Video games kinda suck at designing female heroes
In 2002, the photographer Howard Schatz published a photo collection called "Athlete" featuring pictures of, well, various top athletes from every sport and genre. These are some of the women he photographed, and the thing I want you to do in your head is compare the variety of humans that you're seeing here to the variety of humans you see in the cast list of your favourite video games.
These women are all in peak human condition for their fields - if you wanted to design a character who is tough and strong, these are the kinds of bodies you should look to for reference on what that looks like. You tell me how many video games or comics or movies or anime create their characters with even this limited variety in shape and size.
Of course, realism is not the end-all and be-all, fantasy characters don't need to be realistic, but if you are given the chance to make a character look like literally anything and justify it by "magic," and the only thing you do is reproduce the same 3 or 4 generically hot women over and over again, you are doing character design very poorly, in my opinion.
the hq photo of both men and women
