> The combatants divide into basically two camps: the realists who pooh-pooh chainmail bikinis and D-cup breastplates alike, and the "lighten up, it's a *fantasy* game" crowd.

One of the best medieval fantasy themed comics I've seen is a warrior woman in chain mail nipple caps and a chain mail thong. And there are like six or seven arrows wedged into them. I'm not sure if "Good thing I had my armor on" was the actual caption to that strip, or if I merely remember it having that caption because that's the mantra Dave and I use whenever we get to making fun of impractical armor.

I'm a member of both camps. I take fantasy stories very seriously. They are not "just fantasy" as far as I'm concerned. The best fantasy novels out there are quite substantial in terms of being truly *about* something instead of merely being escapist adventures. The novels I read take their characters seriously. They don't pose and flex and talk in grand, lofty speech. Consequently, I *hate* it when I see illogical illustrations of such works. If the characters aren't dumb enough to go into sword battles naked, then the illustrations should not depict them doing that.

On the other hand, if an illustration is not attached to a novel that would be completely divergent in tone, that's another matter. I turn to fantasy art for an entirely different reason than I turn to (most) fantasy literature. They appeal to me in a wholly different way. Sometimes I *want* to free myself of the constraints of strict logic. I want to see, captured in a visual image, ideas, ideals, feelings, drama, romanticism. Then it makes sense for the characters to flex muscles and strike heroic poses and wear ridiculously long flowing bright-colored robes that drag behind and wrap around and have sleeves that drag on the ground.

All this does not necessarily equate to skin exposure. However, the human body is beautiful and appeals to those same aspects of the psyche that fantasy and mythology appeals to. It need not be logical. If an idealized and dramatically poised human figure, thrown in amidst winged horses and large splashes and luminous moons and wolves and sprawling blue-lit landscapes and dragon fire, enhances the feeling that a visual image evokes, hey, go for it. And if it doesn't make any logical sense, so what. Logic is irrelevant.

So there I am. Basically, there is a place for both camps. I like both kinds of art. (I don't go for sexualized fantasy art, but note that how sexualized an image is really doesn't have anything to do with the level of exposure.) The realistic stuff, attached to a story or not, can inspire the imagination about what the characters are really like and what it's like to live in that world. The idealized stuff can inspire and evoke feelings. My only problem is when one tries to serve as the other.

S "doesn't like Boris Vallejo either" am