Actually, @sirrian says the reverse is true. Revenant brings more installs than Green Seer.
Our culture is so dominated by the male perspective that it’s hard to look at it from the outside, hard to even conceive of alternatives. And the idea that the female mind is secret and incomprehensible only serves to keep it that way.
A big part of the problem is the forest/trees distinction. No one example is a problem all by itself, but to some people, it feels like pointing out an example is unfairly picking on it. Let’s say you have two forests: one is full of birch trees, while the other has a wide variety of trees, such as oak, maple, pine, and also has a few birch. When someone comments that the birch forest is only birch trees, and wishes there were a wider variety like the other forest, it’s not a criticism of birch trees themselves, or a call to burn down every one. And yet in discussions of how men and women are depicted in fiction, the same complaint about variety is often perceived that way – and it’s not always an unreasonable interpretation.
To bring it back to GoW, it’s not a problem that there are sexy women. The problem is that almost all of the women are depicted that way, while the male characters are much more diverse. People criticize individual depictions, and some of them are really awful (Shadow-Hunter’s slapped on boobs are probably the worst), but it’s not necessarily a call to eradicate those depictions, just to balance them with some more variety. Some of them may be genuinely harmful, but most are only bad in the context of their ubiquity: women are given a very limited pool of options to emulate, and most of them are structured to the benefit of men.
Part of the problem is that we’re so acclimated to the visual shortcuts: most people automatically assume a character is male, unless the character has prominent female features. Male is the default, female is a male with very visible, sexualized breasts. Sheggra is female, but most people probably don’t notice. Most would probably have called Shadow-Hunter “he”, were it not for those ridiculously huge slapped-on boobs. In the male mind, sexualization = female. We can’t even conceive what a sexualized male would look like, other than effeminate. Masculine features are “ugly” features, while feminine features are “beautiful” and “sexy” features.
As a culture, we need more positive examples, but no one creator should be expected to buck the trend all by themselves. They’ve got their own goals, and it’s understandable for them to fall back on existing tropes and stereotypes for the aspects they’re not focusing on. Criticizing each and every example doesn’t really drive the culture forrwards, it just makes creators feel like they can only fail, so they dig in and resist. Especially when they do try to challenge the status quo on one issue, and are criticized for not addressing some other issue.
So here’s my challenge: It’s easy to say that a good female character isn’t just a man with bolted-on boobs, but that isn’t actually all that helpful. What makes a character female? We need examples of good characters that aren’t defined by their sexuality, but can still be identified as female.
We have plenty of examples in our culture of the ideal man, from the male perspective, and the ideal woman, also from the male perspective. But we have a dearth of examples for either sex from the female perspective. What is the female counterpart to the male-idealized-male, the perfectly muscled Conan? What is the male counterpart to the male-idealized-female, the busty, scantily clad, sexually available beauty? I can’t even imagine these things, and I don’t think our culture has much to say about them.