I'm extremely conscientious of this idea, please tell me if I'm completely out of line, because my creative processes are only batted back and forth between me and myself, and I realize that makes my imagination an increasingly demented echo chamber, which I realize is dangerous so I feel I need feedback if I'm going to stay grounded in my thoughts:
The idea I'm considering is that I'm wondering if it's possible, in a game or movie or whatever, to just have a female character be perpetually topless, but not in a way that is erotic or sexualized at all. The idea is that in most media, nudity is viewed as innately sexual or vulnerable, which I feel is not the case. This is an idea that sparked into my imagination years ago when I saw the anime "Crying Freeman" which has a lot of female warriors that fight in the buff, and while it's clearly fetishized a little bit in that context, it comes off as extremely badass. That a woman is more empowered and more 'manly' (for lack of a better word in my delirious state at the moment) by foregoing clothing and shame is something that has captured my imagination for the longest time now, but I have felt too incompetent to weave something like that into a story of my own creation.
I'd like to provide additional context for my idea here: I've been world building in my head a story that involves a strong, topless female warrior, the last of her specific religion of which she's the last remaining member, if only thanks to a form of pseudo-immortality/hibernative state granted by her god that has allowed her to outlive her entire Order by dozens of generations during that long spell of hibernation. She's awoken up from that hibernation by an intense conflict that upsets the temple where she was hidden inside. Her toplessness in this context is meant as cultural dissonance between time periods since female warriors of her original era saw fighting bare-breasted as spiritually enlightening, and she has divine protection from her god that makes her flesh extremely resistant to attack, so wearing armor is redundant. It isn't meant to be 'naive innocence' in that she's aware that ordinary women keep themselves covered in shame, but she feels that her whole body belongs to her faith and her purpose, so there is no shame. She sees herself as the 'bride' of her god, being both his last true follower and her body is the physical medium through which her god speaks and in some cases usurps control of her and she acts as his physical embodiment. She's waiting until the time when her and the other gods in the world's pantheon feel that humanity has matured sufficiently enough to rapture the entire human race into the heavenly realm, and then she can finally fulfill her role as her god's bride and be his wife in a literal sense. She's a fanatic, simply, but a fanatic that is validated by the existence of magic and miracles in her world.
I'm trying to make her and her world more detailed, but that's the gist of it. I'm just not sure if I'm actually pushing any boundaries, or being at all interesting, or if I'm just making fanfiction-level dreck that isn't even worthy of being devoted to words. It's something I've been imagining for a long time now, but I'm simply so unsure of how to convey the idea without it seeming perverse and fetishistic, because that's not how I imagine it. I simply would like to bounce the idea off you guys then, to better gauge people's zeitgeist.
and yeah, this is an odd post for the happy thread, I just don't feel comfortable making a whole new thread just for this.