70-Seas

As you can probably tell I crafted The Mall of the Red Wizard as something of a send up of the sort of pulp stories that were the fantasy genre’s bread and butter before everything got Tolkienized. While creating this parody I really took it without thinking that my buxom female protagonist would be traipsing around the frozen wastes in a fur bikini. This wasn’t even intended as an element of parody per se (if it were wouldn’t I have made that outfit even skimpier?) Believe it or not the ridiculousness of Hilde’s wardrobe hadn’t even occurred to me. That is until I read this article about the cheesecakey pandering of the Twilight franchise. Long story short the only thing that separates transparent fetishization and objectification of Twilight’s male protagonists from the rest of genre fiction is that it’s the MALE protagonists that it’s happening to.

So now I feel a bit like an idiot and a misogynist, but the deed is done and I ain’t about to redraw anything now, I guess we’ll just have to learn to live with it.