A lot of the armor they tout as practical actually looks more like parade armor than anything else, with them being really ornate and detail-oriented with sashes and capes and belts and all sorts of other fancy additions. From what I know, parade armor has a rep for being pretty heavy and should never see battle because of how unwieldy it is, so ironically a lot of these outfits they tout as practical are just as impractical as a chainmail bikini.
That, and I think at this point chainmail bikinis and superhero onsies are a lot like air ducts in action films or fingerprints in mysteries: they are unrealistic, everyone over 10
knows that they're unrealistic, and every once in a while treating these things with realism leads to a funny joke or a clever subversion, but at the end of the day normal people don't give a fuck about fiction being 100% realistic so long as it's well made and engaging - and they quickly grow tired of people elbowing themselves into their favorite pieces of fiction to go "WELL ASSCHTUALLY" for every instance it shows up.
And, after scrolling through those "positive" examples a second time, I'm struck by how... unspecial these redesigns are under all the bling and extra trappings. Some of them are nice designs on their own perhaps, but when looking at them all at once they just blend together. I keep seeing the same exact basic designs: every shirt's a turtleneck or buttoned up to the collarbone, poofy or baggy pants, if there's a skirt or a dress it's gotta be a big ass one that looks like it's held in that shape by a skirt cage, if they have a cup size bigger than a B they have to sag to the point that they look almost like a deformity, skinny & muscular doesn't exist; they all check off at least one of those boxes, to the point that you could probably make a counter-BINGO to their stupid bingo card and get a blackout 8 out of 10 times.
It just strikes me that BABD doesn't want interesting female characters or designs, they want
boring designs. Hell, that Apex Legends game they keep praising is a great example: that is a nothing design. That is the oatmeal of character design. That is the design someone comes up with as the base stand-in for a character creation menu with the expectation the player will put together something more interesting. That is the design you give to a NPC so that they don't upstage the player character. And that's not exclusive to just Bangcock or whatever, that pretty much goes for every character I've seen in this game has that same blandness problem; only exception being the Mirage guy who I mostly remember because his suit has a bright yellow quilt pattern.
What's worse is that BABD, the bitter insecure harpies that they are, are so entrenched in this restrictive view of what they think female characters
should look like, that their claims that they just want more "variety" are not only flimsy, but they end up needing to apply it to everything regardless of context. Game comes out that has female characters with a wide variety of body types and skimpy and conservative costume options? Single out the one or two chicks for being too sexy for their tastes. Game gives you the option for any character to wear any costume? Bitch about the designers including the chainmail bikinis at all because "muh sexism" or occasionally "muh homophobia." A clearly not serious holiday/seasonal skin for an FPS where all weapons and items are non-weapons or toys? Gotta bitch about the lack of realism of including a skin where a female character has a V-neck or whatever. It's especially frustrating with fantasy/video games, since character design tends to include a wide variety of influences - music, dance, mythology, pop culture, etc. - that tend to give characters a wide variety of visual shorthand to draw from, so limiting things to just what's combat-practical means a ton of these works would lose their flavor.
And they can brush off the criticisms as "boner culture" or whatever buzzword they're trying to push now, but there's no denying that a lot of this stems from having never gotten over the sour grapes of being a late bloomer/less generously endowed than their peers in high school, what with noteworthy comments like this (emphasis mine):
It paints a really clear picture of BABD's "dream" fiction: Men can have whatever colorfully flamboyant, impractical outfits they want and a generous amount suspension of disbelief is acceptable, but the women have to adhere to a strict set of regulations or else they aren't "serious" or worthy of respect. And I can think of a few other ideologies that fall into that kind of thinking.
