Stripperiffic Narrator

Basic Trope: A fantasy character wears a very exotic or revealing costume into battle.

Straight: Amazing Girl's costume is skintight, with several patches of exposed skin, including a Cleavage Window, and it reveals and enhances much of her figure. Brenna the Barbarian wears a Chainmail Bikini, boots, a cloak, and little else while out adventuring. Exaggerated: Amazing Girl's costume amounts to little more than some strips of cloth and/or threads, if that; she generally goes about her business practically (or actually) naked. Amazing Girl's costume is quite literally skintight, being made of mystical Body Paint, nanotech, or other such vague excuses. Essentially, she leaps into combat naked but an odd color. Brenna wears Diamonds in the Buff at most. Downplayed: Amazing Girl never wears anything more revealing than a bare midriff and short shorts. Brenna wears a chestplate and armored skirt. Justified: Amazing Girl dresses like that to distract and disorient her male enemies. Amazing Girl is herself bulletproof, making exposed skin a non-issue in combat. Amazing Girl's species has hotter body temperatures than humans, so a revealing costume makes sense. Amazing Girl's fighting style requires a lot of acrobatics, so she needs a costume that doesn't restrict her movement. Amazing Girl's powers tend to destroy normal clothes ... and the few materials than can survive long-term exposure are hideously expensive. That teeny swimsuit cost as much as a luxury sedan. Armor and Magic Don't Mix. Due to the way her powers work, the more Amazing Girl wears, the less effective she is in combat. Amazing Girl is exhibitionistic and enjoys the effect her shapely body has on others. Since she has powers that allow her to deflect physical attacks, she wears a striking and revealing costume to capitalize on that. Amazing Girl dresses skimpily to bait her enemies into attacking her instead of her teammates, hoping they don't realize that Amazing Girl supplements her defense with an impregnable force field, while her teammates' armor can be bypassed or broken through. Amazing Girl's costume is a Clingy Costume that repels any other clothes she tries to cover up with. Before becoming a superhero, Amazing Girl was a gladiator who wore a revealing outfit to please the crowds. After she overthrew the system keeping her a slave in the arenas, she kept the outfit to remind everyone of her origins. She'd also gotten used to fighting in it and compensating for its weaknesses, so its lack of real protection isn't a problem. Brenna's tribe lives in an area where resources, especially metal, are scarce, which is why Brenna's armor protects the soft bits and nothing else; the other metal and cloth could be better used back at home. Alternatively, Brenna lives in an area that is very hot and she is an endurance fighter. Wearing too much could put her at risk of heatstroke. In Brenna's culture, exposed skin is seen as a mark of one's combat prowess. Brenna is adventuring to be an inspiration to her tribe, so she unclothes to declare her confidence. Brenna's armor is enchanted so that it protects her entire body even when she isn't wearing much. Brenna's lives in a RPG Mechanics 'Verse and her clothing's visual appearance has literally no connection to its statistical benefits. Brenna's armor is a gift from wizards who have no idea how melee combat works, so design it based purely on what they think looks best. In spite of this, because of its powerful magic, it's still the best option available, so Brenna begrudgingly wears it. Inverted: Amazing Girl's superpowers are provided by her bulky Powered Armor. Without knowing the name, you won't even guess she's a girl at all. Brenna is a knight who wears very all-covering armor that looks pretty much the same as male knights wear. Subverted: Amazing Girl actually wears Nude-Colored Clothes under the costume. It was actually a Sexy Whatever Outfit. Amazing Girl changes into practical clothing for the actual battle. Double Subverted: ... until Clothing Damage kicks in. Her new outfit is no better. Parodied: Amazing Girl's costume is very skimpy and revealing ... but she is someone who does NOT look good in it. Amazing Girl's costume is so skimpy that every male villain, hero, and civilian all stop to stare at her. Amazing Girl goes to a strip club to capture a villain who frequents it. She forgets to change her outfit. Because of her costume, most of the men mistake her for a stripper who works there, much to her consternation. A particularly perverted villain mistakes Amazing Girl for a dominatrix, and he thinks the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown he's receiving is just her catering to his fantasies. The standard bikini is considered the conservative, overly-covering option. Everyone prefers thongs and bikinis where everything possible is nothing more than a G-string. "Bikinis are out; thongs are in." Brenna dresses in a Chainmail Bikini because she needed to tick a few more boxes in her Barbarian Heroine application. The Chainmail Bikini is sold in-game at an absurdly low price ... because nobody is brave enough to wear something so skimpy to battle! Zig-Zagged: Amazing Girl changes how she dresses quite frequently. Sometimes she wears nothing but a bikini, but she's also partial to wearing a very all-covering and modest costume. Brenna wears her metal bikini only in the summer. During the winter, she dons a more modest costume so she doesn't get frostbite. The bikini Brenna wears is actually her underclothes — she was surprised while getting dressed and hasn't had a chance to do anything more than throw on some boots and grab a sword before the adventure began. Averted: Amazing Girl eschews a superhero costume in favour of everyday clothing. Brenna's armor may be put together from scraps, but it's also fairly all-covering and not fanservicey at all. Enforced: "Our readers are mostly men who greatly appreciate the female figure, so make sure you put Amazing Girl in a costume which shows her off to best effect!" Lampshaded: "You can't be a superheroine unless you're willing to show yourself off!" "That's a ... pretty revealing costume you're wearing, there..." "My fists are up here!" Invoked: Evulz purposely causes Clothing Damage to make Amazing Girl's outfit more revealing. Exploited: Amazing Girl's nemesis Emperor Evulz baits her into places where her lack of clothing would be to her disadvantage, like an arctic area where she'd be Exposed to the Elements. Amazing Girl uses her appearance to distract people so her allies can get a good hit in. Defied: "No, I'm not putting on stripper clothes. I'm going fighting, not whoring!" Discussed: "Great; it's the planet of the super-strippers..." Conversed: "Wouldn't you think she'd get cold fighting evil dressed like that?" "Nah, fighting crime means a lot of physical activity. Works up a pretty good sweat." "Really? I hadn't thought about that." Deconstructed: Amazing Girl wears such revealing clothing because it is required by her powers, but due to her body issues, it is a constant source of angst. Amazing Girl must wear the costume because of a sexist code of regulations in the superhero organization with which she works. Because of this rule, superheroines are more vulnerable to harm than superheroes, because they have more skin showing. Eventually, the superheroines get tired of their higher mortality rates and sexist rules, and retire in disgust. Superheroines are caught in a Morton's Fork: If they don't wear skimpy outfits, they're quickly sidelined in favor of heroines who show skin. If they do wear skimpy outfits, they're judged as being sluts. Amazing Girl uses her secret identity to indulge in some exhibitionism, specifically choosing her costume to play towards her secret kink. However, it quickly destroys her reputation as a superheroine, which she has to work very hard to recover. Amazing Girl's clothing provides so little protection to the point that she constantly becomes seriously injured, and is covered in scars and injuries, tarnishing her external beauty, and perhaps even putting her overall health and/or fighting ability at risk. Amazing Girl's clothes are very demure but keep getting destroyed during battle and she is incapable, or it would be a detriment, to get more bulky armor. Thus start rumors that she is an exhibitionist and had to decide between her efficiency in battle and her good name. Amazing Girl wears so little clothes because this is the last of her armor after countless battles and the world she lives doesn't posses the material to reforge a new one and the rest of the metals are simply useless. This forces her to use more evasive maneuvers and keep incurring wounds and scars during her mission. Amazing Girl's choice in superhero attire earns her the hate of people who feel that she is setting a poor example for girls and women and for making them look demeaning. Turns out, wearing armor only over one's private parts exposes some very important bits to archers. Amazing Girl is confronted by her boyfriend/husband over how she struts around in public wearing clothing that prostitutes would be impressed by. She's told that he tried to tolerate her style of dress before learning about how she's been treated (sexually harassed by effectively the whole adult to teenage male population, scorned by other women who call her slutty, repeatedly injured thanks to her lack of proper protection) but now he's putting his foot down and giving an ultimatum: Either change your costume or stop being a superheroine. Reconstructed: Between dead parents, a traumatizing childhood, an atomized homeworld, or constant torment from an unstable biology, body issues are pretty low on the angst scale. After being formally inducted to a superhero team, and spending time with people with much more dire personal problems, Amazing Girl gradually works through her own image problems. She never does get around to changing her costume, though. Amazing Girl is a Legacy Character who takes up the costume of her previous incarnation, despite it being insultingly sexist in comparison to the rest of the more modern setting. As she grows as a heroine, she replaces the costume with her own sensible version, only to have to switch back to the original during a disaster. She discovers the costume is a huge morale booster for her teammates and the civilian population during the dark times of the event, pathetically short skirt and all, and keeps a slightly modified version afterwards. Superheroines realize they can never truly escape double standards, and work to prove their worth (and the fact that it doesn't matter how much spandex one chooses to wear crimefighting) via their heroic deeds, making up for the public's opinion by supporting each other. And after all, escaping public disapproval is part of what a secret identity is for. Amazing Girl only wears armor on her arms and legs to fortify her combat prowess, eschewing and accepting the danger such open weakness get since no defense is perfect. Instead she used agility, enhanced reaction and her arm and leg protectors to avoid or stop the damage and wear the scar of battles as trophies of war. Amazing Girl realizes that wearing armor where they are going is suicidal (desert, jungle, in a ship), there is no smith or Gadgeteer Genius close, or it would mark her instantly as a soldier. Instead she decides to wear little clothes or an "impractical outfit" to fulfill her mission better and keep her hide (if not her dignity) intact. Amazing Girl has passed Training from Hell or comes from a Proud Warrior Race which make her body harder to damage, is adaptable to harsh temperature or use and outfit designed to blend/use in that specifically environment which merely looks stripperific to outsiders. Amazing Girl dismisses the critics and in the end has to save them from their own stupidity/ego. Amazing Girl knows that she can't change how they feel and decides not to be bothered by their opinions and chooses to dress how she feels. Besides, despite her unorthodox fashion sense, she's a kind, righteous and virtuous person, so the "poor example" argument of her detractors doesn't hold much significance anyway. Played for Laughs: The superhero organization where Amazing Girl works forces its female members to dress in "skimpy" clothing. However, they have a different definition of "skimpy": what's revealing for them is actually very conservative for most people! Brenna puts on a powerful set of magic armor for her adventure ... only for it to attract a lot of stares when she needs to interact with civilization. This severely annoys Brenna, who hails from a tribe where showing that much skin isn't considered a big deal and bikinis aren't seen as all that sexy. Played for Drama: Amazing Girl has body image issues and does not want to wear a revealing costume, but the PR department wants to make her marketable, so they're adamant that she cannot get licensed as a superheroine unless she dresses skimpily. Due to this, among other factors, Amazing Girl is pushed into supervillainy. Hey, when you operate outside of the law, you can decide your own outfits. What Brenna doesn't realize when she starts her adventure is that her skimpy dress sense is considered obscene in the cities, so when she walks in wearing her Chainmail Bikini, people think of her as a prostitute with an armor gimmick and no sense of subtlety, and no one listens to her, even when she tries to warn them about incoming doom. Plotted a Good Waste: Brenna specializes in crowd control, buffs and debuffs that all come from her nature as a succubus. Fighting while mostly naked is explicitly treated as a Cover-Blowing Superpower. Implied: Amazing Girl comes home in a bathing suit, and her conversation with Awesome Boy makes it clear they were out doing something much more hardcore than just going to the beach.

MEDIA EXAMPLES

Agent Aika is full of it. Granted, it is a ecchi anime, but one has to watch it to believe just how many variations of "half naked" apparently exist. Not even to mention the fact that Aika's weapon is a corset that undresses her, just to form a very striperific...armor. Parodied in two-episode wonder Assemble Insert: the mad scientist designs a sensible power armor suit, but upon learning that a girl will wear it, he revises the design to expose cleavage, legs, and midriff. Justified with Okoi from Basilisk, whose powers allow her to drain blood from her victims with any part of her body. Her power requires skin-to-skin contact, though, so baring as much skin as possible is very helpful. In Betterman, where the mech pilots wear see-through, short-sleeved/legged bodysuits that barely cover anything. However, the male pilots wear them, too. Bikini Warriors has all of its main female characters wearing super revealing armor. Vanessa from Black Clover wears just her underwear in her squad hideout. But even her outfit in public is this, wearing a revealing top and miniskirt that show off her chest, stomach, and thighs. Most of the main characters in Black★Rock Shooter are dressed in this fashion, but the titular character earns the spot with an exposed midriff, and revealing legs, making her outfit look like a combination of a swimsuit, boots, and a hooded jacket. She does not wear her jacket in the opening of the OVA, which shows her only wearing bikini. The most prominent is the Espada Harribel. In her normal state, she has a shirt so short that it barely covers her breasts, which she can remove to show her Fetish Retardant mask and Hollow remains. Likewise, since her pants have no sides and are kept up by a thick sash. After her Resurrection, she's completely nude, with strategically placed armor, which she justifies by having water-based powers. Meanwhile, out of her Fraccion, Mila Rose's default uniform and battle suit are rather revealing as well. This doesn't hinder them in battle because they're Arrencar and protected more by their Hierro power than their uniforms. Nel is first introduced as a kid wearing an all-covering garb. That garb is torn to pieces, however, when she morphs into an adult (and inexplicably repairs itself when she returns to being a child). In the past, when she wore an actual uniform, she dressed quite modestly. In Blue Exorcist, Shura Kirigakure is an exorcist working for the Vatican... who apparently doesn't mind her wearing a skimpy outfit that emphasizes her humongous breasts. Then again, they keep her magic seals easy to get to, while she's also a very powerful and experience exorcist. And she's hardly the most eccentric exorcist they have. Bubblegum Crisis for curvy powered armor — with high heels. Though in at least one case, the high heels are justified. The feet of the hardsuits are actually modeled on "ballet boots," meaning that the front of them is almost a straight line down. In the case of Priss' suit, this allows for the proper placement of the explosive caps that go off when she kicks things, since it would be much harder to properly position them with "normal" feet. Burst Angel features just about all of the female cast in either bikini with a jacket or clearly visible underboobs. Call of the Night: Nazuna usually wears a very short top that has a Cleavage Window, denim shorts and thigh-high boots. It does a very good job of accentuating her figure. Othinus in A Certain Magical Index wears such clothing because her philosophy is that she is extremely powerful, and therefore does not need any excessive clothing for self defense purposes. In Chrono Crusade, many of the female and male demons wear revealing outfits that seem rather impractical. Sure, demons can heal, but why would you want to expose your innards to attacks? Kallen from Code Geass mainly in the beginning of Season 2, wears a quite revealing bunny-costume. Standard attire for Britannia's female Knightmare pilots is basically a leotard. This "feature" of service carries over to the manga Oz of the Reflection, with the female protagonist, Oldrin. The Valkyrie Squad takes this one step further by having belly-depth cleavage, and Anya of the Knights Of The Round wears a really skimpy pilot suit as well. Cross Ange has the mecha pilot suits that don't leave much to the imagination at all. They're essentially a bikini outfit that shows off a large amount of cleavage and also the abdomen with the only thing that's actually covered up to an extent is the crotch and butt by a thong. It's Lampshaded in the first few episodes. Salamandinay's outfit shows off the Underboobs and even some cleavage at the same time and she wears a very short skirt that shows off her thighs and legs. It's played for Irony as she's meant to be a princess and therefore shouldn't really be wearing an outfit like that at all. All things considered, Cutey Honey's costume is rather tame, not going much beyond some Navel-Deep Neckline (at least when it stays on). Then Re: Cutie Honey rolls along and her outfit becomes fairly skimpy. Date A Live has the AST's wire suits which don't really seem designed as functional armor; aside from leaving a large part of the upper chest and legs bare, the portion that covers the midriff is skin-tight to show off the navel. They have nothing on the Yamai twins however, whose Astral Dresses look like BDSM outfits. Of the ten members of Mamoru Onodera's Battle Harem in Deadline Summoner, only three are dressed decently. One is a Golem in a mini-dress that, at least, covers her panties (if she even has parts down there); the second is a Centaur who does not wear underwear and has a hard time covering up; the third is a Dullahan who cannot remove her full-body armour. Dragon Ball: Chi-Chi is a disturbingly played straight example of this, considering she is only 12 years old. Though when she gets older she changes to a Kung fu outfit. *She's implied to be 12 as she's Goku's love interest, thought this is never confirmed. Dragon Ball GT applies this to Bulla's outfit (a midriff-baring crop top, miniskirt, fingerless gloves reaching almost to her shoulders, and thigh-high boots)... and she's even younger (confirmed via Dragon Ball Super as nine) Digimon Fusion introduced us to Mervamon who wears as little as she can. Lilithmon normally wears an extremely low cut, though still relatively conservative dress. However in Xros Wars as Gattai Lilithmon, this outfit is exchanged for a far more stripperiffic Dominatrix outfit, complete with whip. Justified, since she's the Demon Lord embodying the sin of lust. Yuri and Kei from the Dirty Pair. Their original costume was based on WWF female costumes. Not that the later variants were any more modest. In Divergence Eve the outfits the cadets wear during training are very revealing, then in Episode 6 of Misaki Chronicles, Lyar wears hot red dress while on a mission in the past. And of course in both seasons there's the pilot outfits Kotoko-01 wears. In a Doraemon story, Suneo designs a costume for Shizuka and comes up with this. Shizuka doesn't take it well. In Excel♡Saga, the outfits for the girls of ACROSS are all one piece bathing suits that show of their cleavage and have bits of other clothing attached, and huge shoulder pads. Justified a bit in that their boss is a Cloudcuckoolander. The Daitenzin meanwhile, as a parody of Sentai heroes, wear form fitting spandex.