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Description
Lately I've been thinking a lot about Fantasy Art, MMOs, and everything they reinforce.
Reading academic publications from a writer named Aaron Trammell is probably what caused this for me; he writes sociological reports on TTRPG culture, particularly around Dungeons and Dragons, and how they interact with wider social attitudes and prejudices (Fantasy Racism and Fantasy Colonialism in particular).

And so, for a much later date, I've made attempts at replicating what bad fantasy design looks like. I deliberately made the armor and weapons as anatomically uncomfortable as possible. The male character's full plate has no waist articulation, uncomfortably large pauldrons, no armoring for the groin and hips, cuisses with no articulation which come much too high, and gratuitous demigauntlets and scale armor. The female figure's bikini armor pokes into the flesh at a few points, and leaves 60% of the body fully exposed to the elements. Into the two figures, I endowed no real internal life beyond the phrase "play now". I spent something like an hour looking through World of Warcraft promotional art to reference these.
They'll be in a much later scene in my webcomic, where Laurientus Magnus walks into a drywall waiting room, a dark evergreen forest, or other liminal space, with two high-level Warcraft player characters, one a human male and one a female night-elf. They ask my webcomic protagonist his name, and he responds "Ra Hoor-Khuit". After being asked if he's some kind of villain or goetia practitioner, Laurientus responds "of a sort I suppose".
I'd realized, while flipping through books I have on Fantasy Illustration, that the epistemology which produced Bikini Armor can be seen in how everything is drawn in Fantasy. How weapons and armor are drawn, how buildings are drawn, how peoples' faces and bodies are drawn; it all comes from a place of noxious introversion, of withdrawal from the World in favor of your own fantasies for how it should be, which inevitably reproduce all of the cruelty and barbarism of the outside world, if in a caricatured way. Buildings become shapeless and plastic, clothes become impractical and absurd, people become parodies of themselves, and all to satisfy the fantasies of the individual voyeur-geek engaging with the material.
I'd like to interface with the vocabulary of Fantasy Kitsch as to, on an emotional level, convey that acute sense of alienation from and revulsion towards Mass Culture which many queer folk will experience. When you're surrounded only by caricaturish portrayals of "Alpha Masculinity" and "Alpha Femininity", with anything outside of that being treated like a joke or made into a cackling villainous strawman, an acute sense of not belonging begins to set in, first subtly, and then to a crushing extant.
As I've said before, I'm someone who, in my art, always looks for the feminine aspects of men and the masculine aspects of women, and so producing these two figures felt acutely painful and cringeworthy.

Description
Lately I've been thinking a lot about Fantasy Art, MMOs, and everything they reinforce.
Reading academic publications from a writer named Aaron Trammell is probably what caused this for me; he writes sociological reports on TTRPG culture, particularly around Dungeons and Dragons, and how they interact with wider social attitudes and prejudices (Fantasy Racism and Fantasy Colonialism in particular).

And so, for a much later date, I've made attempts at replicating what bad fantasy design looks like. I deliberately made the armor and weapons as anatomically uncomfortable as possible. The male character's full plate has no waist articulation, uncomfortably large pauldrons, no armoring for the groin and hips, cuisses with no articulation which come much too high, and gratuitous demigauntlets and scale armor. The female figure's bikini armor pokes into the flesh at a few points, and leaves 60% of the body fully exposed to the elements. Into the two figures, I endowed no real internal life beyond the phrase "play now". I spent something like an hour looking through World of Warcraft promotional art to reference these.
They'll be in a much later scene in my webcomic, where Laurientus Magnus walks into a drywall waiting room, a dark evergreen forest, or other liminal space, with two high-level Warcraft player characters, one a human male and one a female night-elf. They ask my webcomic protagonist his name, and he responds "Ra Hoor-Khuit". After being asked if he's some kind of villain or goetia practitioner, Laurientus responds "of a sort I suppose".
I'd realized, while flipping through books I have on Fantasy Illustration, that the epistemology which produced Bikini Armor can be seen in how everything is drawn in Fantasy. How weapons and armor are drawn, how buildings are drawn, how peoples' faces and bodies are drawn; it all comes from a place of noxious introversion, of withdrawal from the World in favor of your own fantasies for how it should be, which inevitably reproduce all of the cruelty and barbarism of the outside world, if in a caricatured way. Buildings become shapeless and plastic, clothes become impractical and absurd, people become parodies of themselves, and all to satisfy the fantasies of the individual voyeur-geek engaging with the material.
I'd like to interface with the vocabulary of Fantasy Kitsch as to, on an emotional level, convey that acute sense of alienation from and revulsion towards Mass Culture which many queer folk will experience. When you're surrounded only by caricaturish portrayals of "Alpha Masculinity" and "Alpha Femininity", with anything outside of that being treated like a joke or made into a cackling villainous strawman, an acute sense of not belonging begins to set in, first subtly, and then to a crushing extant.
As I've said before, I'm someone who, in my art, always looks for the feminine aspects of men and the masculine aspects of women, and so producing these two figures felt acutely painful and cringeworthy.