An informative article about Female Boob armor...

[MightyZ0G]

most of the armour in TES would be dangerous to wear with the exception of the very basic iron and steel or the Stormcloak and Imperial

[DrOuroboros]

most of the armour in TES would be dangerous to wear with the exception of the very basic iron and steel or the Stormcloak and Imperial

Ebony and Dragonplate (minus the helmet , that thing indeed looks dangerous to wear) seems like a viable armors too , and few others

[billyro]

Heh, yes I suppose that unrealistic female armour doesn't amount to the fact that 70% of armours in Skyrim would be a complete no go to fight in (Daedric armour? There is no way on Earth you could fight someone while wearing armour that bulky), and most of the weapons have such bad designs that they would be completely ineffectual in a battle.

 

Call it immersion peeves on my behalf. Dragons are a part of the world for me, so I don't find fault with that. Armour that can get you killed while its meant to protect you? Nope.

[MODinsane]

Im sorry, Im missing something here. Skyrim is a game and all it is, just a game, are you people serious? Im not planning on suiting up in full armor or have some chick I know wear boob armor to go out to dinner. Come on, it's just a game. LOL

 

I prefer my female character as she is ... It is skimpy here but far more when I want it to be, who cares, it's a game.

 

 

[billyro]

Of course, everyone can have their own things in their own game. I'm just saying that my preference is realism.

 

Also, this thread isn't about whether or not skimpy armour is realistic - it's about whether or not those boob cup breastplates are realistic.

Edited May 8, 2013 by billyro

[rizon72]

I just can't get serious about how realistic skimpy armor is when I can get gold rings, gold and other such things from wolfs and other wild animals.

[MODinsane]

Stylish, those wild animals. Gotta have dat gold stuff! ;-)

[MightyZ0G]

as far as gold and whatnot being in the inventories of wolves and skeevers is concerned, I just imagine that some traveller died and a wolf ate his hand, gold ring and all or swallowed his leather money pouch whole because it was covered in blood.

not completely realistic but I can suspend my disbelief that far to get by that until I can be bothered to learn how to edit the levelled lists.

[TheObstinateNoviceSmith]

I just can't get serious about how realistic skimpy armor is when I can get gold rings, gold and other such things from wolfs and other wild animals.

 

Hey, maybe you're looting what their stomachs couldn't digest after they ate another adventurer, LOL... but naw, I see your point.

[ghoulrainbow]

For those who have entirely missed the boat, this is a fantasy game and has little to do with reality. Dragons and spells flying around are perfectly acceptable. But unrealistic armor? If you don't like the 'boob armor' mods, just don't use them. Problem solved. :cool:

 

If you don't like that they exist or that other people actually like to use them in their game, you have a much deeper problem and should probably consult a specialist. :ermm:

 

Actually a lot of the male armor is unrealistic as well, but for some reason no one whines about long spikes sticking out in all directions or paldrons that are more like wings off each shoulder. Think about going through a 3 foot wide doorway with 4 feet of spikes surrounding you. :pinch:

 

The complaint here is not about modded armor, it's about vanilla armor. Suggesting that someone needs to see a specialist because they're angry about their gender being hypersexualised in an entire subsection of media is quite an overreaction.

 

I'm not trying to take away anyone's right to have silly-looking giant boob cups on their armor. If someone wants chainmail bikinis or nude female meshes and doesn't care about whether or not it's realistic, that's fine, it's their choice. It's not my style but so long as I get to do what I want with my game, I don't care.

 

This is quite a post, since I'm working from ground-up principles and addressing the whole topic of boob plates, not just your post, bben46, so I apologise in advance. I'll bullet-point the main bits for the sake of your attention spans.

 

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• The first thing is, when designing fantasy worlds, a writer will always come across the issue of believability. In order to accept something fantastical and maintain immersion, you need to base it on a certain amount of realism otherwise it will be impossible to empathise with the characters and the story.

 

On a very basic level, this is why in most fantasy worlds, gravity works to hold things down and living people breathe air. This is why fantasy world people are not usually amorphous indescribable blobs who have no human traits, living in an amorphous blob-world which conforms to none of the known laws of physics, where the story conforms to no literary conventions (and I'm talking really simple conventions like, things happen and there are characters)-- they'd be impossible to empathise with.

 

You can do a bunch of things that are irrelevant to the main storyline in this game for the sake of role-playing and immersion. Pretty much the only thing you can't do in Skyrim is take a s#*!, and there are buckets under and near the beds, if you look carefully. (Something to bear in mind the next time you put a bucket over an NPC's head so you can steal all their things.) Why do you think there are grates in the street that lead to running water in Solitude, or sewers under the boardwalks in Riften?

 

In a nutshell, you need some things to be realistic in order to accept the things that are completely unrealistic. We can only suspend our disbelief so far.

 

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• The second thing is that if we can believe that there are dragons, then just as we can believe in boob plates, we can believe in no boob plates. This works both ways.

 

In fact, I'd say it's much more lore-friendly to have no boob plates. If women can be guards, hunters, soldiers, housecarls, assassins, bandits, sellswords, and warriors-- Bethesda is not a group of complete tools and recognises that not making women feel constantly undermined essentially gives them about a 100% larger potential customer base-- then in-universe it makes no sense to provide them with non-functional armor.

 

(On an actual realism note, this world is clearly previous to the invention of sports bras. Just so anyone who doesn't own breasts knows, having them jiggle about is in fact very painful, can lead to severe bruising, and would majorly get in your way when fighting. You would probably bind them down or wear stiff padding under your armor, which would give you anything from a flat silhouette to a kind of boob-loafish look. Funnily enough this means that the Blades armor probably has one of the most believable chest pieces if nothing else. Sure, it's not sexy or flattering, but that isn't the point of armor.)

 

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• The third thing is that it's a lazy appeal to sexuality. It's breaking immersion in a game which is largely about immersion and it sticks out more than the Wilhelm scream.

 

I don't feel it's on the same level as four-foot shoulder spikes. Making a character look cool is one thing. I can forgive that. Skyrim is a game designed to make us feel cool. It's a game about having a vicarious power trip and in many way that is its appeal.

 

The female armor has a lot of "just for cool" too. Armor is designed to be both functional and scary-looking. It gives you a larger physical presence. Shoulder spikes obscure your figure-- they give you huge-looking shoulders, adding to the appearance of strength-- and look, well, spiky. It'd hurt to be on the receiving end of a tackle from someone wearing Daedric armor. It's a lot like being a hedgehog. (If you want to get through a door, you... turn your shoulders*. I don't think armor is really meant to be worn indoors anyway, though.)

 

On the other hand, breasts are a very vulnerable part of the human form. You don't have to masculinise your figure to look scary-- femininity can be just as powerful-- but it isn't terror-inspiring to mold armor to the exact shape of the female torso. It implies nakedness, which looks vulnerable, and that isn't the same thing as looking cool. It purposefully makes female characters look weaker and more vulnerable than male characters, which I don't appreciate.

 

Is the feminine figure/breasts being considered synonymous with weakness bound up in a lot of sexism? Is it a social convention? Yes. It doesn't make it unimportant any more than a bank note being a piece of printed paper means that you'd happily flush it down the toilet.

 

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• Lastly I don't complain about a game in which, say, dragons are largely the antagonists and the game is about killing them and eating their souls, because dragons don't exist. No dragons are being affected by this design choice.

   

  Women, on the other hand, do exist, and media reflects and informs society. When all my high-level armor choices are about comically overemphasising that yes, my character is indeed the proud owner of two breasts despite the fact that in real life this would kill her, I hear the following: "You are a piece of meat and how sexy you are is more important than your life itself."

Sure, some gamer women want their female characters to be sexy, and that's fine. I like to make sexy women characters now and again too, not least because sexy women exist. My thief archer lady is damn sexy in that form-fitting Nightingale armor (which looks like it's made of metal-reinforced leather so I consider that much fairer game than plate armor). On the other hand, unsexy women also exist, and if I'm playing a big bald Nord tank lady built like a barn and taller than anyone else in Skyrim** (thank you, PC gaming), I want her to look like a walking tank-- someone you would absolutely not want bearing down on you with her battleaxe held aloft, taking all your blows like it's nothing. Cartoonishly oversized boob plates just don't do it.

 

I want some armor for my character. And I want it to look like it fundamentally works as armor, yes, even if it's covered in shoulder spikes.

 

You can keep your boob plates, I'm not denying you boob plates. I just personally don't want them. How about for once, we get sensible vanilla armor and leave it to the modders to give us giant boob cup chestplates? (Come on, the Ebony armor boob cups are like twice as big as my character's underlying boobs.) And let's not have the forum staff telling us we need to see a specialist because we're tired of seeing the same old in a game which aims to make medieval fantasy fresh.

 

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*Unless you are literally controlled by Skyrim's AI, like that ancient frost atronach in Auri-el's temple that was desperately trying to run at me through a too-tight tunnel while I casually stood around just out of its reach and yol-toor-shul'd it back to Oblivion.

 

**Which I personally find pretty damn sexy myself, but each to their own.