>Sometimes it’s easier to show what’s wrong with an image by drawing directly over it, so that’s what I’m doing today. (Every once in a while, my degree in Fine Arts does serve a practical purpose…)
I know I’ve been picking on Soul Calibur IV a lot. I promise I’ll move onto other targets, but for the purposes of what I’m doing here the freakish anatomy of the Soul Calibur IV women helps me make a point a bit better.
Okay, so today I’m going to pick on Taki, the boobtacular spandex ninja:
Her boobs in addition to being unnaturally huge are also POINTY, which is just kind of freaky. There must be some serious architecture to that spandex suit that we don’t know about, because… yeah. Boobs don’t do that. So let’s go in there and do a little correcting…
Now, I didn’t make Taki small-chested by any stretch of the imagination – she’s still rocking somwehere between a C and a D cup. See the difference there? But check this out -In the designer’s quest to make Taki a walking fetish, they’ve turned Taki into something actually not human:
The red lines are how Taki was drawn, and the black are my corrections. When you compare the two, you can see that they’ve given Taki so much of an “hourglass figure” that her rib cage is practically inverting itself, as is her stomach. This begs the question, where does she keep her organs? Also, you’ll notice that I fleshed out Taki’s ass a bit. That’s not me making Taki a bit fatter, that’s me giving Taki the musculature needed to connect her legs to her torso.
Considered from this angle, this makes the Soul Calibur IV women even more disturbing. Namco has gone from fanservice-y idealized women to women that are demonstrably not human. Considering that the Soul Calibur series is aimed mostly at young men, should we be surprised if the segments of the target audience partially internalizes some of these attitudes, even if only to a small degree?
Go Make Me a Sandwich 
>… or to a large degree. Which is sad because I love playing Taki as a fighter (quick strikes, lots of sneaky moving about) but you can't get away from the facts that you point out here and I have an English degree.I think it's also easier to start with console games because they'll have the easiest to find images and Namco is the worst for this kind of crap too.
>I work in a particularly wealthy, Hollywood-heavy town, and I can tell you that thanks to plastic surgery, many women around here prefer to look like fetish-Taki then "real" Taki, which is, of course, really tacky, unless you're into that kind of thing, which their social circles apparently are.What's really sad is that the need to, um, inflate on top and dress like a 17-year old seems to hit the octogenarians the hardest. I have seen things I cannot unsee.I gotta go rinse my brain out now.
>i laughed hard at "fixing" you made taki look like a guy, not every girl has A-cups. her boob is almost as big as her head and thats normal. look for big boobs in google, and you will see that there are many natural huge boobs around the world. i guess you are a girl and that you dont have the "perfect body". but thats no reason to get mad at good looking game girls. i dont rant about how awesome dante looks like, and that he is too manly, and that nobody is manly like him and that his coolness is unrealistic. and this is a game character, nobody wants to play as a girl who does dishes and cleans clothes with her a-cups. seriously, dont be stupid. this has nothing to do with sexism.
>I'd love to see a fully rendered redraw of the entire cast. Haven't had interest in Boob Calibur in years, and I consider my self a red blooded heterosexual male. These games have just become too embarrassing to own when one has a wife and child.PS – Its Jen Frank's fault I'm here.
>@taki. This has EVERYTHING to do with sexism. Now, fuck off, troll.
>Yeah, I totally agree. But maybe someone could do the men too. I mean those to pythons on Ryu's chest always looked weird to me, lol
>Respectfully, I would assert that Ryu's arms – as ridiculous as they are – are not equivalent to Taki's dirigibles, I mean, breasts. No one's going to look at Ryu's arms and go "man, I want to have sex with those!".
Again, I agree with you on everything…. (except your assertion that the breasts you drew are between a C and a D cup. Unless Canada works on an entirely different bra-size chart than the US.).
I was modeling them on my own breasts, which are about that size. (Now it’s possible I’m not wearing the right bra size. I hear lots of women do that, apparently.)
Yeah, a lot of women do do that. Anyways, the breasts you drew look about B-cup to me.
Obviously, I’m a dude and have no breasts, so I’m basing this off of the bra sizes of my current fiance and past girl friends. Maybe they were all just wearing bra’s that were too small.
I know this was not directed at me personally, but this… kind of hurts my feelings. My breasts have always been very large, sort of ridiculous in comparison to my body (I’m a 36DD with a 24 inch waist and 36 inch hips.)
Hearing you saying that women who look like this are “inhuman” is extremely hurtful and erases the experiences of women who actually look like this. I’m not trying to say you don’t have a point about character design as a whole, I personally would love to see more women of every possible shape and size. But you need to rethink the way you go about talking having this discussion. You can demand diversity without body snarking people that have features that just happen to be fetishized.
The impression I got reading the article was not that the author was calling the size or proportion of the boobs inhuman, but rather, was saying the shape of the boobs and incorrect curvature of the rest of her torso was inhuman. There’s unusual proportions and there’s body shapes that defy physics and ignore internal organs — this artwork is an example of the latter.