Originally Posted by IronStylus

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Originally Posted by IronStylus

Holy **** that was a lot of well composed, extremely well thought-out points and a lot of data to back it up. I very much salute you! This is the stuff that's actually super useful for people like me in a position to help define our body types. I love this information and this amount of it because I can look and be like.. "Oh hey, I think I see where we can fill in some gaps!" You've actually saved me some work, and I owe you a coffee.

Funny thing is that a very nice young lady came and talked to me on the floor of the finals about this very same issue. She made similar points which I.. ya know.. agreed with, like I tend to on these subjects. That said, I don't think I can possibly address the entirely of this pose aside from stating what I've stated before. I believe we need to have breadth, depth and contrast in our characters. We need to have archetypal characters and non-conventional. This goes the same for body types, in this particular case, female body types.

Recently I've been doing some core exploratory work on our champions, past and present. I've developed an even more concrete belief that we need to vary female forms as our game angle requires pretty drastic differentiation in proportions between characters, especially females, to make them truly read as different. Right now, on paper, many of our females read differently, but when plugged into game angle they read as very similar body types. Diana, though having a pretty curvy lower body (larger thighs) and trimmer upper body with smaller breasts still looks in the same general category as Syndra though she's pretty overall standard voluptuous. My bad there. I might have pushed proportions on Diana even further. In fact, I'd like to go back to Diana and push proportions. I think we've standardized our females far too much, producing mainly costume changes. I really want us to focus on stylizing our females as much as we do with our males.

Make no mistake, this is something we have our eye on. I had a discussion with our Art Director about this issue just the other day. We want that barbarian woman who can smash any guy she might encounter, we want us to get the spindly tank-girl type who's far less exposed, we want utilitarian, we want majestic, we want creepy, we want it all. We also do want sexy, in all it's variations.

You also brought up something in there interesting about Varus. He is one of the only examples we have of a different take on males. We tend to make our males of sort of three types. Athletic, Heroic, or Hulk. So, Singed, Garen, and Mundo respectively. That generalization but there you have it. Varus hits a great sweet spot. He's quite androgynous, a bit more anime archetype. He's sleek, trim and mildly feminine, but dang is that ever sexy as far as I’m concerned! Basically, anything Riot Taco Storm can cosplay as is something I'd really love to have more experiments like.

I’m not quite sure I’ve hit on all or any of your points aside from providing you an assurance that we’re taking a hard look at our champions and some stuff is going to change as we go. As always I’d love to keep this conversation going and see what more points come up in this thread. I apologize for not hitting everything but I’ve just gotten back from the finals which has been a rigorous thing today to say the least. I’m a little hug-drunk right now.

I really, REALLY appreciate all the hard work and analysis you put into this. It has certainly not gone unnoticed! This is information that I like to act on and I thank you for it!

I'll try to hit on more points in smaller doses.

Originally Posted by Rauhel

I love your posts. We are almost on the same page. Posing is most of it, but I do think clothes can play a part when it's in poor taste. Stinger Akali isn't sexualized in the least, but I definitely think default Akali is. Anatomy has to count for something. Her boobs are gigantic. It's like having a male champion with a very pronounced package. Regardless of how he is posing, he is being sexualized.

Originally Posted by IronStylus

Basically, anything Riot Taco Storm can cosplay as

Originally Posted by IronStylus

snip.