I’ve been playing the remastered Darksiders games lately.
It’s a good series. Genuinely enjoyable (if clunky, cuz old). And I keep getting pulled out of it by the female characters — undead mobs, demons, monsters — rendered with visible cleavage and carefully fitted armour that somehow manages to expose the maximum amount of skin while technically covering the minimum amount required by the game’s rating.
They’re undead. They’re attacking me. And they have cleavage. And an apple-bottom ass crack. Sigh.
The question isn’t why the artists made that choice. The question is why it’s so automatic that nobody involved apparently stopped to ask why.
I’ve already written on this blog about how the strong female character works as a containment mechanism — how her strength is decorative rather than structural, how it exists to be worthy of male recognition rather than to actually change anything. What I want to do now is take that argument one step further, because I think we’ve been treating it as a fiction problem when it’s actually something else entirely.
It’s not a fiction problem. It’s a belief problem. And fiction is just one of the places it shows up.
Finnish researcher Jonna Alava — who completed her doctorate on women in the Russian military in January — gave an interview to Yle in 2026 about what the war in Ukraine has done to women’s position in the Russian armed forces that got me thinking (because I “have my own cow in the ditch” as we say because one of my FMCs is a female soldier, but we’ll get to that).
The findings are not subtle.
Female soldiers in the Russian military are barred from combat roles. They are present largely in medical, communications, and administrative functions. They are required, per Alava’s account, to always be beautiful and feminine. The Russian defence ministry’s official publication ran coverage in March 2026 of an annual competition for female troops that includes, alongside firearms drills and grenade throwing, judging on cooking skills and make-up. The stated aim, according to the publication: to create a worthy image of military personnel who harmoniously combine external beauty with patriotic values.
External beauty. Harmoniously combined with patriotic values.
Alava’s broader point is that Russia has weaponised gender — fighting a war it claims is in defence of traditional values, which means heroic female soldiers don’t fit the propaganda. Women’s role is to be mothers. To support men. To be the ones who are protected, not the ones doing the protecting. Their presence in uniform is tolerated as long as it remains decorative. As long as it doesn’t threaten the architecture.
I want you to sit with that phrase. Tolerated as long as it remains decorative.
Because I have read that sentence in a hundred fantasy novels (or something close enough). I have watched it play out in games. The woman who can fight, who is permitted to fight, whose fighting the narrative frames as remarkable and exceptional — and who does all of it while looking exactly the way the male gaze requires her to look (see Mass Effect’s notorious problem with butt shots).
And this is the part where someone usually says: it’s just fiction.
It’s just a game. It doesn’t mean anything.
I’d push back on that gently but firmly, because the argument requires you to believe that the culture producing the fiction and the culture producing the military beauty competition are operating independently of each other. That the Darksiders artists made their choices in a vacuum. That the Russian defence ministry’s logic about female soldiers is entirely unrelated to the logic that says a Bat Queen boss needs breasts you can see from across the battlefield.
They’re not independent. They’re the same belief, wearing different skirts.
The belief is this: a woman’s body is primarily a surface. It exists to be looked at. Her competence — if she is permitted to have it — is something that happens on top of that surface, and it must never be allowed to displace it. She can fight. She can govern. She can throw grenades. But she must remain, at the level of the body, available to the gaze. Decorative. Safe.
The moment her competence stops being decorative and starts being structural — the moment it actually changes what her body is allowed to mean — something in the culture becomes very uncomfortable very fast.
This is why I it matters that Sasha Barrett is a soldier.
Not as a political statement. Not because I sat down and decided to write a thesis. But because I knew, from the inside, what it felt like to inhabit a body the culture kept recruiting into functional roles while simultaneously refusing to represent those roles as anything other than exceptional, decorative, or both.
Sasha is competent. That competence has weight and consequence in the story. It costs her things. It isn’t pointed at a man’s recognition of her. It isn’t a permission slip.
She isn’t the first female soldier in fiction, she’s far from the only one. But I wrote her because the ones I kept finding were decorated with their own competence the way those undead mobs are decorated with lip gloss — the competence was there, technically, but it wasn’t doing anything structural. It was just sitting on the surface, making her acceptable.
I wanted a character whose competence was the thing itself (yes, I happen to have a competence kink, so sue me). Not the thing that made her worthy of the story. Just — the thing.
And the Russian military running beauty competitions for its female troops isn’t a foreign absurdity we can observe from a comfortable distance. It’s an unusually honest version of something that runs through the culture we’re all swimming in — the insistence that female competence must always be accompanied by female decorativeness, that the two must coexist harmoniously, that the woman who is only functional and not also beautiful has somehow failed at being a woman.
Fiction that can imagine entire alternate worlds, magic systems, immortal kings, alien civilisations — but cannot imagine a female soldier whose body isn’t also a surface for the male gaze to rest on — is not only limited by its imagination.
It’s limited by what it thinks is allowed.
And the gap between what’s allowed in the fiction and what’s enforced in the institution is smaller than we want it to be. It’s the same gap. The same belief. Just wearing different skirts.
So, if you want to read a book with a genuinely kick-ass FMC who is as competent as she is reckless, I recommend the Phantom Vengeance series.
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One snake bite. One moment of clarity she really didn’t ask for. Sasha Barrett has survived two years at the Praetorian Academy — turns out her captain was always going to be the most dangerous thing in the field.
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