Tynon's Tempting Ta' Ta's Tribunal

I’ve been doing a lot of research and reading about the whole gender and body issues within fandom a lot lately, including being behind the “Cosplay is not Consent” movements and talking with my good friend Bridget about projects we’re both working on, and our mutual hate of the “Fake Geek Girl” phenomenon. However I saw this advertisement for a game called ‘Tynon’ a “PVP Web Game” with of course advertises using scantily armour clad fantasy genre women to entice the slathering pre-pubescent males into joining yet another crappy game build to suck your bank account dry... and breath... these kinds of games are a dime a dozen, and the advertising is blatantly sexual and I honestly don’t give that much a damn about it, however there was one image which kinda blew my mind.

I’m a fan of a tumblr called Repair Her Armour, it’s dedicated to pointing out how ridiculously inappropriate armour is on woman, especially in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, and whilst I will admit I myself like sexy photos of sexy woman in barely anything (and less), I do like ideas on how to fix armours to be less objectified and yet still be quite feminine (and yes it can still be sexy if need be). This came to mind when I saw an advertisement on a Cracked.com article advertising the aforementioned game, but something weird struck me as I casually glanced it. The image is your typical manga/anime affair of a big breasted girl wearing weird armour with big shoulder pads and chest pieces which barely covers each nipple, but the way the designer has added a line on the advert (assumedly for dramatic impart to highlight the text) it broke up the image in such an interesting but I’m assuming unintended way. You see because if you look above the line the female’s armour looks kind of decent, you can almost picture her wearing a full body suit with some crazy attachments but it would be what you expect a warrior to wear into a fight. To contradict that under the line is bordering on soft-core pornography, and whilst there is nothing wrong with that, it kind of really makes you think “How is this girl fighting without having to cover her breasts every five seconds? They must have had heavy duty spirit gum in those days!”

I think it’s probably because I’m so aware of such things now more then when I was a slobbering bunch of hormones and testosterone, also known as last week, but it really did amuse me that you could break up an image like that and come away with two really distinct images in your mind about just one picture, all because of just one line. Knowing what I know about design, I dare say it was intentional to attract your eyes to the breasts, which were also conveniently placed next to the name of the game, but it really did seem strange that the line intersected perfectly on the armour as well. I wish I could show you the image but it was a Flash ad, and when I went to right-click it (to find it was flash) it crashed my browser and I haven’t been able to find it again.