Well, the short version of the answer to both is that when doing The Road Warrior they straight-up just got all of Lord Humungus's people's (y'know, the villains) outfits from a BDSM shop. And that film is seminal to the genre's aesthetics. So...lots of people in fetish-wear, and many of them villains.

The making them villains thing is also partially because that's just a general tendency in media in general. A lot of forms of media do, in fact, just use BDSM/fetish wear as shorthand for 'evil monster'. Post-apocalypse fiction does it more than some genres, but honestly superhero stuff does it almost as often and several other genres also dabble in it (a lot of neo-noir has some of this going on, for example). Now, speaking as someone into BDSM, that's kinda unfortunate and has some seriously unfortunate connotations in some ways. Though the ominous vibe is part of the point for some people, I suppose.

But more importantly, the tendency to make people in fetish-wear the villains is pretty much completely absent in Apocalypse World unless you bring it with you. Several playbooks have fetish-wear, bondage gear, and similar things as an option, and those are only as evil as you make them. Ditto illustrations, many of those using fetish-y stuff are those associated with the playbooks, and again only as evil as their player wishes them to be.

That's from the section on when to make a move, though. An advice section rather than rules in the absolute strictest sense (not that the distinction is hugely important in AW, but still), and more importantly, is word for word from the 1E book, meaning it could easily have been overlooked. And every single other piece of rules text in the 2E book makes it pretty clear that that's not necessarily correct on anything other than the basic moves.

The combination of it being legacy text and every other bit of text disagreeing with it leads me to think it's not correct at all for 2E.

And, just to present a counterpoint to people who'd never considered others might feel this way, I never read that sentence quite that way and never considered that other people might. So I never considered that anyone looking at the 2E book could conclude that 2E works the same way as 1E in this regard. I obviously knew 1E worked that way, but it struck me as an obvious and fundamental edition change.

My goodness!

So, what is our conclusion here?

Is the text not clear on this point? (I only have the 1st Ed.)

The text is very clear that there is no hard move on a miss on battle moves. Or indeed any moves where it isn't specified.

The question is whether that's an intentional choice or what, and whether it makes for a better or worse game that way.

I dunno, calling them The Frontier makes me think of them, personally, as the frontier that others explore. Like they are the wilderness on some profound level. Which seems about the right vibe to me.

Yup, totally kosher.

It uses up one of your 'pick a move from another playbook' options, which is a not insignificant price to pay for the advantages it provides. After all, you only get two of those, and there are a lot of good moves to pick from. Using the stat-ups in your own playbook has no such cost, and is thus still a significant advantage.

DeadmanwalkingXI, I apologize if I came across poorly.

No worries, it's cool. I was just clarifying my own point.

I'd have them travel with a caravan of some sort, or possibly go through a set of locations on a set route in order to make the above problem a bit less severe.

Other players helping one in particular are risking quite a bit (if anyone fails the MC gets to make a hard move), and presumably not doing as much stuff on their own, so yeah, that can happen and is quite powerful, if risky. It's other bonuses that are rare.

But that doesn't change the fact that all bonuses stack with each other. A player with a +3 stat, three people helping them, and +1 forward could get a +10 on their roll in theory. That won't happen a lot, but no rule prevents it.