And In This Corner, The Fantasy Girl-Fight Zine Of Our Dreams

To say women have gotten the "short end of the stick" in diversity of game characters is an egregious shortchange—women have been given a replica of a tree, built of all the inadequate ends of sticks.

Imagination and aspiration are indelibly linked. When the only woman in your fighting game is a sexualized cultural stereotype or simply palette-swapped to create two women (to save on the cost of designing and animating a new character, of course), you are sending a message, if inadvertently:

Women have a "proper place," even in fantastic far away universes of the ultra-violent. When women in fighting games kick ass, it's done as a facet of their sex appeal. Avenging your father's deaths at the hands of the tournament's mastermind is no excuse, young lady. You get right back up to your room and change into something I can jerk off to. 

Women and girls deserve a visible spectrum of agency, motivation, and ownership of personal aesthetic (i.e. women characters who looked like they actually might have dressed themselves). We buy the games and paint our toes while watching the film adaptations. We deserve to aspire—and FIGHT! Round 1gives us so much to dream of. 

Curated by Jenn Woodall, the zine is 44, full-color pages of original fighting game characters. The result is a vibrant tome of colliding universes—each artist was assigned a direction (left or right), allowing for dream fights between queens of rival yet-untapped universes. 

More good news: the project's already been funded on Kickstarter! The even better news: there's still 25 days to contribute! And if you do? Such sundry earthly delights as limited edition screenprints and sticker sets could be yours.

The bad news? My list of "dream girlfriends I can never date because they're not real" has swelled up a seriously sad, few dozen more. 

I asked Jenn to send me some characters my way to help ya'll get acquainted and wisen you up to all the ways this zine will improve your life. As you can see, she knows a measure of mercy far lost to the dire darlings of destruction found within her zine.

ARGUS, the many-eyed demi-god, is a psychic-type mystical fighter who specializes in paralyzing her opponents with her gaze and holding them in crippling mental pain. Nearly impossible to sneak up on, she maintains a vigilant defense against physical attacks with evasive hovering, as any contact with her eye-covered body can do serious damage. The large eye on her forehead, when opened, casts a heavily destructive wide beam of light, but it forces all of Argus’s other eyes closed and leaves her vulnerable for the duration. An orbiting shroud covers the eye until she needs its power. Fighters that want to take on Argus should employ blinding techniques: bright flashes of light, obstructive smoke, or sprays of ink. While impervious to attacks of willpower, physical attacks can bring Argus down easily if fighters manage to blind all of her eyes.

  

INMATE 0001190301, an imprisoned space pirate trying to fight her way out of space jail by hacking her holo-visor to know all her enemy’s weaknesses!

This is Guillotina, a tuff-as-fuk post apocalyptic barbarian who got some unholy demon blood in a severe wound on her arm, mutating it into a horrifying flesh guillotine.  Now she defends her title of Grand Master of the Wasteland by decapitating any and all of the motherfucks in her way.

Oozing between dimensions like a bad smell, Miasma emerges from tombs seeking corpses to feed the insatiable charnal god Mordiggian. Armed with a necromantic dagger capable of driving opponents slowly insane until they turn on themselves and the mystically conjured psychic serpent equipped with a toxin that causes limbs to necrotize and fall off, she brings all of her opponents to a grisly ghoulish end.

 

Two follow up volumes, Round 2 and Final Round, are anticipated. The beatings will continue and for once, morale will improve. 

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