#thick mei

[kassandravespertine]

Mei

TL;DR: Her model is fine and quite accurate. There are technical issues present here, specifically a rig and animation set which shared across all of her model, both thicker and thinner. I think it should be fixed. However, there is no gender/body image issue here.

So I saw this on twitter

And people are making a fuss about gender/body image issue or something.

It’s not.

First of all, her waistline is quite accurate [1]. In her original skin, she wears very thick winter coat and a utility belt. If gives an impression that she is ‘thicker’, which is not true. In Rise and Shine [2], she’s shown to be bottom heavy, and her waist is quite smaller than what her original model gives as an impression. 

Now, she’s bending weirdly, what is that? Does Blizzard not know what women look like?

It’s actually simple. All of her models use the same rig and animation. Remember that her original model is very ‘thick’, so they built and optimized her rig and animation around that. Her original model is bendy and always is, because Blizzard’s art team tweaked and set her rig up like that and decided that it looks right for her original model (which is ‘thick’, as I’ve said 3 times already). Now, they’ve created a model with Loose clothes and noticeably thinner body. When they put her rig and animation there, they will still behave as if her model is thick like the original, resulting in weird bend here and there.

Now you would ask, why won’t they fix it, just this particular model?.

The thing is, they can, but how much resource would that take? We don’t know the inner workflow of Blizzard, but basically they have to create a new pose and export as what? Single animation or a package? Is their code complicate or easy enough to put new animation there for only this particular character? What size would it take up? etc.

(This is not the same as Tracer’s issue. Tracer’s is a single pose which shares with all of her model, not just this particular one.)

(But what about Reinhardt? Genji? Their face are animated in some of their peculiar skins? With face? Well, that is the wonder of rigging. Things, like face for example, you can put as many on the model and tell it to appear or disappear. This can be shared among all of their model.)

Will Blizzard fix this? They may, and I think they should just because it’s so anatomically incorrect. But I wrote all of this because I want to tell that:

NO GENDER OR BODY IMAGE ISSUE IS PRESENT IN THIS PARTICULAR MODEL

Peace out

[aurorarosepetal]

OK so I have a theory

Of course Blizzard knows that Mei’s body type is a hotly debated topic. People are constantly arguing whether she is thin or not. Then, Blizzard goes and makes this new Mei skin, and it looks bad. Like, even if you are a thin-mei supporter, you have to admit it looks bad. Her ass has a literal horizontal line, an actual ass-shelf. That’s the definition of bad. But people still support it! People love and say, “I don’t see anything wrong with it?” Enter Blizzard, our overlords (see what I did there). Next thing we know, Blizzard says, “Whoops it was a mistake and its going to be fixed!” What is that supposed to mean? How do you fuck up a skin that bad (lest we not forget Widow’s literal expanding buttcheeks)? So I started thinking about it and now I’m wondering... what if it was intentional... Fucking Blizzard, the ones who invented straightbaiting, fucking thinbaited Mei...