This week in Retronauts, watch those tan lines. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to Retronauts episode 670.

I am Jeremy Parrish, and this week I am here to confirm that it's time to get our beach bodies into shape.

This is the Bikini Warriors episode of Retronauts, and you may be saying to yourself,

what is this provocative title that I am hearing in this episode of Retronauts?

And the answer is it is another entry in the loosely organized trends and influences line of podcasts that I've

started working on, talking about a trend in video game, in this case, video games, and

kind of the cultural forces and history behind that trend.

And this is esoteric in its own way as the satanic panic episode was.

Maybe, I don't know, I was going to say less provocative, but maybe equally provocative.

This is something that's more focused on the Japanese side of the industry,

really in the 1980s and 1990s. And there's some, obviously, some carryover into the U.S.

But I would say that what we're talking about, specifically, bikini warriors, cool warriors

wearing a bikini while they fight stuff.

That is much more of a Japanese console game, Japanese computer game sort of thing.

Comes from Japanese anime.

But really, when you stop and look at it, it really comes from, it has a much longer history than that.

And it's an attempt, I think, to reconcile a lot of different creative and personal

and market forces reconcile those all into one,

one very profitable little catamari of video game character design.

And to kind of prove my point that there are many, many influences on this,

we have, I believe, appearing for the first time on retronauts,

...