Oh, and it's probably available on the Nexus right next to an outfit that uses spray on latex on a nude body for all your latex fetish needs in the wasteland.
My main objection to latex catsuit armor mods is not that they’re too thirsty, but that they’re just kind of lazy. Once you’ve seen one texture painted on the human body, you’ve seen ‘em all. Ditto on ”helmets” that look like SCUBA diving gear meets Daft Punk. Very boring.
I’m not very fond of boobplate cuirasses with molded-in cleavage, not because they’re impractical, but just because I think they look stupid because they’re too anatomical and organic (I don’t like the Lorica Musculata or half the designs in Warframe for the same reason), but monoboob armor is fine. I love Agrias Oaks’ armor design, even if it isn’t particularly protective.
It has aesthetic appeal. It’s balanced and proportionate.
The anti-boobplate people literally want all fictional women to wear goddamn beekeeper outfits. Even this very modest design is literally too much boob from their perspective. They unironically want every fictional female character to look like a turtle stuffed in an Interceptor OTV two sizes too big.
Aesthetics are important. I don’t think most people realize just how important they are. When you’re setting a scene in a piece of visual media, the look of everything has to be congruous with everything else. In filmmaking, this is called mise-en-scene, and it’s the reason why you don’t film a scene in black and white of a man in a suit and tie sitting in a darkened room, and then suddenly cut to a blown-out, oversaturated shot of a rainbow-colored clown in a grassy field. If you’re going for that half-naked, Frank Frazetta look, that’s because you’re intentionally invoking a Conan the Barbarian-like aesthetic. People in loincloths and leopard skins and chainmail bikinis is a visual shorthand for “we are on the fringes of civilization in the cold, harsh, unforgiving wilds“. It is an aesthetic that invokes a theme that people immediately recognize.
It doesn’t matter if it offends someone. It doesn’t matter if it makes you feel good or bad about your body, or whatever the fuck. That’s not the goal of writers and artists. Their goal is to put you in a certain frame of mind. Every genre has stock characters that look a certain way. It would be very jarring and unusual for someone in a chainmail bikini to be shoehorned into a work of Lovecraftian horror, just as it would be odd and out-of-place to see someone dressed in tattered rags in a far-future science fiction work with a clean aesthetic like Mass Effect or Star Trek. Any incongruity makes the audience take notice. It highlights a character.
The first rule of visual character design is that the character has to fit with all the other characters, and the second rule is that the design has to be aesthetically appealing. That’s it. There are no more rules other than those two. Designing for “sensitivity” is the most pernicious sort of nonsense. If a character is designed to be fat or ugly, it should be because that is the specific aesthetic the artist was going for, not because they wanted to throw a bone to the body positivity crowd and give them someone to relate to. That’s ridiculous. You see this a lot more often, these days, with female character designs being altered to have uggo man-jaws and wokesters applauding them for not setting unrealistic beauty standards. Where does the craft of fiction or visual art come into any of it, if it’s just to satisfy moral outrage?
I really think that a lot of these wokesters are incapable of comprehending the very concept of beauty. The only reason to include anything in a work of fiction - be it a visual, narrative, acoustic, or other element - is if it is aesthetically pleasing to the audience. Didacticism is bullshit. Works of fiction are not manuals for how to live your life, and they aren’t supposed to teach you what values to emulate. If they were, then Ichi the Killer and Godfather would never have been filmed. If your argument is “Oh, some young man might see this and assume that female bodies are a commodity and that makes me feel vulnerable and upset”, you have already failed to make a cogent argument. Authors and artists do not presume to teach audiences anything. It is the individual choice of each member of the audience to use their own powers of reasoning and to agree or disagree with what they read or view.
If boobplate makes someone horny, that’s fine. If someone finds it entertaining to look at, that’s also fine. If someone hates it, that’s perfectly fine, too. The problem comes when a wokester tries to universalize their dislike, and turn the whole thing into an object lesson in why their values are more correct than yours, and furthermore, they suggest that your toys should be taken away and replaced with woke tedium. That’s not fine. That’s the opposite of fine.
When someone says “I don’t like the sexualization of women in fiction”, they’re making a moral argument, not an aesthetic one. They are positing, first, that it is immoral to show half-naked women on a screen, and second, that this display of immorality normalizes the act and makes the audience accept it as a fact of life that fictional women will always be shown half-naked. The counter-argument to this should always be this: in fiction, morals do not matter, only aesthetics. That might sound frivolous or even bourgeois to someone conditioned to believe woke nonsense, but it really isn’t. Aesthetics are paramount.
The purpose of anything in a work of fiction is to tickle people’s neurons a certain way. Why do writers make the word choices they use? Why do filmmakers choose specific lighting to set specific scenes? They want to activate regions of your brain associated with specific emotions, that’s why. Do you think you’d fear the xenomorph in Alien nearly as much if it was running around in broad daylight or line-dancing with fucking Teletubbies? No, of course not. That’s why, when it unfurls from the ceiling to snatch you away and drag you to your death, it’s accompanied by darkened corridors, steel chains dripping condensation, and strobing yellow emergency lights that make you feel tense and anxious as fuck. Aesthetics. Are. Everything.
Imagine what you would be forbidden from depicting in a fictional context if you had no choice but to show morally-good things to the audience. Well, no murder. Warfare is right out. Drug abuse, clearly awful. You can’t write about that. No fighting, no fornicating, no
living.