• 1 Post
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 31st, 2023

help-circle

  • I don’t draw, but I think a lot of the facial sexual dimorphism in people isn’t real. The same features that appear masculine in some populations or cultures appear feminine in others. A bunch of recognizing masculinity or femininity is probably based on archetypes and other signaling features.

    In western media women are presented as younger than men, so lots of the features we recognize as feminine like having a smaller nose are really features of being younger. (And also why nose jobs are popular - not only do they make you match a societal beauty standard, they also make you look like your own memories of yourself)

    The really observable facial secondary sex characteristics are darkening of hair pigmentation and increased sebum production in men. In art those would probably show up more in shading than line drawing. Feminine makeup in response to those things is kind of a mixed batch. There’s adding shading to the face in places that wouldn’t be darkened by facial hair, like cheeks or under the eyes, which might exaggerate sex linked appearance. Similarly trimming eyebrows to reduce the appearance of darkened facial hair. But there’s also markup to darken and thicken eyebrows, makeup to lighten cheeks instead of darken them, and makeup to add a more oily, glowing appearance.






  • Guild Wars (not GW2) didn’t have that problem. All of the skills are just available somewhere if you go get them. The only meaningful build choices are which skills you use, a small number of attributes, and how much of the stats from your gear you are willing to sacrifice to obtain other effects.

    You get to level 20 (the cap) fairly quickly in each campaign and still have all the rest of the game to play with expanding options instead of increasing numbers.

    You can’t just pick a single build and do everything with it, you need to adapt what you’re doing to the missions you encounter, so you’re more than encouraged to play with the other skills.