I think I may have a new favourite outfit.
After watching Game of Thrones, I was inspired by the sight of 'Lady' Brienne of Tarth. If you're not familiar with her, well, this picture sums her up pretty well:
She's introduced winning a gladiatorial competition, and when told 'You fought well Lady Brienne' she replies 'Just Brienne, I'm no Lady'
In fantasy, usually only the pretty girls survive, but in the world of GoT anyone can die, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this skilled warrior fares (I know I could read the books, and I still might, but so far I only know what's happened in the TV series).
So I set out to find some nice Medieval style armour for my avatar. I wanted something that looked nice, but was functional. Stripperiffic Plate Bikinis are ten a penny, and I expected to have to wade through endless listings for inappropriate outfits along with 2006 era primmy monstrosities with flat textures, but as it happens the spirits of marketplace were smiling on me and I found the
perfect outfit on the first page of results with the 'most relevant' sorting, not only did it look great, it was a 'Paladin' outfit (my favourite WoW class), compete with a libram (holy book) hanging from the belt by a chain. I checked a couple of more pages but didn't find anything close, other than a '
Dark' version from the same creator - The Old Forge.
I visited the creators shop to see if there were any models or additional pictures. I found neither, but I did find a customer in
another outfit. Examining the level of detail gave me confidence that my chosen outfit would be a good one. After buying it and porting home to wear it, I wasn't disappointed - and when
Imogen saw it she went and got the dark one.
I had the armour, but now I had to accessorise it. Although Bienne was my inspiration, I wanted my own look and decided to base it on one of my WoW Paladins - Truesilver:
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| 2012 |
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| 2008 |
The hair was easy, my recently acquired
Truth Skyla in silver. I tried a few of my skins before settling on Snow, a gift from from [Mydear]. As she was a warrior I decided to deviate from my normal shape, and created a much taller (in human terms, still short for SL) more muscular shape with broad shoulders less fat and a sterner expression. After a few eye/glow combos I settled on a set of vivid blue non glowey eyes from
Xolo, and some facial scars on a tattoo layer from
TDS.
In terms of weaponry I hit a bit of a wall. I wasn't planning on visiting combat sims, so I didn't need a fully scripted weapon, but I didn't want a bare blade hanging off my hip. I found a Nicely detailed Japanese sword for L$1 which would make a good placeholder until I found a decent medieval sword with scabbard in my price range (Turns out both SL and the Internet as a whole is obsessed with Katanas, they're everywhere!)
I looked good on the pose stand, but I had to move too. My 'Luscious' AO wasn't appropriate, and while my Assassin AO looked good, it was a bit more 'Rogue' than 'Warrior'. I went back to
Oracul to buy a few new poses and ended up getting another complete 'Bionic Girl' AO for L$200. As with the Assassin AO I opened it up and dropped the poses into the Firestorm AO (which I was pleased to discover has been made much easier, it no longer jumps around your inventory as it creates the shortcuts).
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| Of course, no one says Vampire Knights can't use Katana |
I felt I was pretty much done, so I went to hang out with Imogen during her shift at LoveCats where someone asked me about my outfit, and when I said I was a Paladin, someone else piped up that I wasn't wearing enough armour and that a Paladin wouldn't have Katana proficiency.
After things got a bit snippy (I can take criticism, but the wording came across as plain rude - where I'm from adding 'nice try though' to the end of an observation can be a put-down to say you're smarter than them and they won't fool you) we agreed to put it down to the difficulty in conveying true meaning via text and drew a line under it.
She was technically correct though, so I took another look at the MP for a context suitable Sword & Sheath combo (as I'd always planned to), and this time
I found one, and at just L$10 it was definitely worth having. After a little scaling I got it to suit my size, and due to the way it was made I was able to drop the show/hide weapons scripts i made for my
Assassin outfit with just a little bit of modification. A final touch of some
chain mail gloves and I was done.
All that remained was to go get some nice pictures with Imogen at
Taure Ru a set of beautifully designed fantasy RP sims.
It really appealed to me, but the lack of boots still put me off. The helpful people in the Graves group assured me the boots sold elsewhere in the store would match, but they all had heels, and as I've said in the past, heels are fine for fashion outfits, but if I'm going for a utilitarian or tough girl look, I want flats.
For hair I tried some white prim hair in a bob cut. But next to the detailed clothing it looked horrible (And Imogen said it'd be better in Black too). I found some nice flexi hair at Wasabi Pills, and was about to buy it when I realised I could have either a blacks pack or a whites pack but I'd have to pay twice for both. So I took off to Truth where I could find a similar style - Skyla with blacks and whites in a single pack. (Turns out Imogen was right as well).
