It's taken the fantasy genre decades to grow out of its image as a juvenile boys' club obsessed with cleavage and crossbows. And just as Game of Thrones seemed to be lifting fantasy into the modern mainstream, it's now taken a step backward—with many of the genre's professional writers shocked to see that a recent issue of their most-respected industry journal had dedicated its cover to the image of a warrior woman in a scalemail bikini straddling the corpse of a frost giant.
Sure, scantily clad women with swords were a staple of fantasy fiction in the 1960s through the 1980s, thanks largely to the popular artwork of husband-and-wife team Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell.
