Red Sonja is one of my favorite sword and sorcery characters. Her adventures have a similar feel to Conan the Barbarian’s, but I feel like she has more wit and wile as a character. Part of that comes from her status as a woman in a genre that has a lot of inherent misogyny. In the Robert E. Howard motif, women can be victims or rewards for dashing heroes, but very rarely get to be heroic themselves.

However, there has traditionally been a major problem with Red Sonja, and it is unfortunately tied to her origin story.

In her classic origin, Sonja begins as a commoner who is raped by raiders. Rather than perish, she is saved by a goddess who grants her impressive combat abilities under the condition that she can never sleep with a person who does not defeat her in fair combat first. This leads to several unfortunate problems.

Most obviously, there’s the fact that rape becomes an inherent part of Sonja’s backstory. Rape is far from off-limits when it comes to fiction, but it tends to get used far too cheaply in fiction, and this is an example. It takes one of the most traumatic things a person can experience and makes it a footnote in the grander tale, a quick source of tragedy so the story can press onward. That’s not to mention that Sonja’s “curse” tinges any potential romance she might have in the future, since in order to consummate a relationship her lover has to physically overpower her first.

Secondly, it renders Sonja, a heroine on par with the mighty Conan, as somebody who didn’t necessarily “earn” her abilities. Rather than being a natural badass like her male counterparts, Sonja was given at least a significant portion of her abilities.

Every time a Red Sonja comic comes out, I take interest, but also know that there’s probably going to be some cringey rape-related problems in it. But then Gail Simone came along and changed this inherent issue with the character.

Sonja the Unrestrained

When Dynamite Comics handed the reigns of Red Sonja over to the amazing Gail Simone, one of the first changes she made was to change the character’s backstory. When raiders came for her home, one of them attempted to rape young Sonja…and got a knife to the gut in retaliation. This removed a lot of problematic issues with the character, and it also opened up a whole new side of her.

The removal of Sonja’s “curse” opened up numerous…options for the character in the romance department. Simone opted to make her pansexual and randy as all hell. As a result, she’s even more of a loveable, hedonistic sellsword than she was before. Sonja is willing to bed man or woman, and wears her sexuality as yet another sign of empowerment. (The fact that this also partly explains her long-bizarre obsession with wearing a chainmail bikini that offers no actual protection is a small added bonus.)

The panel above actually takes place in the second storyline of Red Sonja, volume 2, while her revised origin story happens in the first volume. But that panel is what really made me realize how much more fun this new Sonja could be. Whereas the old version was overly defined by her traumatic origin story, this new version used her sexuality as a source of empowerment.

For many a year, I’ve been a fan of Red Sonja, with the caveat that there is some squicky stuff tied into her character, not just the clumsy handling of the rape in her backstory, but the fact that this highly sexualized character usually written by men has implications of sexual assault hard-coded into her character. For Simone to unceremoniously drop all that baggage seemed like a bold choice at the time but also made me wonder if it fundamentally changed the character. This panel showed me that it did indeed change Sonja, but in a great way.

Images: Dynamite Comics