I made a few decisions early on. First, the obvious choice was to give the Commissar a different skin tone to mark them out. Second, it should be the case that this Commissar should actually look more austere than my blingy Guardsmen. Thirdly, I wanted the Commissar to be a woman. For all its appalling practices, the Imperium doesn't seem to be misogynist, with men and women entering all branches of service except the Astartes and Sororitas. This was where I hit a bit of a snag.
There are plenty of female Commissar models out there, and almost all of them are almost offensively over-sexualised. I'm talking Commissars with miniskirts, Commissars with bondage gear. It says plenty of uncomplimentary things about hobbyists that the sculptors think this approach is a winner - and that they're at lest partially right. It irritates the living heck out of me because a Commissar is a Commissar first and a man or woman second.
Thankfully, the ever-excellent Brother Vinni came to my rescue. This lady Commissar isn't entirely perfect - she's exceedingly busty, for example. But her outfit looks quite sensible, and whilst her boots are a little silly they can easily be hidden.
Hopefully in the future we'll see something like this from GW. For a long time, that company had a very real misogyny problem: when I worked there in 05-06, there was a policy for paternity leave, but not for maternity leave. I heard senior managers making comments which made me quietly leave the room, and I have a friend who has had some shocking things said and done to her in her decade working there. But the good news is that they seem to have got their act together on this. We see a lot more representation of women in the model range. Moreover, not every female model is grossly oversexualised. I hope that one day we'll see female Guard.
In the meantime, we have companies like Brother Vinni!
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