Retreading "feminism"

Good point, and that's somewhat reassuring to my philosophical dissonance

That really is a good question, though: Why do big guys look so "wrong" in athletic roles? Seeing them in supporting roles really isn't the same thing - it's perfectly fine if your doctor is a big fat man, or your engineer has big muscles. But seeing them as "fast?" Surely comic book logic could explain this as easily as it explains why a tiny little girl can stop a speeding train, yet it doesn't. So why doesn't it? Why am I willing to accept a small person being strong but not a large person being weak?

To some extent, this might be wish-fulfilment bias. In order for me to accept that someone's primary power is being fast, I have to first accept that his primary strength ISN'T being strong, because if you're strong and tough enough to not die, then isn't that always better? Or is that just my inner macho man telling me it's more impressive to take a punch and shrug it off than it is to dodge it? Because, thinking about it from an emotional standpoint, a punch that doesn't affect me means I'm so badass you can't hurt me. A punch that I HAVE to dodge is a punch which WOULD have hurt me.

See: Why does Super Man allow himself to get shot, but he has to dodge the gun when it's thrown at him?

Are fast, agile characters specifically NOT exhibiting some kind of desirable characteristic that makes them "feel" inferior on an instinctive level? Is there some characteristic that's so integral to being big that losing it feels like it removes the point for said character to BE big? Because, honestly - what benefit does a large size bring if you're not strong and tough enough to stand and take a hit? Being bigger "feels" like it would impact mobility and and flexibility, but could that lead to a big and fast character feeling like he's given up a useful power to gain a power he can't really utilise?

I don't know, truthfully speaking. Anime giant mecha have been doing flips and moving super-fast since time began and those don't feel awkward or out of place. And indeed, even in Dragon Ball Z, pure speed is often even more important than pure strength, and regardless of how big a guy is, if he's the strongest, he's also the fastest. And yet that still feel perfectly reasonable there, but not when I think about City of Heroes.

Why?

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 guess that although they might well be tough enough to not be *damaged* by a punch, it could still *hurt* enough to distract them.

Look at Wolverine who is "tough enough" to shrug off most injuries that would incapacitate a normal person, who can take a stupidly large amount of damage/injuries/disease that would kill a normal human being (and most super powered people as well), and yet still dodges *most* attacks... because getting hit *HURTS*.

He even comments that popping out his claws hurt each and every single time, but he has been able to cope with the pain (through constant repetition) so that it feels (at least in that area of his body) similar to getting your ear pierced.

I can relate on the ear piercing front, the first time hurt a lot, but as you get more and more piercings, the pain actually *feels* reduced each time, so i didn't even flinch on my most recent piercings, it just didn't bother me anymore.

*edit*

I would most likely to put it down to "expectations of the specific genre"....

Rogue punching a semi across town isn't really any less realistic than Superman doing the same thing. You know their strength isn't natural, so it doesn't really matter how big they are. Nobody can actually do anything remotely approaching that in real life. Whereas the agile fighter is more of an exaggeration of what can actually be done by real life gymnasts and martial artists (filtered through a lens of cinema stunts, of course), who tend to be more lightly built.

There is also the perception that excess bulk would only get in the way of agile movement, which may or may not be true, I don't know. Whereas a small build won't get in the way of a feat of extreme strength unless comic books start respecting the laws of physics.

Depends *entirely* upon how you define "excessive" bulk... hell, some wrestlers (old and new) that were quite possibly overweight, still have the agility to do cartwheels in the ring (Bam Bam Bigelow), jump clear over the top rope (The Undertaker being a good example of this), perform standing backflips/standing jump somersaults (ex-wrestler Paul Burchill could do this)...

None of them i would call "small" but most of them still made the "typical" wrestler look small

How could i forget Vader (360lbs+ of mass) doing a moonsault of the top turnbuckle... not to mention as well that "The Big Show" Paul Wight, whilst he was in WCW, was rumoured to actually perform a moonsault whilst training... at 7ft tall, and over 415lbs at the time... shame no one would actually be on the receiving end of it (he was more muscle instead

Hmm... I like it, that's a good point. Maybe we're just coached to see this, or maybe it's a general idealised notion (huge power in a small, convenient package), but a small size just doesn't seem to imply weakness these days, at least not within the realm of fiction. You have the tiny, scrawny old king fu master who can wipe the floor with ten huge men at the same time, you have the cute bruiser who looks like she's 12 but can benchpress two semis stacked on top of each other, you have the Grey Fox type machine-assisted small guy who can shoot the radar dishes off giant mechs, just to name a few. We're well accustomed to divorcing physical strength from physical size at the lower end of the spectrum.

I think part of the problem is we're not as used to divorcing strength from size in the UPPER spectrum. So while it's easy to believe that a small girl is strong, it's much harder to believe that a big guy is weak, at least without said guy taking a serious hit in the respect of his characterisation. Big dudes who aren't also strong dudes come off like all bite and no bark - they look big and probably suffer the drawbacks of being big, but they don't have any of the perks of strength to show for it.

And the drawbacks of being big is something that modern society is all too familiar with. In a culture obsessed with obesity the widely known negative side effects of the various drugs some men use to get big enough to be scary, there's an unwritten rule that one always has to pay some kind of price for being big. Even if one is possessed of superior health and so suffers no physiological drawback, there's still the question of mobility. Big guys are heavier, so more floors will collapse under their weight. Their bigger arm have less of an angle of rotation as their big biceps push against their big chests and restrict them. A heavy body takes more force to move and more force to stop, hampering mobility. A bigger body is harder to squeeze in tight spaces. There are numerous such examples that we can't seem to look past as easily as we can look past the fairly internal drawbacks that a small body has, which are much easier to explain away without having to account for it visually.

In short, if I see a big biceps, I expect to be seeing a strong arm, and if the arm isn't strong, then it's just pointlessly cumbersome. If, on the other hand, I see a small biceps, I can still buy that I'm seeing a supernaturally strong arm anyway, because you don't have to look strong to be strong.

I think the point is less about relatively big guys doing relatively athletic things - I'm sure they can. Hell, a lot of athletes are quite heavy built, especially those who excel at sports that require upper body strength. Where it gets weird for me is when you take an EXCESSIVELY big enemy, say something like a Greater Devoured, and then try to have that's primary strength be acrobatic flip jumps, wall running and fancy wire-fu martial arts.

Sure, the Incredible Hulk can jump good, but he jumps in a similar fashion as an artillery cannon fires a very heavy shell, in that it's raw strength. And though I've seen the Hulk wall-run on the exterior of buildings, when he puts his foot on your outer wall, his foot goes clean through it so he's stepping on the interior girder. Because he's big and heavy and very powerful. You wouldn't expect the Hulk to land quietly, sneak up on a tank and THEN attack it. Because he's big, he lands like a bomb, he runs like a road compactor and he's frikkin' 10 feet tall, if not more. You can't miss the guy.

That's kind of what I mean when I say big guys - the REALLY big ones. In comic books, they're the Hulks and the Juggernauts and the Doomsdays, and they are almost universally defined by their size and bulk. Now take a more anime concept - let's say Dragon Ball Z's Nappa. He's a man mountain, pretty much twice the size of everyone else, if not more, and yet because he's so powerful, he's also damn near the fastest and most agile of them all. And for him... It kind of makes sense, because DBZ's fictional universe is pretty heavily based around the notion that strength and speed are BOTH qualities that a strong warrior needs and you can't have one without the other. If you're JUST strong, you an never land a hit. If you're JUST fast, you can never deal any damage. That's why the biggest and strongest of the bad guys also end up being the fastest, as well.

The more I think about this, the more I feel there's a concept there that I need to explore. I'm just not sure of a good way to do that in-game, since the only truly "fast" defence set is Super Reflexes, and that intentionally shuns damage resistance. I guess what works for DBZ characters is they're big and fast, but they're also big AND STRONG, so they don't feel like they're missing a quality, so much as that they have an additional one. I don't think there's any good way to depict this in City of Heroes, though, since I don't think we have a set that's a decent enough combination of both defence AND resistance against the same elements. Energy and Will come close, but Willpower alternates defence and resistance between damage types and Energy is element-centric.

Still, food for though. I will need to do something about this.

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.

This is where you are starting to cross culture expectations, different comics, as well as different "universes" where the expectations contained within only run true *whilst inside* that realm...

Who would win a fight between someone from DBZ and The Phoenix Force?

Lets wind it up another notch, DBZ and the *big* mech from Gurren Lagann (hint, the mech is just on the stupidly large size.... possibly using Galaxies as throwing stars *might* be getting stupid)

Of course, you can say that i am being silly here, but this is where expectations kick in... you cannot really say "but X works here, so it must work in Y series", when both series are totally unconnected.

Sometimes you just need to use a bit of handwavium and let it slide.

*edit*

There are comic characters out there that *theoretically* could be "large and stealthy"... Apocalypse for one, as he has the ability to manipulate stuff at the molecular level (this can cover shape changing as well as changing his density)... So he could be "really really large, and yet really really light"... so he could weigh the same as a small child if he so wanted.

He does have other abilities that are more useful in this situation, but he could fall back on stuff like that if he wanted to.

The fact that it hasnt been shown doesnt mean that he cannot do it (Jubilee for example could potentially explode matter at the subatomic level.... but she didnt, either through lack of training to control it properly or being unwilling to knowingly take a human life as a side effect)

Except that doesn't seem to be the case for Trinity. In Trinity's case, she's killed off to emphasize to Neo that ultimately, he has to face his fate alone. He was always the "One," singular. Her death doesn't strengthen his resolve, he was resolved to go even without her.

Before Trinity is taken away from Neo, the first thing that is taken away from Neo is his sight, or rather specifically his sight of our world. In losing that, he retains his vision of the machine world. Its all part of the process of leaving everything else behind to face his destiny as the One in the world of the Matrix.

However, at no time during the trilogy does Trinity seem subservient to Neo, or her character seem to function solely as a trapping of Neo. I never saw Trinity's death as "killing off the girl."

I meant that on a more analytical level - why does this work in the DBZ universe but not so well in the DC universe? Is there something I can learn from the difference that I can then transplant to my own stories? And I think that the thing to take away from this is "balance." Though full of Mary Sues and Marty Stus, American comic books are still at least somewhat balance - one hero excels at speed, another at strength, another still at regeneration and so forth. Sure, you get some with a wider range of abilities, such as Super Man, but again - most have AN ability that defines them and are balanced around that. Anime protagonists are much more often possessed less of specific unique abilities and more of the SKILL to use a theoretically unlimited source of power, so the one that's the strongest doesn't just have the most powerful ability, but rather is the most powerful in ALL abilities.

The difference here is that within the context of American comic books, and this game to a large extent, for a character to be fast or agile, he must expressly NOT be strong, and when a character is expressly NOT strong, then being big comes off as satirical. Not so in anime, where becoming stronger makes you better at what you're already strong at, as well as better at everything else. In fact, speaking of different cultures, Extra Credit had a good video on a similar topic, and it seems like Penny Arcade are hosting their videos after the Escapist controversy.

I'm getting WAAAY off topic here, though.

However, bringing up anime does offer me an out to get back on topic: While anime sometime does a very good job of presenting strong, respectable female leads (Ghost in the Shell, Armitage III, Gunsmith Cats, I think), it also all too often gives us quite the opposite to an almost alarming extent. While DBZ is VERY guilty of this, famously having a cast of fighters that's entirely male save for a female cyborg who doesn't do a lot and gets eaten whole, but the whole show just winds down into the kind of simplistic muscle-head shouting contest that you can't really fault for having a bad representation of women... Without faulting it for a zillion other things first.

But then there are shows like Naruto, which REALLY get on my nerves. I know this is sort of a cultural thing with Japan, but it still horrifies me that I managed to sit through, what... 450 episodes of that thing? And almost never at all did I see a single female character who was useful in the long run and didn't serve as the "weak link" in her respective team, or otherwise act as "the healer." This is twice as annoying when you consider that the show underwent a time skip of three years during which time everyone was supposed to have gotten much more competent... And the girls were quickly reduced right back to crying over the boys, whose angst defined the narrative.

Actually, let's rag on that for a little bit longer. When I talk about a horrible representation of women in fiction, Naruto's Sakura is probably the prime example. For those who don't like anime, let me summarise a basic problem that occurs in one particular instance. Sakura, our "heroine" has been given the informed ability of being incredibly strong, very fast, dauntless in the face of danger and otherwise highly competent. So when Naruto, our "hero" suffers... Let's call it possession, her response is to essentially shut down and break down crying. She subsequently gets knocked out by a bad guy who gets knocked into her and has to be rescued before she slides off a bridge. When she wakes up, her response is to try and hug the hero, now fully possessed, and comfort him, for which she gets a flaming tail in the face and starts crying, not to mention a nasty, lasting wound.

While I hate ineffectual females in stories, I can at least tolerate the ones who are built as victims that exist solely to be saved. I don't like it, but I get why the author needed such a character. But to present a character as strong, confident and capable and then have her act as THE BIGGEST LOSER of the whole cast for the span of six episodes (an entire action scene)... That's just wrong. And that's neither the first nor the last time I'd see this. In fact, when I finally decided to flip the show the birdie and stop wasting my life on it... It was pretty much over the exact same thing happening AGAIN. There are few things worse that presenting a female character as strong and then having her act weak and get beat up like a chump. That's degrading on a whole other level, and actually demonstrates a far, far greater insult to strong female characters everywhere.

As I said, I can tolerate shows that tell me women can't be strong. They're wrong, and I can just state this and be done with it. What I CANNOT tolerate is shows that tell me women can TRY to be strong, but they will fail and fail hard. I HATE that!

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.

Maybe it's just the "Basilisk" in me, here, but I've never had a problem with that disconnect. Take a look at alligators/crocodiles. We're talking anywhere from 1 to 6 and a half metres of solid muscle and bone, and it's an ambush predator. It's as much of a stalker as the animal kingdom provides, sneaking up on its prey while it's drinking and taking it down in one fast, hard strike.

Killer Croc, from the Batman franchise, is often shown operating in the same way. He waits for Batman to come too near his hiding place in the water, then bursts up and drags him under. Typically, Croc is depicted as a huge guy, too. Somewhere from 2.5 to 3m tall, and massively muscled.

In terms of Stalkerdom, it seems to make as much sense to me that a stalker be large and powerful rather than small and stealthy because of that massive initial hit, particularly in the sets that seem to be less about finesse, like Electric, Broad Sword, Energy, the yet unreleased Street Justice, and to a lesser extent Dark and Kinetic.

Actually, the disconnect is less between being big and being an ambush predator and more between being big and being a speed fighter. Even at the best of days, a Stalker's Assassin's Strike is only the beginning. Once that's expended, the Stalker is basically fighting head on, just because the game is so finicky about letting you regain your Hidden status, and while you COULD strike from the shadows, then run away to strike again, game reality simply makes this unproductive. As a result, even as a Stalker, you spend much of your tight fighting directly, and that's where problems start occurring.

Suppose for a second that I wanted to make a big guy Claws/SR Stalker, and I'm talking BIG big guy. Yeah, he'd strike from an ambush, but then what? He'll be doing back flips and spin jumps, and he'll be bobbing and weaving to avoid enemy fire. Odd, but OK, sure enough. But then what happens when he actually gets hit? What happens when he hits? He comes off as a fighter who's weaker, which he compensates for by being faster. Then you have a problem.

Sure, an alligator is an ambush predator, but the thing is DAMN strong. It has a bite force of I don't know how many tons and it's just a mountain of muscle. It has a fast strike, but it then uses strength to pull its pray underwater and drown it. Now suppose if the alligator had a weak jaw and couldn't pull very well, so it had to get out of the water and chase its pray on land. Awkward, weird and not very productive, right? That's my problem.

I can see a big guy being fast, if he is ALSO strong. What I can't really see is a big guy who ISN'T strong, because... Why is he big, then?

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.

OK, I laughed my *** off at this video. Awesome, and the little girl is such a good actor, too. Thank you!

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 just wanted to point to this again:

I'll admit that a Claws/SR stalker is probably not going to be about big hits and being tough. An Electric/WP stalker, on the other hand, definitely could be. You get your big, slowish, physical, hefty attacks, you're not taking the hits as hard as a blaster, for instance, and you can stand toe to toe with the big boys (especially with an IO build) for long enough to get placate and Build Up back. Plus, you get enough AoE to deal with swathes of chumps.

Claws/ SR might not be a big-guy friendly pairing to you, but that doesn't mean that no stalker pairing would work for that big brutish stalker feel. You may not be as tough as a tank in terms of survivability, but you're still going to out-tough roughly 60% of the ATs outside of IOs, and you've still got single-target damage that's greater than any other AT, between leveraging AS, placate, and random criticals scaling to team size.

For what it's worth, I do have a Claws/SR stalker at 50 who is height maxed (he can be seen here, in the extreme foreground[/url]). Shadowlisk has superhuman speed, reactions, and strength. He's so fast that he teleports rather than superspeeds because his travelling the distance between "jumps" happens so fast it's basically imperceptible (also because super speed is a pain in the butt villainside.) He follows the concept of the ambush predator. He takes out a lieutenant on the first volley and moves so fast he doesn't get hit with incoming fire. If he does get hit, however, he's just a giant lizard. It hurts him like it would hurt anyone else. Why is he huge? Because that's what the cloning process did to him.

Does the game make his attacks weaker because of Claws' high DPS? Sure. Do I wish AS was an instant one-shot against basically anything? With reservations, sure. Do I think Stalkers in general could use buffing? Yes, but that's a different thread altogether. Do I feel that because he fights fast he hits weaker? Not really. Few enough people play stalkers that he's ever in direct competition against another, and if I do come across another stalker while I'm on mine, I'm generally more focused on the enemies dying on my hands then the numbers my ally might be putting up anyways. I know that I can kill almost anything up to and including a boss before they have the opportunity to strike back. That's strong enough for me.

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.

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.

Ugh, don't get me started on this. Whenever an alien race is involved, the males are always bigger and brawnier than the females, just to show that ones are male and the others female. Even if it makes no sense given the alien race's actual anatomy or heritage. It's tertiary sexual characteristics all over again, or at least as close as I could find within a two-minute TVtropes search.

I actually remember being pissed as all hell at Ben 10 doing the exact same thing. See, when Ben transforms into a big alien, like Fourarms or Diamondhead, it's... A big alien. But in that one "what if" episode when Gwen, his GIRL cousin ended up being the one to receive the Omnitrix, the aliens she transformed into, though they were the same species, were much smaller and more petite for no reason other than... Well, Gwen is a girl. Complete with hammy "female voice actor trying to make her voice sound deep and failing badly" voice acting, even. It's a good thing it was an all-around cool episode and Vilgax steals the show every time he's on-screen, so the episode is at least watchable, but damn it!

Or, something closer to home - do you remember how many times people have asked for a female version of Granite Armour? I'm sorry, let me say that again. Do you remember how many people have asked for a female version of AN AMORPHOUS PILE OF ROCK? Because I recall at least half a dozen instances of this. I never quite got what people's vision of a female version of igneous rock is, but I'm still blown away that such a notion even exists. It's a a walking collection of rock. It has no gender to begin with.

But, yes, I do get the problem you highlight. To go back to Ben 10, that actually had something of a subversion. You know how "Gwent 10" transformed into a small, skinny version of Fourarms? Well, a few episodes later (or is that earlier? It's been a while), "The Galactic Defenders" or such come to Earth, and they have with them an actual native aliens of the "Fourarms" species, and it's just as big, hulking and massive as Ben's version... And it speaks with a female voice! So the girl Fourarms is just as big as the guy Fourarms, bigger, in fact, and it's played for comedy that she has a slight crush on Ben's transformation. To the episode's credit, that's not played for parody or even comedy, but rather for minor humour, as she is otherwise depicted as a very competent fighter and easily the "heavy" of the team. Sadly, she has relatively little screen time.

I'm not surprised that your average audience seeing a female alien that's big and bulky and concluding she looks manly. That's really not the sort of thing you can't fix, and indeed probably don't want to anyway. Personally, I like to play on it as a subversion, and I've seen that done tastefully a few times, as I mentioned.

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.

This raises a question for me. What would the reaction be if instead of making a 'female' version of Granite Armor, the male-ish version basically looked female to begin with, for everyone?

Anyway, in terms of size, I do mess with the height and bulk sliders quite a bit. One thing I also tend to do is to resize specific body parts to call emphasis too or away from various areas. The Joan of Arkansas character in my sig below actually has a maxed out chest, while the Attila the Honey character is set to around average. The reason I adjusted Joan upward was to give her a more recognizably female profile, since the armor is so obscuring, the end effect looking more like the armor is "oversized" rather than that she is bulging at the chest. The Attila character already has this attribute just in her style of dress, and she is intentionally dressed in a much more revealing manner. Neither character is especially bulky or close to the "high strength" female you are proposing, but individual parts are modified.

I also tend to play with boot sizes for emphasis on characters I want to look slightly silly. The enormous oversized boots make an already bulky character look bulkier, and a scrawny or short character look more cartoonish. I like using the PPD boots and that new set of boots that recently showed up for this. I often wish we had more oversized hands, collars, helmets, and so on.

The one female character I kind of threw in the towel on due to lack of parts that satisfied my original concept was one not in my sig called "Lotus Operandi." I envisioned her as an African American/black gumshoe with green hair who investigates crime by interviewing plants, who it turns out have all kinds of different personalities. I wanted to do a traditional 1930s or 40s trenchcoated (male) detective look over a somewhat more feminine base layer. I haven't been satisfied with the results mostly because the trench coat that is available to females is hard to work with for this purpose, and because the brown coat I envisioned next to her brown skin blended together too much. I ended up with a more traditional sort of super hero costume for her for now. The baron coat might work well for her if females ever get it, because its bulk and ability to wrap would probably create good contrast with the figure underneath.

I would objectively assume the devs had gone insane. There are only so many ways to make something "look female" and most of them are not applicable to the Granite armor appearance. It basically leaves putting breasts on a rubble pile. Asking why Granite Armor wasn't made to look female is like asking why there are no female Fungoids.


In general, the visible large-scale gender distinctions between men and women for humans is shape for women and size for men. Women have visibly larger breasts and wider hips, while men on average tend to be overall taller and larger, with a slightly less obvious increase in upper body size. So androgynous shapes tend to read "male" and female shapes tend to exaggerate breasts and hips to disambiguate. The only obvious visible male shape distinction generally cannot be depicted in a T for teen game.


To put it more directly, the default stick figure is male, not because it has male characteristics but because it lacks female ones. That's just the way gender characterization seems to work for people.

Hmm... Interesting question. I can tell you almost for certain that this would make quite a few men uncomfortable. Possibly quite a few women, though I don't know so much about that. Again, it comes down to the male self-image and how "feminine" qualities are seen as degrading to it.

Personally, I wouldn't really have a problem with it. I'd have to think about how to work around it, however, and that in itself is telling. Turn my men and women into giant male-shaped brutes and I just roll with it. Turn my men and women into giant FEMALE-shaped brutes, though, and suddenly I have to work around it. It's quite possibly I'm falling for the "male is default, female is divergent" fallacy that says humanoid characters should look like men, especially when they're genderless. It'll take some doing to root that out of my subconscious, though I think I've already made progress on that front with the collection of female-body-shaped inhuman aliens and monsters. Time will tell, but I'll give it my all.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. As far as I'm concerned, the IDF boots are the greatest thing to happen to the costume editor since Power Customization, though the backpacks slot is a close second You're right on the money when you say big boots, gloves and shoulders make big characters look even bigger. In fact, without precisely this fact, I wouldn't have been able to make ANY of my big female characters, or at least wouldn't have been able to make the as compelling. Zombra used to love teasing me over my obsession with big boots and big gloves, but I just find them so versatile.

Also, I wouldn't define large boots on small characters as "cartoony" so much as "chibi." Oh, sure, we can't do the big heads, but we can do a pretty good general chibi body shape in all other ways. The more I play, the more I realise how much the chibi aesthetic really resonates with me, as I've always been a fan of stockier, thicker characters as serious preference. Big boots and gloves are just so versatile, and we have so few of them, it's just a shame.

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 wish Georgia O'Keeffe were still alive.

I'm willing to bet that just giving it the female Walk would do it without changing the model. It might even look less ridiculous than Eagle's Claw does. Anyway I bet with the right animation tooling some people would even start objecting to the huge size of the breasts and other aspects of the existing model, that currently don't cross their minds.