Girls go bare too.

Well, the problem with "naked" really is, as you mentioned, genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. Basically, female nipples and everybody's crotch. Everything else is fair game, so if you can manage with a character that lacks both (well, has a crotch, just with nothing on it) then yes, censors will generally allow you to go with that. I'm not sure that counts as "naked," though, not unless you can establish that your character's species and culture typically go around wearing clothes of some fashion.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm pretty sure that, strictly speaking, anything not clothed is naked. The distinction you seem to be going for is whether this is a marked status or the norm. If I see a dog wearing no clothing, I'm not going to call it a "naked dog", even though the dog is naked, because that's not usually worth noting on a dog. If I see a man wearing no clothing, I'd call him a "naked man", because that's usually enough to distinguish him from any other men in the area.

Of my characters who do not wear clothing, some have nakedness as a marked status and some don't.

This reminds me of the "Almost Naked Man!" episode of Samurai Jack, for some reason

When it comes to describing the character, I agree - it comes down to the norm. I had my fun talking about "naked aliens" back when the Rikti used their old models, but by and large this comes up when you're trying to discuss whether a character should or should not be seen as naked without any clothes or armour.

A completely different issue arises over the question of whether a character is allowed to be rendered without clothes or not. Humans, even in animation, generally are not permitted to, but anthropomorphic animals sometimes are and sometimes aren't. Someone once gave an interesting example - Buster Bunny constantly walks around pantsless and no-one bats an eye, but take Minerva Mink out of her bathrobe and you'll have moral guardians descending down the mountainside like partisans overthrowing the evil oppression of capitalism. Not all characters are "safe" to be drawn naked, whether or not they are actually perceived as being naked even by the show's own standard.

I think your avatar is actually pretty telling, in this regard. By the way, that's as good a time as any to say this - you have a pretty cool avatar. I don't know what the transformation implies, but I like the artwork in it

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Porky Pig and Donald Duck didn't wear pants, so it's good enough for my toons!

One of my first characters, Yadernii Ogon (Fire/Rad Controller) runs around naked. I used the Chitin pattern, picking colors to look like chitin plates over exposed muscle tissue; this fitted into her mutant origin. As a bit of characterization, I built a bind for her as a reply to someone commenting on her costume -- "Это не костюм, это - мое тело; 'подарок' 'великолепной советской технологии'." ("This is not a costume, this is my body; a 'gift' of 'glorious Soviet technology'.") She has some issues connected with her appearance and her childhood, fallout (more or less literally) from the circumstances of her mutations.

Howard the Duck didn't either.

There's a whole world of interesting things going on there. In essence, clothing implies something to cover, and this implication is very strong. You can even create mental discontinuities this way. Try this thought experiment. Picture Bugs Bunny, naked as he usually is. No big deal. Put some pants on him. Still no big deal. Have him pull down his pants. Even though you know that this is just him returning to his usual genderless nakedness, it's weird now.

Thanks. All credit goes to Shia, who made it for me as a random act of kindness. I really ought to resize it properly; it was made for the old forums and doesn't do her work justice when automatically resized.

Took me a second to realise why you had to translate that

I actually did much the same with a sorta-demon dude I have. His actual body is dark green chitin plates over dark red muscle, designed to look repulsive. Gloves, boots, belt and helmet are black tech with blue patterns, however, as part of his story that's not interesting enough to shoehorn here. He, too, is technically naked, but since he has nothing to hide, being a warped and mutated human returned from the dead (hence, Revenant Jack), so it's all good. Or ought to be. No-one's complained yet.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Not to go off on a tangent, but this fits into both something I've heard and something I've observed. The former is a saying to the extent that sexy clothes are often more exciting than just a bare-naked body, because a naked body is just "there," whereas sexy clothes imply what's underneath, allowing fantasy to paint a more exciting picture than reality can ever produce.

In much the same vein in costume design, I've noticed what I'd describe as "naked spots" that can make a costume with an otherwise high cloth-to-skin ratio seem exceptionally revealing. These constitute areas on the body that, if left bare, will heighten the sense of titillation without actually requiring a heavy cheesecake costume. Breaking established clothe trend lines is a good place to start.

As I've only experimented with female costumes in this regard (being that I don't find the idea of revealing men attractive enough to bother looking into), the lines I've seen as most effective are the waistline, back and straps. Typically, the bare minimum acceptable clothing for a woman is a bikini (i.e. underwear), which relies on a solid waist line, a solid strap around the back and solid straps over the shoulders. Removing those via patterns such as Angelic, Savage or Hacker actually leads to interesting effects. I should note that Savage is one of the most fully-covering patterns in the game.

That's just idle observation, of course.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

My conclusions: You're a regular group of guys who'd rather stare at a girls ***. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Lies. My sources in Disney tell me that Howard the Duck always wore pants. Suggesting otherwise is a filthy, scurrilous untruth. Or at least out of continuity.

Wow. Insightful. Really explains why I feel so uncomfortable with those patterns and thus never dress characters in them.

At least they had the decency to put a towel on when getting out of the shower, though.



Ooo, sadly, later he did. The "Sidney" corporation sued him for looking too much like a certain other fowl, and that was one of the compromises. See Howard the Duck Magazine #2 for the satirical treatment and this article by Steven Grant from #8 that was the "real world" version.

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Fully agree, whenever I play now I always get people asking if im male or female irl, in all honesty i just stopped answering now because the instant you refuse to use ventrillo, your usually shouted at and called all sorts of stuff lol.

In all honesty I couldnt give a damn what people want to believe but id rather not have people randomly abusing me because I refuse to do exactly as they say.

Two times now i have spoken to sg on vent, two times i got a bunch of weirdos asking for msn, pics, facebook and phone number etc. These guys seriously dont understand the term 'no' and its also the reason ive left SGs in the past and had to block half the SG members lol.

It is funny, but at same time its kind of sad that people can be so closed minded.

That being said, Ive also known people who say there female too, yet are blatently obviously men. One told me he was female at first, then after speaking a bit said he was male and said he plays females 'because hes not gay and would prefer to watch a women from behind all day rather than a man'.

Another who added me, was actually using the pic of a girl i knew irl lol, they had just stolen it off her facebook. When I mentioned her name, i was blocked ingame and on msn lol.

How you dress in game though doesnt mean you are one sex or the other though, some people say there is but thats what the /ignore command is for

All but one of the times people have made unwanted sexual advances towards me in-game have been with FEMALE characters...

I can't blame you. It's a question of taste and preference, and it may well be just a guy thing. I've already expressed inability to see men as cheesecakes, so I can imagine women have the same response to other women. Imagine, as in "guess." No hard data here. I've also seen a fair number of people, both men and women, express dislike for revealing concepts for women. In fact, I have a friend who's a guy that I had to spend probably a year suggesting concepts to before he conceded in making a more revealing female concept, because he just felt uncomfortable with it.

Speaking as... Basically a former prude, myself, I can certainly understand this. I've never been a fan of things like high heels, short skirts (or skirts in general), cheesecake costumes and so forth. I always saw those as insulting and objectifying, to be honest. But over the years playing this game, I basically wanted to try a little of everything, and I can definitely say there are tasteful ways to go about it.

Of course, there are tasteless ways to go about it, too, and some concepts just call for exactly these

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, I wouldn't go that far. I do play a super model bunny girl, after all.

I also have a tough punk girl that has an outfit with nothing on top but a leather jacket, but that is a specific attempt on my part to make a character that doesn't care about that sort of thing.

I can show you a movie that says otherwise

Do you mean just in comics, or RL too?

I would think that wearing skimpier clothing makes the question of one's gender much easier to resolve. Then again, there are certain combinations of body type and clothing that can leave the question highly ambiguous despite considerable exposure. One of my longstanding gripes with the CoH costume designer is that it places a relatively high lower limit on gender ambiguity, although I've seen some amazing things done.

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