanart or if that honor should go to Ivy's SC4 redesign. These are all just so, so wrong. Like so much other art of the Soul Calibur women, all of these Ivy's seem to have some sort of organ TARDIS, since their rib cages are clearly not large enough to contain her internal organs. And what's with the boob strap? That thing must be made of titanium to contain those ta-tas. Either that or it has an anti-grav field build in, because there's just no way those boobs should stay in that top.

Lastly, I just have to ask. What is the obsession with having female fighting game characters rub boobs? I seriously don't get it.


(PROPERTY OF STREGATTO10, CLICK FOR LINK)

And here we have another one of my least favorite characters ever - Morrigan. Amazingly, while her boobs are very, very large, they look like they might not be implants (it's kind of ambiguous). But I guess that's made up for with the completely ridiculous ass cleavage. This one is a pretty classic example of the "please bang me right now" school of posing.


(PROPERTY OF STREGATTO10, CLICK FOR LINKS)

Lastly we have yet another entry in why I will always hate the Dead or Alive girls now and forever. Morrigan's breasts miiiiight not have been fake, but these breasts definitely are. Ayane (left) is just... so... passive. And Kasumi - what the hell is with that hand placement? I mean, I can't help but wondering what she's doing with that right hand, which I imagine is probably the point.

The thing that makes me sad is that Stregatto10's coloring skills blow mine out of the water, even if she seems purposefully ignorant of how female anatomy actually works.