lady-knight- submitted:Despite it shows a stage of dressing : it is not in progress, it’s the final form of Jaïna’s armor ! (Jaïna being the female knight, Ellys her squire.)
She the heroine of the first book ( called Jaïna ) of the french comics La geste des chevaliers dragons. (“Geste of the Knights dragons”) The protagonists change in every of the 15 currents issues.
I used to have a fondness for this series due to the-paradoxically – feminist subject. In that world, dragons make go crazy any living creature due to a malefic influence except virgins women. Bonus, the monsters can’t see the maids, too.
So in that otherwise patriarchal society, the order of dragons knights is exclusively female, and of course they never have sex or get married, the majority being pretty happy of this. And when they fight, God they know their job properly.
The problem is, certainly to appeal male readers, their armors made of dragons scales does not even cover one of the nipple. With no reason. (Warning, spoiler: a sudden dragon attack will fatally wound Jaïna …where she wear no protection. Genius!) Need I say male knights are decently clothed?
The habit was kept for most of the series:
The squire attire:
Thanks God this is not always true:
I don’t know…Maybe because the subject was feminist, the scenarists (a couple, man and woman) supposed we would swallow the half naked armor with no problem?
La Geste des Chevaliers Dragons, created by Ange, by Soleil productions.
Important note: This was not meant to be posted. It was sitting in my queue and I hadn’t meant for it to post but I forgot to move the posting time. -_- I hadn’t yet formulated my response to it, and usually I leave things sitting in the queue until I have time to write my response.
I would delete it and put it back in the queue, but there’s already been discussion in the comments about the subject matter, so I feel deleting it now would cause more problems.
I think it’s sad that a story where women get to be these heroic dragon slayers and the only warriors in the society capable of stopping this big threat has to tie their powers and worth to their virginity. : A woman’s worth or purity being related to us being virginal is an age old sexist trope and it’s disappointing that the concept ties so heavily into that, and that the art is the usual battle bikini stuff (and as wincenworks points out, doesn’t lead to covers that inform us very much to the contents of the book). Also, it would have been interesting to examine how a society where women are the only possible defenders against a huge menace would have evolved and changed women’s place in society rather than having it be necessarily patriarchal.
It seems like they tried to do a subversion of the “virgins sacrificed to dragons” thing with the virgins being equipped to kill dragons rather than be sacrificed to them, but ended up playing into traditional narratives of female virginity being a societal good, and women having sex causing ruin (as Ozziescribbler points out in the disqus comments.)
I wanted to talk about La geste des chevaliers dragons for a while now, but didn’t manage to find its original title, so thanks to lady-knight- for bringing this problematic comic up!
Parts most important to BABD bolded by yours truly.
As for writing, I wrote my thoughts on it in aforementioned Disqus comment and follow-up escher girls submission.
Here I’m just gonna reiterate that the comic is self-aware enough of the heroine’s fanservice-y “armor” to address it as ‘demeaning’ by a male character… but then abruptly handwaves the issue. Really.
Nothing more is said about the clothes. The order of virginal dragon-slaying knight women dresses skimpy to fight beasts without even the stupidest explanation given.
La geste des chevaliers dragons, written by Ange duo and drawn by Alberto Varanda, is one of the reasons this blog exist.