Of the heroines in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels, I always preferred Thuvia to Dejah Thoris. John Carter talks a lot about how wonderful Dejah Thoris is, but much of the time she seems to be just a prop. Her role seems to be to get abducted or menaced, so that John Carter can rescue her.
Thuvia, on the other hand, kicks ass. She gets abducted herself, of course - it seems to be what women do on Barsoom - but in between abductions she's resourceful and independent, she plots escapes, she carries (and uses) a gun and a knife, she kills bad guys, she wrestles for knives with crazy women. And, of course, she can control banths, which is a pretty awesome superpower to have. So, no disrespect to Dejah, but Thuvia gets my vote.
Burroughs' novels are not great literature, but they're a rich source of colorful imagery. By which I mean that they're an excuse for artists to paint naked people because, according to Burroughs, almost everyone on Mars is (a) super-hot, and (b) almost completely naked. Disney, in their recent expensive flop, missed the point that Barsoom is all about the life and death struggles of smokingly-hot naked people, and threw away the trump card that could have grossed them millions. But I digress.
Anyway, I keep trying to render the main protagonists of Burroughs' stories (because the tools and content that I have are also well-adapted to creating pictures of hot people not wearing very much), and Thuvia is a recurrent theme. This image is one such attempt, and uses a variety of different pieces of jewelry and weaponry, drawn together from different models. I don't think it's the definitive Thuvia image - she's perhaps a little too dark-skinned to be one of Burroughs' 'red Martians', and she's perhaps not pretty enough. Still, she's certainly naked enough. If she doesn't fit your mental image of Thuvia, she's still squarely in the grand tradition of planetary romance (a tradition, incidentally, that did not begin or end with Burroughs).
And no, I don't know what holds her bra up, but Martian gravity is weaker than terrestrial.
Comments
Of the heroines in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels, I always preferred Thuvia to Dejah Thoris. John Carter talks a lot about how wonderful Dejah Thoris is, but much of the time she seems to be just a prop. Her role seems to be to get abducted or menaced, so that John Carter can rescue her.
Thuvia, on the other hand, kicks ass. She gets abducted herself, of course - it seems to be what women do on Barsoom - but in between abductions she's resourceful and independent, she plots escapes, she carries (and uses) a gun and a knife, she kills bad guys, she wrestles for knives with crazy women. And, of course, she can control banths, which is a pretty awesome superpower to have. So, no disrespect to Dejah, but Thuvia gets my vote.
Burroughs' novels are not great literature, but they're a rich source of colorful imagery. By which I mean that they're an excuse for artists to paint naked people because, according to Burroughs, almost everyone on Mars is (a) super-hot, and (b) almost completely naked. Disney, in their recent expensive flop, missed the point that Barsoom is all about the life and death struggles of smokingly-hot naked people, and threw away the trump card that could have grossed them millions. But I digress.
Anyway, I keep trying to render the main protagonists of Burroughs' stories (because the tools and content that I have are also well-adapted to creating pictures of hot people not wearing very much), and Thuvia is a recurrent theme. This image is one such attempt, and uses a variety of different pieces of jewelry and weaponry, drawn together from different models. I don't think it's the definitive Thuvia image - she's perhaps a little too dark-skinned to be one of Burroughs' 'red Martians', and she's perhaps not pretty enough. Still, she's certainly naked enough. If she doesn't fit your mental image of Thuvia, she's still squarely in the grand tradition of planetary romance (a tradition, incidentally, that did not begin or end with Burroughs).
And no, I don't know what holds her bra up, but Martian gravity is weaker than terrestrial.