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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9312662" data-attributes="member: 2067">Back when chainmail bikinis were a big thing, you could count on the person buying your fantasy product to, for the most part, be a heterosexual cisgender white tween boy whose parents were working class or wealthier. So big muscles (exactly what your tween wants to be) and scantily clad ladies (exactly what your tween wants to see) get you a sale based on that alone. Anyone who wasn't in that target demo would just have to tolerate the art to get to the content, which wasn't always in line with what the art was promising, anyway. And a lot of people couldn't tolerate the art! But that was OK, for the publishers, since things weren't big enough to care yet. They just wanted to sell a few copies on this weird new thing. Enough tweens in the world for that.It's a different market today. Bigger, for sure. More diverse in every way. More competing media, more fantasy genre things competing for their attention. And the art doesn't sell the book like it once did (your audience doesn't spend as much time flipping through books in stores as they did in '77). They could still probably take bigger risks than they do, but it would kind of be an indulgent thing, and not something they really want to do for the core books, I'd bet. Though, personally, I'd love to see a few janky lookin' mofos in the mix.</blockquote>