You might remember this blog post, in which I expressed confusion and dismay at an especially awful computer-generated illustration. It has become apparent that either I didn’t communicate the nature of my exasperation clearly (likely; exasperation thrives on the inability to articulate it), or some visitors to this website have poor reading comprehension (equally likely; this is a website about videogames), because I keep getting emails from people who mistook my frustration for some sort of moral outrage:

I am sure you have heard this from others already, but the cover in question is from a hentai tabletop game based on the Lost Worlds system from many moons ago. As it is a pornographic game, I am sure you understand that objectification of women was basically the goal. Sorry for being a butthead about this, I just don't see a reason to get irate over that sort of thing, when it's literally meant to be that way.

That was from Brandon, who seems like a sensible guy, even if he uses the word ‘literally’ in a weird way. Brandon, I want you to know that I wasn’t irate about the picture – I was baffled and flabbergasted.

For reference, here it is again, god save me:

Let me be clear about this, since apparently I wasn’t last time: I have no problem with women, or men, being represented as sex objects, so long as we’re all grown-ups who understand the difference between fantasy and reality. I especially have no problem with it when the representation is drawn or rendered; I wish there was more and better erotic art in modern culture. Sex and sexuality are so important to our lives – they should be elevated and celebrated. I love drawings and I love sex, so of course I appreciate the two in combination. Yay, in a nutshell, for cheesecake.

My problem with the above image is not a moral one, but an artistic one. I don’t know how it’s possible for someone not to realise, but just in case, I’ll spell it out: It’s a bad, bad picture. It’s shitty. It is sooooooooooooooooooo bad.

It is especially, embarrassingly bad because it’s clearly meant – as our friend Brandon pointed out – to titillate, but god help any poor bastard who can masturbate to this frightful abomination. There are many sexy and exciting things about women and their bodies, and this picture fails to capture or exaggerate or fetishise any of them – it fails catastrophically. The girl is stiff and misshapen, and her bulbous tits seem hard and heavy, like something you could tear off and incapacitate an intruder with. The entirety of her head looks somehow two-dimensional, most unfortunately her eyes, which might have been painted on cardboard, cut out and stuck on with double-sided tape. I would add, “And this is what ruins her sultry expression,” except she isn’t wearing any expression at all: The artist didn’t have the confidence to give her one, because he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. Sex aside, this picture is a confused, incompetent mess.

She’s meant to be some sort of warrior or knight, this girl, but the artist doesn’t know what real armour looks like – or real girls, for that matter, and he couldn’t be bothered looking up reference pictures for either. What we have here – and this is typical of shitty art by nerds – is a copy of a copy of a copy (of a copy of a copy). Some fantasy artist, once, drew a warrior in armour, and the armour was not of this world or its history. But of course that artist used many reference pictures of real armour, and real warriors, so that his drawing would be convincing. (A fantasy that doesn’t seem real isn’t a fantasy.) His fantasy pictures were so wonderful that a second artist endeavoured to copy him – and since he was copying something wonderful, this second artist’s pictures were pretty good too. But his warriors were never as lifelike, and their garb never as believable, because while the first artist made drawings from life, his imitator made drawings from other drawings.

But the second artist, and a hundred others like him, were good enough, and pandered to their fans enough, that they inspired a third generation of artists, and they in turn inspired a fourth, and the drawings were getting pretty shitty at this point, but they were drawn by and for nerds – thousands of goddamned despicable, fat nerds, and nerds think they’re cleverer than everyone else, so they never notice that their favourite things are a load of shit.

And so the degeneration was allowed to continue, and has ultimately resulted in the image above: surely a fifteenth- or sixteenth-generation, chinese-whispered, fumbling piece of hackwork. The artist has a vague idea that he wants to draw armour, but doesn’t know what armour looks like, nor what it’s for or how it works; the result is this haphazard mess of metal and leather. The artist wants to draw a sexy girl, but his grasp of the female form is as feeble as his understanding of ‘sexy’. He wants to draw a dynamic pose, and a seductive expression, but he knows that he would fail, so he doesn’t even try. He hopes that a skimpy outfit will magically create sexiness, so he dresses the girl in a cheese knife.

This image is beyond bad; it makes the mind spasm and careen, like a Lovecraftian horror. Nothing about it makes any sort of sense – it’s confusing and contradictory on every possible level. The context in which I encountered it tells me there must be people who are pleased by it in some way, yet I can’t – I cannot – imagine how any human person could look at it and not immediately find it utterly ghastly. Who are these forsaken people, and what terrible thing has happened to their brains?

To reiterate: I don’t mean that I don’t understand the fetish, or that I don’t appreciate the degree of sexual perversion. I’m saying there is no perversion – there’s an attempt at it, but this image is not perverted, it’s just terrible. It’s bad. BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD.

Is that clear? Jesus I hope so.