Industy artist fail: Wayne Reynolds (at least he's not as bad as HTK)

[Preamble and Disclaimer: All of these can be seen at much higher resolution if you click the images. I recommend doing this. And as always, none of this is mine. All of this is copyright Wayne Reynolds and/or whichever company hired him. I don't own a thing!]

I've been meaning to write this post for quite a while now - it just kept getting put off every time I spotted more egregious stuff I wanted to post about. But Wayne Reynolds has long been a pet peeve of mine when it comes to fantasy tabletop art, and I thought it was important to highlight his artwork because he is a huge name within the fantasy art industry. I will certainly be the first to admit that skill-wise, his artistic chops far exceed my own; however, Mr. Reynolds is a perfect example of an artist using his powers for evil.

Now when I say "using his powers for evil", let's be clear. Wayne Reynolds is no HTK. Even if he has a propensity for stupidly cheesecakey women, his cheesecake women are definitely active and strong characters. Also, for the most part the only anatomy distortion that they suffer from is an over-inflation of the breasts, which is also a far cry from HTK's barely-human-looking crotch-thrusting figures.

In a way, that is actually part of my frustration with Wayne. I know that he's capable of producing totally epic, non-sexualized female characters that kick huge amounts of ass when an art director puts their foot down and insists on NO CLEAVAGE WAYNE I MEAN IT. I mean check these women out:

Totally epic, right? Any of these women would be completely badass characters for long-term play. Each of them is strong and has a real sense of character. I mean I've talked about how much I love Seelah (paladin, far right) before here. But sadly, I had to look pretty hard to find these examples. For the most part, Wayne prefers his women looking like this:

/sigh

Don't get me wrong. Tiger lady is pretty badass, for sure. But, you know, does she have to have her tiger bits hanging out like that? Now, it wouldn't be so bad if Wayne had a habit of doing equally sexualized illustrations of male characters. I've long said that I wouldn't mind a line that just sexified everyone equally regardless of gender; it might not be to my personal tastes, but I could at least get behind it's existence. And Wayne does occasionally do illustrations of sexy male characters like Seltyiel:

But sadly, Seltyiel is pretty well in the minority for male characters in Wayne's art. Mostly Wayne's men tend to look like this:

...covered head to toe in armor and in poses that don't emphasize their sexy bits. (Okay, maybe not with quite that many weapons. I couldn't resist the opportunity for a bit of visual hyperbole...)

Now this isn't exactly new, and it certainly puts Wayne in good company with many other fantasy game artists. The male = fully armored & not sexualized / female = chainmail bikini and heaving bosoms paradigm has been pretty dominant in fantasy game art ever since the creation of D&D. And at least Wayne manages to draw women who look competent while thrusting their scantily clad bosoms out for the rest of the world to see, which is certainly a far cry from women in cages.

Still, it's pretty discouraging when Paizo hires Wayne to design their iconic sorceress and he comes up with this:

Wow! How distinctive from every other female mage ever! A gorgeous woman with big fake boobs and not enough clothing. I mean, come on - she's practically walking fanservice. Unless she's using body glue to hold that top in place, there's no way that top is going to confine those ta-tas once she starts dodging arrows. But then again, I suppose she could use sorcery to the same effect? Still, it seems like a waste of a spell slot...

And Seoni is far from the only example of Wayne's stereotypically slutty mages:

Okay, can the female = mage = slutty stereotype please die now and forever please? The female = mage stereotype is bad enough! God knows I get so sick of seeing female characters get railroaded into being magic-users and not being allowed to swing an honest-to-god weapon at people. But it's DOUBLY frustrating to see the mage = slutty stereotype in action, because it just reinforces the "tits or GTFO" that women in gaming get all the time.

The trap that fantasy women fall into is that if all women are mages and all mages show their tits, then clearly all women show their tits! And Wayne certainly isn't doing much to dispel that notion either. But then I think that stuff like this:

...makes Wayne's opinions on the importance of breasts in fantasy art pretty clear. Sure, none of these women are in cages, but it doesn't exactly feel very progressive to say "sure women can be adventurers" when the clear parenthetical is "as long as they show us (male gamers) their tits".

And most of these aren't even NICE tits, which is kind of bizarre given the fact that these figures are otherwise pretty undistorted. (They're all Barbie, sure, but not too distorted.) All of these women have bizarrely inflated sphere boobs that in some cases aren't even that appealing. I mean, the gnome and the hook fighter especially have boobs that just kind of freak me out - it looks like someone taped melons to their chests. How is that in any way appealing?

The only one of these women that I in any way appreciate is the fire mage; her chest is actually quite small. Still, body paint =/ clothing and gee it would be great if she HAD SOME DAMN CLOTHES.

The ones that make me the most frustrated though are the ones where the art direction was pretty obviously for a strong, FULLY-COVERED female character and Wayne gave them cleavage anyway:

I mean, Christ, Wayne. Looking at these, I hate to think of what initial drafts of Seelah might have looked like. Did you honestly think that people wouldn't notice the random cleavage? It's especially frustrating on these characters because they come SO CLOSE to being every bit as awesome as the first set and then fall flat on her face. Is there ANY reason for us to see Imrijka's (far left) hugely inflated sphere boobs? No. Does being able to see Merisiel's (middle) tits somehow make her a better, more compelling avatar? No. Does being able to see the pirate's tits AND panties make us more able to believe in her strength? Um... no.

The worst part is that I can so clearly see what these characters could have been had they not been gratuitously sexualized. Please - can't we allow strong female characters to be strong AND female and not have to show their tits to the world? Why do we have to do this? Why do we have to continue to tell women that they can only expect to be strong and competent so long as they agree to dress for the titillation of their male counterparts?

Fuck that. I want women who are badass and not sexualized:

So how about it, Wayne? You're clearly able. Now are you willing?

Reaper Miniatures: still a fap-fest, even at 1 inch high

Okay. So last time I posted this teaser image for a post about Reaper Minis:

Dragon replacing alligator as a fashion accessory?

That's pretty representative of a lot of minis. As any woman who's tried to find a mini to represent her character in a D&D game can tell you, it can be really hard to find female minis that are A) wearing clothes AND B) not showing their breasts.

Now Reaper Minis have gotten pretty popular for fantasy minis lately. Partly because of the very high quality of their minis, and partly because of the product lines that they produce minis for. What caught my attention is their line of Pathfinder minis, which I hear sell pretty well. I will definitely admit that the minis I've seen that have been based on existing illustrations are impressively sculpted. And they do well enough for themselves to run a convention called Reaper Con every year, so apparently their product is pretty popular.

However, their catalog is pretty similar to pretty much any collection of minis I've ever browsed at a con in that it's light on females, heavy on males, and chock full of naked or mostly naked women. So I thought that I'd go through their catalog and pull out some particularly egregious examples.

So first of all, meet Sophie. Sophie is the Reaper mascot; there are special edition Sophie minis released for Christmas, sometimes Halloween, and each year for Reaper Con. These are concept sketches that were later turned into special edition minis. (Except for the top right - that's going to be the special mini for this upcoming Reaper Con.)

Riiight. So, instead of releasing special edition minis that are actually interesting they just decided to make a busty demon chick their mascot and make slutty special edition minis. Which are useful in what context other than fap-material? It seems to point out the dearth of women in gaming, and especially in minis-related gaming. I mean, what gamer DOESN'T love cleavagey hot girls?

...oh wait.

Speaking of cleavage... Some of the sculptors need serious anatomy lessons when it comes to the female torso. I found way too many examples of head-sized sphere-boobs - many of them on the same models that also had impossibly tiny waists and no rib cages:

I fail to see how any of these are attractive. Some of them, like The Little Please Have Buttsex With Me Mermaid, are downright freakish. And some of them are just stupid. What is it about the chicks with huge tits, no clothes, and a large weapon?

However, even the misshapen tits are better than the sheer preponderance of models I found that need to PUT ON SOME DAMN CLOTHES.

Half of these models are bare-breasted, and the other half might as well be. How edgy! And by edgy, I mean pathetic. Seriously, isn't this shit what the internet is for? Why do they need to produce fap material for guys who can just as easily find the real stuff online? It's especially silly when you consider the scale of these things.

And of course, some of them go beyond stupid and right into WTF:

"Ghostly summons" (top left) my ass. That's two lesbians having hot ladysex in a cloud of smoke. Don't try to claim it's all artistic - her head is in the other woman's crotch and you folks can't exactly claim the artistic high ground. And check out Miss Muffet (top right). WTF? Why is she showing that spider her tits?

Even that's less ridiculous than the witch (bottom left) and the ZOMBIE STRIPPER. I mean, for god's sake, people. Both of these are supposed to be gross and monstrous, and yet it's STILL tits or gtfo for these women? What if I don't WANT to see their tits? Cause that's kind of gross.

The worst, though, are the two middle images. The chained succubus (bottom) is bad enough, but the VICTIM ON A SPIT is naked folks. Because nothing says "awesome" like tying up a naked woman and hanging her on a spit. In what world is anything like this even remotely appropriate? Gah!

But wait! The WTF doesn't stop there!

... you've got to be fucking kidding me.

The figure on the left is actually a special edition figure, so another example of fanservice to reward their loyal (male) customers? The figure on the left... Gah. So she's described as a "naughty maid", but the expression on her face just makes me think she's surprised. "Holy shit, when did those get so big??"

Can the maid fetish please die now and forever? kthx

Anyway. Not all of the Reaper Minis are complete fail; there are some hidden gems if you look long enough, like this mini from the Pathfinder collection:

I have mixed feelings about this one. The deep cleavage made me roll my eyes at first, but then I re-considered. This is the rare example of a woman who is NOT Barbie and also not monstrous. I think she's quite attractively rendered. So I'm not sure if the cheesecake is ridiculous, or if I should be happy that they're presenting a non-standard body type as attractive. (Thoughts?)

And then there are a few that are totally awesome. Why can't they all be like this??

Okay, so yes, the middle figure has a little cleavage. But she's awesome! Her tits aren't huge, she has a waist, and she looks badass! And I love, love, LOVE the knight on the right. And the nun on the left - awesome! Another woman who's not Barbie, and so completely badass!

Why can't THIS be how Reaper depicts its women? All of these figures are totally awesome! But no, they'd rather continue to cater to their "safe" market of desperately horny young males, which is disappointing. The quality of their product is clearly pretty high. It's disappointing that for the amount of work that goes into each mini, there's a base level of contempt for women as potential customers that clearly isn't being addressed.

Some followup: Jim Sterling, Reddit, and DM's Roundtable

DM's Roundtable follow-up interview

Hey, folks. Before I get to the meat of my post, I just wanted to update you all that last night was the followup interview done with the folks on the DM's Roundtable podcast. After hearing the podcast that originally went up in which I got fairly lambasted, I was pretty wary of going on. But, happily, things went really well and we had a really positive conversation. Those of you who want to give it a listen can find it here. Fair warning, though, it's long. (A little over an hour, iirc)

Reddit response to yesterday's post (trigger warning! rape jokes...)

Why do I read the comments on reddit? Whhhhyyyy? After the backlash I got from reddit over my post about gaming not being sexist against men, you'd think that I'd have learned my lesson? But no, I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment.

So, some dude over on reddit called me an "ignorant judgemental cunt". The fact that all the horrible shit Jim Sterling has said was meant as humor apparently puts me COMPLETELY in the wrong. Of course, given that in THE SAME COMMENT this dude joked that the difference between football and rape is that women don't like football.

...so, yeah. I guess I should feel vindicated rather than annoyed. But. Wow. Yuck, dude.

Jim Sterling. Sorry? Well....

Okay, so here's the thing that prompted me to write a followup post, rather than tackling one of the many other things that I've been working on entries about. Kaonashi forwarded me the email from Niero that was mentioned yesterday, and the summary was pretty accurate. "Sure Jim crossed a line and he knows it but he's a nice guy".

Which, you know, fine. As an apology it kind of sucks. I have yet to see anything resembling an apology that isn't full of defensive bullshit from either Destructoid or Sterling, but I'm not about to hold my breath since I honestly don't expect it to get better than that. An acknowledgment that a line was crossed and that it's not okay to call people feminazi cunts is about as much as I can reasonably expect since Jim Sterling has proved his worth to Destructoid by being able to get pageviews to Destructoid by saying inflammatory things. Is that out of the ordinary in the gaming world? No. Is Kotaku worse? Oh fuck yes.

Still.

I was skulking the Destructoid site yesterday looking to see if there were any editorials offering a more official apology for Jim's conduct (there weren't) when I spotted this post by Jim Sterling about a recent "news" segment on FOX in which the recent rise in reported rapes is blamed on sexy scenes in video games. As is to be expected from FOX, the segment offered no supporting evidence or really any reasoning beyond "be afraaaaaaaiiiiiiid! only FOX can saaaave yooooouuuuuu!".

Now, is this worthy of ridicule? Absolutely. Does this sort of thing deserve coverage on a major gaming site? Sure. Do the people at FOX deserve to be lambasted for making the same groundless accusations that no one has been able to prove for the last thirty years? Right on. As someone who had to promise her mother not to become a serial killer in order to be allowed to buy Mortal Kombat as a child, I get just as tired of the blame that video games get for just about every social ill that exists. So for once I was cheering Jim on, until I got to the last sentence:

Now if you'll excuse me, there are some vaginas that have not been raped yet, and Kirby told me I need to "get on dat sh*t!"

...really? Really, Jim? Wow. This doesn't make me all that confident that Jim has, in fact, grasped the nature of the line that was crossed. Calling people feminazi sluts? Not okay. But you know what else isn't okay? JOKINGLY SAYING THAT YOU'RE GOING TO GO RAPE A BUNCH OF WOMEN.

I've come to terms with the fact that hottest chick lists aren't going away any time soon. Will I mock them? Sure. Are they a staple of "game journalism"? Unfortunately, yes. Ditto with all of the stuff masquerading as "news" that boils down to "hey look! Boobies! We all like boobies, amirite?". It's crass, it's tasteless, and it carries with it an undertone of "tits or gtfo". But that is still something I can roll my eyes at and walk away from. Jokes about going out and raping a bunch of women? Not so much.

So I've just sent the following email to Niero, the editor-in-chief of Destructoid:

Dear, Niero

A commenter on my blog was kind enough to forward the email that you sent him in response to his complaints about Jim Sterling's comments in the twitter dust-up that occurred last week and I was very happy to see that in that email there was a clear acknowledgment that Jim's comments were entirely out of line. I want to make it clear that in no way do I support Daphny's actions - her comments were entirely disgusting and tasteless and I do agree with Jim that no one gets a free pass on discriminatory language just because they happen to be a member of said group.

That being said, I have grave concerns about the larger context of this twitter dust-up when viewed in light of a larger history of things that Jim has said as an official writer on your site. When the flare-up originally occurred, I refrained from taking sides on my blog, but I did put together a chronology of offensive comments that display a consistent trend of denigrating feminists, feminism, women, domestic abuse, and rape. So when I saw your email to Kaonashi, I was very pleased and had every hope that perhaps Jim would be a bit more thoughtful in his official commentary in the future.

Imagine, then, my dismay, when yesterday morning I saw a post by Jim about FOX news blaming Bullet Storm for the increase in reported rapes. Did FOX deserve to be thoroughly lampooned? Absolutely! But Jim ended by saying: Now if you'll excuse me, there are some vaginas that have not been raped yet, and Kirby told me I need to "get on dat sh*t!"

This makes me very concerned that perhaps there wasn't any sort of real lesson learned at all and that the apologies were just lip service to win back those publishers that Jim managed to offend with his comments.

Look. I don't like the boob-centric nature of your website, but I'm not about to start a crusade to take down Destructoid because you folks like boobs. Whatever. I just really hope that you can understand the difference between jokes about liking boobs and jokes about going out and RAPING A BUNCH OF WOMEN. I really do. I'm not trying to be a "humorless feminist here". I just really hope that you can make it clear to Jim that just as it is never okay to call a woman a feminazi cunt, it's also never okay to joke about engaging in rape. The fact that it's a joke does not obviate the fact that Jim is an influential guy within the gaming community who gets a lot of respect for the consistency of his gaming scores and, like it or not, there are people who look up to him.

I do hope that you will relay this message to Jim. And I do very much hope to see Destructoid clean up its act.

Thank you for your time and attention.


I'm not sure if I'll get a response, or if anything positive will come of it. I mean, I'm not a user on their site and I'm a woman, which already puts me at a disadvantage. But it's worth a shot, and I hope that those of you that agree with me that rape jokes ARE NOT OKAY in game journalism (or, you know, anywhere) will also send Niero an email and let him know where you stand on this.

That's all for now

This just in: women actually aren't stupid

Dude, I was going to take a long weekend off from this shit. But then Louis Porter Jr came and posted this comment on my last post, and I’m almost constitutionally incapable of not responding, let alone responding concisely to this nonsense. (It’s a failing.) Hence the new post.

Anyway, before I start off, thanks to the fine folks on Story-Games who helped me refine my arguments. Much appreciated.

So here's the comment in question (emphasis mine):

This is going to be a two part answer.

First on the racial diversity of Paizo character design: Always a good thing. Being one of the few (if only) African-American (or Black if you like) RPG publishers I think it is a GOOD thing to show ethnic and racial diversity in the artwork. Paizo always kicks ass for that and I hope they continue to!

So, yes, thumbs up to Paizo for not being full of race fail. That’s great. Good for them. It’s so great that they are making efforts not to marginalize men of color. And if women of color feel marginalized, well, they should be used to much worse by now, right? None of this is going to change, so us wimmenz should just learn to suck it up and deal.

Yeah, I call bullshit. As a person of color, I would assume that you have some experience with feeling marginalized. Why then are you excited that Paizo is fighting one type of discrimination (racism) even as they simultaneously embrace another (sexism)? Doesn’t that seem a little hypocritical and more than a little privileged to you?

Second, women and sex appeal. Sorry but you lost me on that one. Paizo knows it market: majority male. And males (and some females) like scantily dressed women (which I am one).

Okay, aside from the issue of your grammar sucking (you just implied you were a scantily dressed woman), your argument sucks too. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

When doing my artwork for many of the females in my products, I over sexualize what they physically look like or what they are wearing. Why? Because it will cause males (my main base of customers) to stop and look and in the gaming of marketing that would be considered a WIN! Now would I over sexualize males and place them on the cover a product I created? ABSOLUTELY if it helped draw interest which in turn would equal additional sales. For me this is an issue of helping me generate sales. Sad but true.

But I do understand where you are coming from and I do support you so saying what you think is right.

Oh, thank you. I’m glad that you support my right to express an opinion on my own blog. That’s very gracious of you. I mean, I’ve been pretty nervous about criticizing large game publishers, so it’s very good to know that I have your permission. It’s quite gracious of you.

So, basically you’re saying I “lost you” with my complaints about Paizo’s sexist Pathfinder art because I’m not a man and therefore not part of Paizo’s target market. Does that mean that only men have the right to complain about Paizo’s art? I call bullshit on that too.

It’s clear that Paizo has made the marketing decision to pursue their “safe” market – horny conservative males - and to not really try to reach out to anyone outside that market. But the lack of success of these “experiments” that Paizo has done with non-sexist representations of women doesn’t prove a damn thing. I know TONS of women who were completely, COMPLETELY geeked about Seela's design. But then you pick up a Pathfinder book and go, wow, that's just the exception to the rule. Look at all this cheesecake! Which leads back to 'meh, this is just like all the rest, I’m going back to FarmVille'.

Do you honestly have so little regard for our intelligence? Why should one character make us satisfied enough to flock to Paizo’s products? Sure it's better than most other mainstream RPGs out there, but that's like saying that Justin Bieber is better than Britney Spears. They both suck – it’s just a matter of degree.

But in the long run it’s a short-sighted publishing strategy when you consider that more and more women are getting into gaming. There are somewhere around 62 million active Farmville users, and 69 percent of them are women. That’s a whopping 42,780,000 women all devoted to one game!

Now let’s hypothesize that Paizo actually pulls its head out of its ass and creates a product line completely devoid of sexist representations of women, and let’s say that they somehow managed to find a successful way to advertise to the “women who play FarmVille” market. If only five percent – around 2.1 million - of women who play FarmVille wind up being interested in this new product line that they spend an average of $10 a year on products from this line, that’s a whopping $21,390,000 per year in sales. And if you attract only 2.5 of the women who play Farmville , that’s still $10,695,000 per year in sales.

I’m not sure if you realized this, but women constitute roughly half the population. And these days, they even let us have jobs, which means we have our own money! But given a choice between spending it on roleplaying books splattered with ridiculous cheesecake porn and, say, a new copy of Beautiful Katamari, where do you think my dollars are going? (Hint: Not the cheesecake-laden RPG)

Lastly, as much as I know you find this hard to comprehend, there are men for whom cheesecake art is off-putting and actually creates negative associations with your products. This insistence that splashing breasts on the cover will make a sale is pretty demeaning toward men as well. Do you as a publisher honestly have such a low opinion of your own customers that you think their purchasing decisions are made with their dicks?

Now I’m sure at this point you will have dismissed me as 1) not a customer 2) an over-emotional female or 3) a humorless feminist. And that’s fine. In case you need more reasons to dismiss me, I suggest checking out Derailing for Dummies for more reasons why what I’m saying doesn’t matter.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make a sandwich.

Paizo: Thanks for not being full of race fail, but...

do you think you could maybe be a little less full of gender fail?

[Preamble and Disclaimer: All of these can be seen at much higher resolution if you click the images. I recommend doing this. And as always, none of this is mine. All Pathfinder material is copyright Paizo. I don't own a thing.]

So the first time I heard anything about Pathfinder was actually in a forum thread about positive female characters. Someone linked to pictures of Seela - Pathfinder's iconic paladin, and Seoni - Pathfinder's iconic sorceress:

These pictures blew my mind, especially the picture of the paladin. Two completely kick-ass, non-white female characters! And okay, sure, the sorceress is a total slut-bag, whatever. But oh my god I loved the paladin so, so very much. This is what I wanted and never saw in my fantasy art! It made me so very happy to know that there was an RPG publisher out there whose head wasn't completely up its ass when it came to gender/race issues.

Now that's not to say that Paizo gets a total pass on the race front. Paizo is still guilty of race fail on occasion, like with the official photo promoting their 2010 GenCon costume contest. For the contest, they had a photo of someone costumed as Seoni, the aforementioned sorceress:

Sing it with me kids! One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong... I mean, come on guys. I'm sure it couldn't have been too hard to find a racially appropriate model to pose for this photo. It's not like white women have a monopoly on big fake breasts! And oh yeah, thanks for promoting your products at GenCon by encouraging women to dress up like cleavagey skanks. I mean, please. Wayne Reynolds really doesn't need more encouragement to draw shit like this.

Then again, as this photo taken by Sean K Reynolds shows, it's not like this is the first time that Paizo has used boobs at GenCon to sell their products:

And the thing is, if it was Wizards or Blizzard or the like, I'd roll my eyes and call it par for the course. But it's doubly disappointing coming from you, Paizo considering your obvious attempts to not completely whitewash your settings. Why take so much time to balance your depictions of non-white characters if you're just going to make all of your female characters standard fantasy cheesecake?

When you go through the portraits that are posted on the official Paizo blog, you do see a very diverse mix of ethnicities. But for the most part the portraits of women are at least mildly problematic. To illustrate my point, I've compiled a bunch of their portraits - which I've rated on a scale of WTF to awesome:

WTF:

/facepalm

Okay. So first of all, mummies are not that hot. There's this thing that happens where all of the moisture is removed from their bodies, which is what makes them mummies in the first place. There is absolutely no way that a mummy would have breasts that perky, or such a curvaceous backside. Also, real mummies are wrapped in so many layers of cloth that there's no way they're just going to start walking around.

Then we have Naked Dinosaur Chick. And again, seriously, what are you thinking? We'll leave aside the question of why the dinosaur isn't trying to eat her and consider the problem of her nudity. There's a reason why women's bike shorts have a lot of crotchal padding. (Yes I'm inventing words. Shut up.) It's because bicycle seats can be painful for extended periods of time. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that having your crotch pretty much in direct contact with a dinosaur's spine has got to be way worse.

And flying chick... So many anatomical problems. Like her shoulder connecting directly to her ribs. Or her lack of a neck. Or an ass. If you're going to publish ridiculous cheesecake, at least get the basic anatomy right.

Bad

Hey look! Big fake boobs! At least the drow looks somewhat badass, which is more than can be said for the other two. I do have to give Wayne Reynolds props for that. His cheesecake women are at least never passive princesses waiting to be rescued. But it would be great if he could do NON-cheesecake badass women too. [Note: apparently the drow is by Steve Prescott, whoops! I'll stand by my comments about the art, and my comments about Wayne, but he didn't actually perpetrate this particular cheesecake indignity.]

Yawn. Cleavagey noble, check. Woman with cleavagey/disintegrated clothing, check. The "Persian Princess" on the right is actually disappointing because she comes SO CLOSE to being completely awesome. I love the costume, love the sword, love the jewelry, and love the fact that she actually looks Persian. So why, oh WHY the random cleavage? It's like running 4.75k in a 5k race, then deciding to quit and go to Tim Hortons for doughnuts.

Meh

No surprise here, numbers one and two are Wayne again. Come on, Wayne! It's like he gets art direction asking for fully covered women and says to himself, "well, no one will notice if I stick in some cleavage". It's especially ridiculous on the woman in plate mail. Why go to all the effort of getting plate mail made if it doesn't protect from heart-stabs?? The woman on the right I included despite being fully covered because she's just... so... insipid. But that's a judgement call on my part, I guess. [Note: Number one was also miscredited and is actually by Steve Prescott. Though, again, I stand by my commentary on the art and my commentary on Wayne's art in general.]

Awesome

THIS! Oh my god, this! More of it! More of it, I say! THESE are the women I want to see in my roleplaying products. The cleric on the left is everything that the Persian Princess should have been! The duelist in the middle, I heart her so much! And Seela the paladin remains one of the best pieces of fantasy art I have seen ever! Yes I need this many exclamation points!

See, it's stuff like this that makes me delighted, makes me think that someone out there is listening to us! We're finally getting the strong, non-sexualized female avatars we've been asking for! But then you turn around and do shit like this for the holidays:

(from 2009 and 2008 respectively)

And that just makes me disappointed, because these are supposedly a "thank you" to your customers. I'm not a customer, but even if I was I wouldn't want to be thanked this way.

So I guess how I feel about Paizo is kind of like how I feel about Enterprise. There's just so much raw potential for awesomeness, but the reality just fails to deliver.

Because clearly women don't have adventures

[Edited: True20 is the system behind Blue Rose, not Blue Roses.]

All right. So I'm going to shut up about Soul Calibur IV for a while and turn my sights back to tabletop roleplaying for a moment - specifically Green Ronin publishing. Green Ronin has published some pretty popular games like Mutants & Masterminds, Blue Roses, and the new Dragon Age RPG. Still, they command a much smaller piece of the RPG pie than either Wizards or Paizo.

Now, the problematic trend that Green Ronin displays with their products isn't so much about cheesecake as it is about representation. Witness, the True20 cover - the system behind their popular Blue Rose RPG:

Check it out! She's got clothes on! And pants! And isn't overly sexualized! Which is great and awesome, but she's also outnumbered three to one by male figures. And Green Ronin doesn't really try to even the score with the covers of their True20 supplements either:

(CLICK FOR MUCH LARGER VERSION)

So out of 21 figures on these five covers, only 6 are women. 7 if you want to be charitable and call the ninja a woman since the gender is ambiguous. That means that women account for between just over a quarter (uncharitable) and a third (charitable) of figures on these covers. Which, for a system that touts itself as being about "adventure roleplaying" is very disappointing. So, women don't go on adventures? (And yes the female Indiana Jones has a ridiculous case of sphere-boobs that are bigger than her head. Whatever. We've seen worse, so... moving on.)

It gets even worse when you look at the covers of Mutants & Masterminds products:

(CLICK FOR MUCH LARGER VERSIONS)

Out of 30 figures with a discernable gender, only 7 of them are female! That's even LESS than a quarter! And of the seven female figures, only two of them could be called focal to the illustration - as opposed to the True20 covers where at least the female figures had equal weight with the male figures in terms of cover real estate.

Now, Green Ronin is known as a fairly "trad" publisher, and trad gaming isn't always the friendliest place for women. But still - it's hard not to look at these covers and get the message that these are games for telling stories about MEN. Men having MANLY ADVENTURES. Which is kind of sad. I love superheroes, and I love adventure stories, but the exclusion leaves me kind of cold here.

It's not just the game companies

I've been lampooning game developers here, but please don't think that it's just the developers that are guilty of sexism and that gamers themselves are totally innocent. No, gamers are just as guilty as the publishers. While you can find sexist gamers in just about any portion of the hobby, it's usually true that the most horrific behavior comes out on Xbox Live servers or in StarCraft II ventrillo servers.

So, first up: "Xbox Girls Get Revenge" (CollegeHumor). (Really, REALLY NSFW)

I found this to be pretty amusing, though I recognize that as far as satire goes it's still pretty offensive. I wanted to link to this, though, to highlight the kind of abuse that women can be subject to by their fellow gamers. Sadly, it's a trueism that Normal Person + Internet + Audience = Total Fuckwad, and this phenomenon only exacerbates the abuse that is heaped on female gamers when it comes to venues like blogs and official forums. But hey, don't take my word for it...

[Note: All spelling and grammar errors left as is. All links are added by me for emphasis.]

Dungeons and Dragons
from Gender violence in gaming (Astrid's Parlor)

I would love to see a ranger with favored enemy: women just for the lulz. It'd atleast be different. And would ward off those annoying chaotic neutral male playing females I hate so much...

...God-damn I wish there was a FATAL d20. I love that book, but I definitelly don't feel like attempting to run or play in a game with such draconic mechanics! As far as personal gaming experiences, no. I havn't had the pleasure of being an overly misogynistic or gay bashing game. And my gaming career has suffered cause of it. That sounds friggin' awesome.

... when there's demons attacking your soul and dragons eating entire villages. Smacking a woman around for speaking outside of form just doesn't have the sortof shock value it would have in a mundane world like ours...

-- "JimProfit", entire post

[In response to a post where a player objected to a campaign setting where misogyny and gender violence was common and the DM changed it as a result of that complaint.

Was the world really the problem or was it your problem and you decided to make it the groups problem?

As a PC you could have had a chance to change things if you could deal with it for a while. If your DM had said "This is the way things are and no one in the world could ever change it" I can see that being upsetting and warranting a discussion. But, hey, it probably made you feel really good forcing change of the whole world with no effort and making everyone else play in the mystical (b)land of "Everyone's Equal Because I Say So", which is what's unacceptable in my book.

--"RubicantX", entire post

[In response to a post questioning "Misogyny for the lulz"]

Oh ****. I thought the concept of the man-hating feminist was hyperbole. I now see that it is reality. I guess its time all of us men packed our bags and got ready to be put in death camps.

-- "MusicOfCre", entire post

[Editor's note: Oh! Godwin'd!]


World of Warcraft
from The New Fountain in Dalaran's Central Square [A complaint that a statue of heroes of the war against the Lich King has ONLY male heroes and not a single female hero]

How unnecessary. You're complaining about females being unrepresented in a fictional universe that bares little parallel to our own. It would matter if females were slaves of males in this game, it's not real life.
--"Emmelin", post #5


Women and their freaking opinions about everything just pisses me off, back to the kitchen I tell you.
--"Xiu", post #10

from ***ty Costumes at Blizcon

[On - why do women wear skimpy costumes to BlizCon?]

I'm not saying I don't enjoy the view, I just don't understand why girls like to do it so much.
-- "Maelan", post #10

StarCraft

from Are You Sexist? (Team Liquid forums)

Do you think women are intellectually equal to men? Do you think they have the same perseverence? Do you think they are as rational? I ask this because my experience stresses this claim so strongly, especially that they are not as perseverent or rational. ... they are also more emotionally impulsive about long-term loving and hating (guys will fight you then offer you a beer, a woman will pick at you for years then just come back).
-- "-_-", entire post

No they aren't equal. They CAN be intellectually equal to men, but only in book smarts. Street smarts? They have none. They are too emotional, too. They don't think rationally, but base everything on their emotions.
-- "SweeTLemonS[TPR]",entire post

I've said it before, ill say it again
ESTROGEN IS THE ANTITHESIS TO REASON.
-- "BigBalls", entire post

obviously it's wrong to judge an entire group of people based on a single person, but i find it that, in most cases, women are inferior to men intellectually. so i guess i'm sexist.
-- "ItchReliever", entire post

Yes, I am sexist. I do not believe they can are equals of men. They probably don't want that either.
-- "Cambium", entire post

...okay, here's where I have to stop for now - it's just getting too depressing.

Mixed Messages in D&D 4th Edition

So it has to be said that Wizards has made strides in improving how women are portrayed in 4th Edition D&D. It's certainly a lot easier to find images of women who are both fully clothed and active. You also see a lot more pictures of women as fighters, where in the past any woman in armor was by default a cleric. Furthermore, I've been quite pleased by some of the images I've seen of strong, competent, not sexualized women.

The problem is that Wizards seems to want to have their cake and eat it too. It seems like for every fantastic image I see, there's somewhere between one and two really awful ones. What's worse, when you see women on the covers of 4E books they're almost always cheesecake women and not the positive strong women I just mentioned. (Case in point: The Adventurer's Vault 2, Dungeon Delve, The DMG 2, The PHB, The PHB 2, The PHB 3, and too many others to count.)

So I thought I'd do a little side-by-side comparison of some really great pictures of 4E women right next to some really awful ones. These are images that I found in two threads (good art, bad art) in the Astrid's Parlor forum on the Wizards site. As such, I don't own the rights to any of this. See the end of this post for the cover-my-ass boilerplate.

(Noteably, unlike my last post, there are larger versions you can click through to of the below for more detail.) First up we have:

So here we have a comparison of different approaches to the badass pose with weapon. The woman on the left really does look badass. Those weapons are most definitely not for show. (Incidentally, this is one of the few images by Wayne Reynolds that I found that WASN'T guilty of egregious cheesecake. Maybe he got tired of all those uncovered boobs.) The woman on the right - what is she doing? Getting drunk? That would explain her complete lack of caring about the sideboob. I know which one of these two women I'd rather take on.

So D&D is purported to be loosely based on medieval Europe. The wizard on the left is a good example of that, with her costume looking pretty similar to stuff you might see in that period. The woman on the right, however, appears to be wearing absolutely nothing to cover her backside - which I'm pretty sure isn't in keeping with the feel of medieval Europe. Last time I checked, Europe gets pretty cold and, dude, a tail is not a replacement for pants.

I'll also note that despite the fact that the tiefling is actually casting a spell and "controlling the elements" or whatever, I find the halfling far more imposing. I love the "don't fuck with me" expression on her face.

Another contrast in spell casters, here. Overall, the art for the female dwarves has been pretty fantastic and positive in 4E, and the mage on the left lives up to that standard. The pose is pretty neutral, but the shadow-serpent and the expression on her face make her someone not to be dismissed lightly. And sure, the mage on the right has a more active pose - but she's pretty obviously posed that way so as to display her, uh, attributes to their maximum advantage.

Also, the anatomy is problematic on the slutty-mage - she's suffering from a pretty serious case of sphere-boob. She also doesn't seem to have any hips, which is kind of bewildering. Maybe the only difference between the sexes for elves is that women are just men with boobs tacked on?

These are, unfortunately, both depictions of female fighters. Don't ask me how the chick on the right is supposed to fight in that getup. I'm sure she spent a much longer time getting her hair to do that than getting into that "armor". The sad thing about this is that the woman on the left is both powerful and feminine. The chainmail she's wearing is clearly serving a function and actually covers all the stuff you'd want to protect when hacking at people with swords. And, personally, I find the woman on the left a lot sexier than the freak show on the right.

What to wear when hacking at people with swords: Part Two. Again, fantastic female dwarf. Again, I love, love, LOVE the "don't fuck with me" expression. Whereas the woman on the right is wearing a tube-top held together with a few pieces of string. Here's the deal, guys. I'm approximately that well endowed, and there's no way in hell I'd trust that top to keep the girls contained. Also, what's with the visible thong? Did medieval Europe have Victoria's Secret? Lastly, look at the poses. The dwarf looks like she's two seconds from smashing your face in with that giant hammer. The human just looks like she's posing for a glamour shot.

Okay, we're going to end with how to portray threatening women. The woman on the left is strong and competent. She's not just swinging the spear around for show. Whereas the women on the right... Okay, okay, yes they're succubi. They're "supposed" to be sexy. But succubi are demons, for crying out loud! Practically immortal beings from another plane that are supposed to eat men for breakfast! These women don't look like they've eaten anything more than a lettuce leaf for breakfast.

Furthermore, they're in these awful "look at me, I'm so sexy" poses, but the anatomy is so distorted that I have a hard time seeing them that way. Their waists and shoulders are both way too small. Plus, you know, the boobs. Again, guys - BOOBS DON'T WORK THAT WAY. Christ, the succubus on the right practically has a shelf. I'm surprised she doesn't carry stuff around on that thing.

So, yes. D&D is making strides, but they're no Paizo. (Not that Paizo is perfect either.) And when you consider how many of their covers have cheesecake, it makes me wonder if they have any real intention of improving their depictions of women past this point.

[Oh yeah, the boiler plate. This blog is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or specifically approved by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Wizards owns everything, I own nothing. For more information about the products these are taken from, go to the Wizards website.]