Metal Bikini Party

So, the talented and funny Gail Simone is taking on Red Sonja.  Which means she gets asked about the impractical armor.  If you know nothing about Red Sonja?  This is just ridiculous.

And normally?  I would totally agree.  In pretty much any case, this kind of armor is totally ridiculous.  Simone lists a number of good reasons why people can let it slide with Red Sonja…but her first reason is the one that makes the most sense to me.  Red Sonja spun out of this universe:

Listen, if you shot an arrow at Conan and one at Red Sonja, she has about a 30% better chance of surviving.  He is wearing fur briefs.

Gail Simone offers:

But I also have that feeling in the back of my mind that there are always people who want to tell women what to wear, how to present and display themselves. It doesn’t seem out of character to me for Sonja to be wearing something light and unrestrictive. I keep hearing people say she should wear more armor, and I think, maybe for war, if she was prepared, but the barbarians we are talking about aren’t knights or Gondorians, it’s a different level of technology. Some of that does appear in Howard’s Conan but to a much lesser degree.

In the case of Red Sonja, I think  Gail nails it:

To me a much bigger problem has been the posing. If she’s posing like a Penthouse pet, something’s gone wrong.  Sexy and powerful is fine, sexualized beyond context is not.

You can read her thoughts here.  The Red Sonja image is an upcoming cover by the very talented and cool Colleen Doran.