Tomo-chan and the sliding scale of feminity and masculinity. (Patreon)

Feminine <-> Masculine

A very long winded title for the idea I had while tinkering with my KKL model of Tomo. Essentially, I asked myself how Tomo Aizawa would look if I made her girlier. Then I asked myself how she would look if I made her manlier. Then I kept tinkering with results, and made not one, but three sliding scales of feminine and masculine traits for her.

This project was a fun artistic exercise for me, since it allowed me to contemplate the concept of gender coding of fictional characters. In real life, humans are complex creatures whose identity is a vast mixture of underlying biological processes, social context and their own internal lives, but fictional characters are mostly defined by their perception by the audience, especially in the visual medium.

The good example of this were clothing choices. The feminine side of the scale has the most extreme shift in clothing with a rather noticeable swap from pants and shirt first to skirt and sweater and then to a one piece dress. It also gives her accessories, since jewellery is seen as automatically girly, unless it’s your wedding ring and all the fancy, shiny stuff men add to their suits, like the cufflinks. The masculine side essentially just gives her stereotypical tough guy big belt, jean shorts and undersized wife beater shirt. To be honest, this was basically an exercise in stereotypes about clothing. The idea that girls are neat, soft and shiny while the boys are sloppy, harsh and drab is a very pervasive stereotype lately, come to think of it.

The other experiments were about body shape. “Boobs are girly, muscles are manly.” was the part of anatomy I tried to study the most there. I know, it’s cliche, but it was interesting to see how the perception of the character shifted with her body proportions. The fact that just giving Tomo a stockier build with smaller buffs still wasn’t enough to make her look like a boy was an interesting observation. Same with the cup size having a quickly diminishing return on its femininity enchanting effect. This was likely due to Tomo being a full on C-cup in her canon version too, though. Spending a lot of time without drawing from a human reference makes you forget just how busty an average anime girl is.

The attempt at creating the final, strongest contrast piece focused on some other traits closer to biological sex, namely height and shoulder width. The original idea of this wasn’t really about the secondary sexual characteristics though, it was about trying to shift scale between reasonable extremes of stereotypical butch and femme. As for the reason why the ultimate femme Tomo is visibly slightly chubby, I did it for three reasons. First, it felt like a natural conclusion to attempt at making the opposite of ultra buff butch. I could make her very skinny and lithe, but it didn’t feel right. Mostly because it would mean taking away from her hips and thighs, which would ironically make her more masculine looking. It would also clash with the final boob size. Second, the association between femininity and softness is ancient, as evidenced by all the ancient and not so ancient fertility idols we keep on finding. Third, I don’t really like people's tendency to treat girls with any amount of extra body weight as inherently fetishistic or political. I just drew her chubby because it fit the concept.

Thanks for listening to my long rant about femininity and masculinity in art! Do you have any questions or comments? Leave them below!