Posted under General
pool #18446 is for explicitly women in actual armor as opposed to my archnemesis, the chainmail bikini. As a result, this one is kinda tough to figure out what to do with at a glance.
I think it's a pretty safe tag conversion, as the pool is objective in concept, and hard to search for otherwise. But I have no idea what to name it, as it's kind of a mouthful on its own. Any suggestions?
Damian0358 said in forum #452552:
I think a solution could be found in resolving why that pool had to be made in the first place - do we have a tag for women in impractical armor?
bikini armor, reverse bikini armor, etc come to mind. It's where the usual chainmail bikinis live. The main problem with a 1girl full_armor two-tag search is that you get a lot of dudes in full armor, while the girl is not in armor, scantily clad, or whatever else.
I like this pool, and I want the spirit of it to live on too.
I think you may start to have issues around the point of "practical armor" right at the boundary, because full plate scaled and fitted to a woman is clearly practical, chainmail bikini armor is clearly not, but there are some armors in between which might need a bit of refining in the definition.
boobplate
Take a look at this post post #11671140 (rating:s).
It wasn't designed only with practicality in mind, you could argue, because it follows the curve of her chest, and some of her thigh is unshielded (I think?), but if I had to choose between this or no armor for a woman in a battle I'd choose this. I think it would stop attacks, but it's not considered a valid entry in "Women in Practical Armor" because it's boobplate and it doesn't cover the entire body from the neck down.
Also, the argument for boobplate being impractical sometimes centres around the "cleavage" of it channeling swords to a weak point in the armor near the heart, but I think that's some armchair reasoning and actually you'd still be pretty happy wearing boobplate versus no armor. It'd protect you from most angles even if that channeling thing is true.
leather armor
Look at this post post #11431879 (rating:g).
Not sexualised armor, but also, in reality, not going to protect you from anything sharp really. There's a little chainmail on the shoulders, but the idea of leather protecting a person in a fight is a bit of a myth. Personally I think it should still be considered proper armor, because in the fictional context it is presented in it functions as proper armor, is meant to portray to the audience "this is armor", even if in real life it wouldn't work, but just one to think about.
I don't think this is insurmountable at all, just that it would be good to define whether practical armor means "no frills whatsoever and the same thing a man would wear historically" (like the pool is set up, essentially) or if it means "armor not designed to titilate or designed with no thought to protection at all".
To throw out some loose ideas for this tag, perhaps female_knight (though not all armor makes one a knight, and there are even scifi armors in Women in Practical Armor), armored_female (though it doesn't really make clear "how armored", but that could go in the wiki), or something in that vein.
I also like the idea of tagging impractical armor too, but I understand what you mean about needing to specify the armor is on the woman not just near the woman.
Perhaps what we need is realistic armor, as opposed to just "not chainmail bikinis"? Because you are completely right in that while these outfits are not the most practical I can imagine them keeping someone safe (even if only by video game logic in cases like leather armor), and would rather wear them over fucking bikini armor hypothetically (even if the boobplate sounds a tad unpleasant).
I admit, armor is not my area of expertise, but there has to be some way to break this pool into a plausible tag, as otherwise I have no clue how to find what this pool covers. I like the idea of female knight at least, as we already have tags like female butler which is for your girls in handsome butler suits, but I'm worried it might end up restricted to fantasy only scenarios, when generally speaking I think Samus Aran (in her full powersuit, as opposed to just her zero suit) would be someone I want to see in this tag just as much as Ironlily's various characters in their full armor.
I think an issue additionally is how to word it in such a way to prevent mistags too. Like, something like woman_in_full_armor/fully_armored_woman makes sense relative to full armor, but searching full_armor bikini_armor does show mistags like post #6948194 and post #6339112 would still be possible, someone misunderstanding the "full armor" tag. woman_in_traditional_armor/traditionally_armored_woman would eliminate sci-fi and more fantastical looking suits, obviously. Just armored_woman would have difficulties given we have armored pasties as a tag, and generally searching armored_* shows a lot of scantily clad designs.
Maybe it would make sense to adopt heavy_armor/heavily_armored_*? The only issue with that is that it would exclude something like leather armor, which is light, and it runs into modern military stuff terminologically...
I think the ultimate issue we're running into here is this: in spite of armor's examples reflecting their real world use, armor as it is represented on Danbooru likely leans far more heavily in the fantasy and sci-fi direction, doubly so once we see the kind of armored stuff we have, and that impacting what people think 'full armor' means. So, really, the main question worth asking here is this: how well gardened is full armor, and if the answer is "fairly" then we could probably safely go for like, fully_armored_woman or fully_armored_female, and then hope that people aren't stupid enough to induce pollution because that tag now exists. Though if we rely on full armor then there has to be armor protecting the head too...
What this conversation is teaching me is that our armor tags need some serious work before we can deal with this pool properly. What I think needs to be done is something along the lines of:
Armor nuts, feel free to pick this apart, I'm out of my depths here and just want to properly convert this pool.
Edit: Full armor seems to be tagged properly at a glance for the most part, though there are a lot of posts like post #11661628 lacking head pieces.
Knowledge_Seeker said in forum #452623:
Full armor seems to be tagged properly at a glance for the most part, though there are a lot of posts like post #11661628 lacking head pieces.
Do we need a tag like full_armor_without_helmet or similar to account for this?
Damian0358 said in forum #452633:
Do we need a tag like
full_armor_without_helmetor similar to account for this?
Honestly, I don't think that's a bad idea. Full_Armor -Helmet returns 234 pages of results alone (not accounting for alternate armor headwear like the visor (armor) existing). I know I've made the mistake of not including armor without headwear before at least.
Updated by user 872990
CrossbowArcanePlus said in forum #452598:
leather armor
Look at this post post #11431879 (rating:g).
Not sexualised armor, but also, in reality, not going to protect you from anything sharp really. There's a little chainmail on the shoulders, but the idea of leather protecting a person in a fight is a bit of a myth. Personally I think it should still be considered proper armor, because in the fictional context it is presented in it functions as proper armor, is meant to portray to the audience "this is armor", even if in real life it wouldn't work, but just one to think about.
I'm not an expert on armor, but from what I know (such as from the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiled_leather), while leather armor was obviously inferior to metal armor, the notion that it's ahistorical is just wrong. There are lots of historical reasons why a type of armor that's worse, but cheaper and still better than nothing would be used.
Which is to say that for our purposes, there's definitely no reason to treat leather armor as inherently unrealistic if we were to make a tag for realistic armor.
LightSolas said in forum #452708:
I'm not an expert on armor, but from what I know (such as from the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiled_leather), while leather armor was obviously inferior to metal armor, the notion that it's ahistorical is just wrong. There are lots of historical reasons why a type of armor that's worse, but cheaper and still better than nothing would be used.
Which is to say that for our purposes, there's definitely no reason to treat leather armor as inherently unrealistic if we were to make a tag for realistic armor.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing. It seems to me from that and a little reading I did around it like it was largely used on horses rather than people, and when it was on people it was more in tournaments rather than in war or on just on the helmets at Agincourt (which I guess it because the head was more vulnerable to blunt force injuries than cutting? Not sure.). When it was used on people's bodies, they usually put bands of metal on it. I understand that it's harder to track from an archeological point though. Very cool boiled leather book cover image on that page too.
Even if it were used on people in war, something that negates that is that image of Ciri isn't cuir bouilli, it's just normal soft leather from the looks of how it creases at the elbows and how it follows her form. We could make a cuir bouilli or boiled leather armor tag to talk about that as realistic specifically, but I don't know if we actually have any pictures of it to begin with.
All this aside, I still think it should be considered "proper armor" for in fiction reasons. I do think the idea of tagging "realistic" things has some issues though, not necessarily with leather armor in particular (though this discussion we're having about it is an example of my next point), but more because I don't think it's feasible to expect taggers to have to research anything historical just to tag something. Whichever one of us is right about whether leather armor is realistic, it shows that it's not that rare for someone to have the wrong idea about whether a certain armor is realistic. I think, if possible, tags should probably be a bit easier to intuit than what we're doing here, though I do appreciate the wikipedia link and further information personally.
Oops, i missed this thread. I'm proposing a conversion in topic #38448.
I intended the pool to allow a fair bit of artistic license, and artistic lack of knowledge of historic armor. It doesn't really matter if that suit of armor she's wearing doesn't match up to with any particular one from history, or if the faulds are shaped in a subtly wrong way that would prevent her from moving her legs effectively; what matters is that the artist clearly intended to depict a woman in practical armor, breaking away from the gravity well of obligatory female sexualization or whatever, and also not some ridiculous yu-gi-oh-ass colored plastic fantasy getup. I also sort of intended it to be for historical and modern armor but exclude sci-fi armor because it's more or less impossible to tell what's practical there.
