The aesthetic world of 1980s fantasy media is so heightened, so visually saturated, that it becomes theatrical by default. Drawing on Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” this section explores how fantasy posters and films from this period operate within a camp tradition: a style marked by aesthetic excess, stylised gestures, and an unabashed embrace of the artificial. These are not subdued fantasy landscapes—they are glittered, oiled, and staged to the brink of absurdity.
Swords shimmer unnaturally. Hair doesn’t fall—it billows. Muscles glisten like sculpted plastic. Fire blazes in painterly oranges and purples. Skies swirl with cosmic drama, suggesting mythic warfare rather than grounded reality. There is no dirt, no exhaustion. The body—whether male or female—is a performance of divine exaggeration.
This is camp not by parody, but by seriousness taken to an aesthetic extreme. It is camp that believes in itself. As Sontag notes, camp is a “mode of aestheticism” where meaning comes not through content but through the degree of stylisation. The costumes in Heavy Metal, Conan, and Red Sonja are not functional. They are composed of leather straps, chrome, and fur, adorned with theatrical geometry and fetish-like materiality. Even the wounds are staged—glistening, symmetrical, abstracted from pain.
This stylisation blurs into drag. Gender in these images is not innate but posed. Power is not embodied but displayed. The male hero’s musculature is oiled and curated, his loincloth cut for maximum exposure. He is not simply masculine—he is masculinity as performed by an artist. Likewise, female warriors wear armor that reveals more than it protects. Their boots are heeled, their blades gleam as accessories. Their threat is sexualised, their poses halfway between attack and display.
A cover from Heavy Metal magazine captures this hybrid mode perfectly: a pin-up style woman, scantily clad, rides a winged beast across a sky that glows like stained glass. Her face is impassive, her sword raised, her body arched. This is not a moment of combat, but of mythic posing. Her power is inseparable from the artifice of her image. She is not real, and that is the point.
The queerness of these visuals lies not in their character’s sexual identity, but in their detachment from realism. Power is coded through stylised surface. These figures defy naturalism, coherence, and restraint. They are maximalist, synthetic, impossible—and in that impossibility, they open space for queer readings. The drag of masculinity, the erotic charge of warrior femmes, the visual camp of high fantasy excess—all contribute to a landscape where gender and power are always theatrical.
Camp, in this context, functions as both exaggeration and disguise. It amplifies fantasy while obscuring vulnerability. Conan is mythically masculine, yet posed like a sculpture. Taarna is divine in her vengeance, yet composed like a centerfold. Their strength is inseparable from the artifice that defines them. This is not realism, nor is it satire. It is fantasy as drag—always adorned, always elevated, always unreal.
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