>WTF: The where the hell did my week go? edition

>Holy shit, folks. This week kind of got away from me. I apologize for the radio silence – this week is a week of pure and utter madness. I’ve also been working on some things that require a bit more research to pull together. Next week, things return to normality, so I’ll be returning to a more normal posting schedule.

Some of the stuff you can look forward to is a rant about why Jim Sterling of Destructoid is a despicable human being, a look at recent M:TG art, and, uh… this:

And worse, sadly.

Anyhow, I don’t come completely empty-handed. I have some WTF for you, aside from the above.

WTF the first

David Jaffe, the director of the ever female-friendly God of War series, compared the new Sony handheld to a “fresh vagina”. Unsurprisingly, game “journalists” have fallen all over themselves to repeat this in the name of “journalism”, proving once again that game journalists really are incompetent fuckwits.

WTF the second

I’ve heard of several “virtual girlfriend” apps for the iPhone, which… okay. Whatever. A lot of them are based on the popular dating sim genre common in Japanese games. But what I really love is when North American men who don’t even have a cultural excuse to fall back on wax enthusiastic about these games. Like this review of Virtual Girlfriend in which the title image is captioned:

The beauty is, when she starts getting bitchy, you just start over!

/facepalm

WTF the third

NOOOOOO!!! Samus! What have they done to you?? Curse you, internets! Curse yooooouuuuuu!!!

So. Okay. I want to point out that the file name of this picture is “waifu1″. For those of you not familiar with Japanese, that’s a Japanese rendering of “wife”. There are many things that I can picture Samus doing. Being a housewife is not one of them.

For more housewife Samus fail, check out these photos here.

>Cosplay galleries on major gaming sites

>There is a horde of gaming news/columns sites out there, some more notable than others, and pretty much all of them operate under the assumption that their readership is young, male, and horny. One of the things that makes this abundantly clear is the fact that on most of these sites, you can find cosplay galleries quite easily that are full of female cosplayers dressed as various “sexy” video game characters that are pretty much collections of wank material.

Now I’ll take a moment to say that I have mixed feelings about cosplay. I get why people do it – I’ve even done a little myself (though, amusingly, as male characters). So lets be clear that I’m not out to demonize cosplayers. They make some seriously amazing costumes that I always enjoy seeing every year at GenCon. It’s the creepy fetishizing of female cosplayers that I have a lot of problems with. It’s bad enough when you see hordes of male nerds photographing female cosplayers at GenCon, and on the internet it gets even creepier.

For the most part I’m not going to post pictures because even just scratching the surface of what’s out there, I found hundreds of photos. Instead, you’ll mostly get links that are, of course, mostly nsfw. Youtube rules apply for comments (ie: don’t read them) as well.

On to the awful!

Kotaku actually doesn’t post regular cosplay pics, but they can’t be left out of the fun, as evidenced by “The Top 50 Cosplay Cleavage Shots“. The indicator that this is less than classy? (Okay, other than the title.) The first sentence of the feature is:

Well it’s noon, and that means we can break out the porn.

Right, because there’s nothing gamer men like better than whipping it out and wanking to cosplay cleavage shots over their lunch break. *eyeroll*

Destructoid, however, has tons of cosplay features – so many that it even has its own feature category. Now, granted, some of the posts under this category are really awesome and not creepy cosplay, like the most amazing Samus I’ve ever seen. But then you see some of the other featured galleries that just have so… much… cleavage. *sigh*

GamesRadar has, in addition to regular cosplay features, a “Sexy Cosplay Gallery” full of fanservice-y shots of female cosplayers.

RipTen, too, has its own cosplay feature category. Scrolling down the page you see boobs… boobs… and more boobs. What’s really great, though, is this one: “Jennifer Nigri loses Xbox and game collection in fire – booty goes unharmed”. There’s some cleavagey shots of Jennifer in a few costumes before the article mentions that she has been selling stickers to raise money to replace her game collection. The feature goes on to quote these as actual responses (emphasis mine, bracketed comments mine as well):

I wanna put my stickers on your naked body. Whoa my feet smell … [WTF???]

I would love to help out but I don’t think my fiancee would approve [That bitch!]

I’ll buy you both a PS3 AND a new XBox ($500) but I’m going to want more than the stickers… >;D [Right. Because really what's the difference between cosplay and prostitution, really? /sarcasm]

Srsly. Yuck.

GossipGamers has its own cosplay category, which is of course full of wank-worthy cosplay pics. However, there are some pretty wtf-worthy features like: Hot R2D2 Girl with Taco Bell Dog and Samus Zero Bunny Suit (curse you, Nintendo! Curse yooooouuuuuuu!!!) – which interestingly is another feature of Jennifer Nigri.

1up.com actually doesn’t have a cosplay category, but it still has plenty of cosplay articles like this one: “BlizzCon 2010 Cosplay Gallery: elves, swords, and a lot of body paint.“

GameWad doesn’t seem like a terribly active site (their last post was in September), but there are three cosplay galleries just on the front page. I just can’t believe that they named their site “GameWad”. However you think about it, it just sounds… unappealing.

GoFanBoy.com (another entry in the “why did they pick that name?” category) takes the cake for sheer volume of pornular cosplay pics with a staggering 42 feature cosplay galleries in 2010 alone. But perhaps the creepiest thing is this gem in the navigation sidebar:

That button there sends you directly to the list of cosplay galleries. And, since you wouldn’t want to get tired of the same pair of breasts, the image that comes up is random each time. Right above that we also have a super-creepy cosplay poll. “Make my girlfriend dress like Tifa” gives me the heebie jeebies for reasons I can’t quite put into words.

Last, but certainly not least, we have SlobsOfGaming.com, which I think deserves some kind of “Smoking Crack While Picking a Domain” prize. SlobsOfGaming has the most porn I have ever seen on any gaming site on its front page, including: “11 Hot and Awesome TGS Cosplays“. In this feature, SlobsOfGaming really goes for the gold in creeptasticness with gems like:

These ladies give me a big Level Up. In my pants. Sexually.

With a little imagination, the picture on the right almost looks like a lesbian ninja make-out battle just WAITING to happen. Hmm. Lesbian ninjas.

Man, I wish I could show this picture to every fat, ugly cosplayer out there who’s tried to ruin my Tifa fetishes and shame them into wearing burlap sacks for the rest of their lives.

Okay, please crawl into a hole and don’t come out, like, ever. kthxbai

>Fanart Hall of Shame: Reiq

>Okay, folks. Things have kind of blown up around here the last week or so and I’ll admit that I’m pretty drained from arguing with people on the internet – even though I said I wouldn’t. Rather than being lazy and posting some links, though, I figured it was about time to induct a second member into the Fanart Hall of Shame.

So first of all – legal boilerplate. All images you see here are the property of Reinaldo Quintero (Reiq). I don’t own a thing. The artist’s website can be found here and his GFX Artist profile can be found here. If you want to see his hentai (read: Actual porn, NSFWer) site, you can find it at jigglygirls.com. (Real URL, I swear!)

With that said, on to the shaming!

I first stumbled across Reiq while I was doing Image searches for my original post about the ridiculous Soul Calibur women, and the link went straight into my bookmark folder for future shaming. It was impressive to me that with the wide variety of disgusting Ivy fanart out there, this was by far the worst I’ve yet seen:

The sad thing is that even as I’m repulsed by the image, I have to admire the technique that went in to creating these textures. This guy has serious artistic chops, and I’ll freely admit that skill-wise he’s probably better than me. But talk about an artist abusing his powers for evil. I think even Wayne Reynolds would be embarassed to draw something like this!

I shouldn’t need to point out all the things that are wrong with this image. Boobs, check. Nipples, check. Ass, check. Overall proportions, check. I’ll just add that boobs are NOT like balloons. If you squeeze the top, the bottom does NOT expand. Contrary to popular belief, boobs are actually just bags of flesh. (OMGWTFBBQ!)

Thankfully that’s the worst of them, but there’s still some heart-breakers – like TWO different renditions of Samus:

Oh, Samus! What has he done to you? The Samus I know and love would never passively flaunt her sexuality with a come-hither look! The Samus I know would be kicking ass and taking names! What evil did Nintendo unleash upon the world when they created the Zero Suit? Is this how you’re destined to be remembered? As a busty blonde in blue spandex, completely stripped of any power or consequence? Honestly, this bothers me so much more than the big fake boobs and distorted anatomy.

Although, Christ, people. If you’re going to draw chicks in spandex, don’t give them cleavage that could rival the grand canyon. That just doesn’t happen. Unless she has a separate spandex compartment for each boob, which seems unlikely.

THIS is why I immediately tune out whenever anyone starts talking about how Cortana is a “strong female character”. I’ve never played Halo. (I’m not a huge fan of shooters, I just made an exception for Mass Effect because it’s Bioware.) But looking at crap like this just makes me completely lose interest.

Is there anything more ridiculous than ass cleavage? I mean, I’m pretty shocked to see Reiq take on Crimson Viper considering that she’s almost completely covered and then pose her so that her boobs are not visible. But clearly the lack of cleavage was getting to him, so he gave her ass cleavage instead.

Honestly, I don’t know how she’d fight like that. I mean, her pants are so far up her ass that they must be lodged in her colon, which has GOT to be uncomfortable. Personally, I really don’t think I could fight like that.

I’m ending with this one because I wanted to go from worst to best for once. Aside from the big fake boobs, I actually like this rendition of Wonder Woman. She doesn’t have massive camel toe, she’s not passively on display, and she looks like she’s daring you try something so that she can use that lasso to choke the life out of you. And that’s the sad part. If this was the rule rather than the exception, I’d sigh about comic character design and big fake boobs and move on with my life.
Clearly Reiq has it in him to draw only minimally distorted women with some sense of agency – he just chooses not to.

I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising, since the profile on his says that he is male (surprise surprise) and 27 – which puts him firmly in the “young and pervy” segment of artists. But considering that he is now working as an artist full-time with the income from these illustrations, that also puts him in the “perpetrating sexist stereotypes for fun and profit” camp.

>Et Tu Nintendo?

>With the noteable exception of Princess Peach, Nintendo has been doing better than Sony and Microsoft in terms of positive depictions of women in its video games. The female characters in Super Smash Brothers kick just as much ass as the males, and with the Wii Nintendo has largely steered clear of the jiggle-tastic fighting game series that have proliferated on the PS3 and Xbox360. (Mostly. I’m looking at you, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon.) And of course, Nintendo had one of the first female hero characters ever, the unbelievably bad-ass Samus Aran of Metroid series fame.

Of course, what most people know Samus for is her assortment of cannons and the bulky power armor. There’s been a lot of suits over the years, but they’ve all been large, bulky, and powerful-looking:

Now I’ll admit that I haven’t played any of the Metroid games after the original GameBoy games (My first console was a PlayStation and I’ve stuck with Sony since), so I’m a little fuzzy on the chronology of which suit came when. But I can definitely say that I love, love, love these suits. Samus started out as a total badass and has continued to be a total badass.

Except…

Except then they created the “Zero Suit” – a much less powerful spandex version of Samus’ suit. Gone is the badass armor, gone is the huge cannon. They replaced the Samus that I love with some blonde bimbo with a handgun:

Et tu Nintendo? ET TU??? It seems like a pretty blatant attempt to re-design Samus to be more appealing to the lowest common denominator of gamers that marketing departments seem so convinced are their “core” market – lonely horny teenage boys looking for action games with wank-fantasy females.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t guys who were unhappy with the re-design. But for every guy who complained that he wanted his power-suited Samus back, it seemed like there were twenty more who welcomed the new Zero Suit Samus with open… um… arms. And they’re all too eager to dogpile on people who complain about the new Samus with gems like:

dont be mad shes not a frumpy carpet muncher

get laid, mouth-breather

i really don’t like the idea, but she’s hot man.. and i hope that playing with no suit will be an extra o something like that.

Please, stay off the internet for the rest of your life.

lol, youre a fag.

*sigh* I wish those weren’t actual quotes.

And now, of course, the damage has been done. According to Wikipedia, the Zero Suit was introduced in 2008, but it seems to have come to dominate the popular representations of Samus, despite that the Zero Suit was never a total replacement, just a new option. If you search for “Samus Aran” on Google Image search, 15 out of 44 images on the first two pages are of the Zero Suited Samus – some very NSFW. So despite that there are seven suits to choose from, if you include the Fusion Suit that only appeared in one game, the Zero Suit accounts for 34% of the results on the first two pages – definitely a disproportionate representation.

(An interesting side note, though I’m honestly not sure if this signifies anything, is that despite the fact that the helmet is one of the most distinctive features of her power suits besides the cannon and the large shoulders, only 16 of 44 images on the first two pages show Samus actually wearing the helmet. Almost two thirds, 63% show Samus without her helmet on. Not sure if that’s good or bad.)

But if you really want to see how much of a wank-fantasy Zero Suit Samus has become, just search for “Zero Suit” and look at the huge number of fanart results that come up on the first two pages. The fanart universally falls into three categories: Ridiculous Cheesecake (Sphere Boob Ahoy!), Soft Core Porn, and Holy Shit That’s Disgusting. (Needless to say, links NOT SFW.)

None of these images depict Samus as anything other than a sex object, and none of them show the toughness that made Samus such a popular character in the first place – which is hugely disappointing. There are so few really good female characters that have their own franchises, so it’s really disheartening to see Nintendo give in to the Sex Sells Marketing Machine after around two decades of a Samus who in no uncertain terms could feed you your spleen on a plate if she felt like it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go soak my eyeballs in Lysol. Srsly. Yuck.