I don’t know about “inclusion”, but the ‘80s sci-fi/action movie source material for the “Cannon Fodder” – ’Aliens’, ‘Starship Troopers’, ’Ender’s Game’, and the like – did have a number of female soldiers.
It’s the Space Amazons that kind of puzzle me. I’m going to guess it’s a thing in “Grimdark” sci-fi wargaming that the Other Guys aren’t supplying the niche demand for, like sci-fi dwarves and halflings. Not that that’s a problem – quite the opposite – it’s just not my genre, and I’m not quite sure I get it.
On the other hand, if “Space Amazons” translate to the Dejah Thoris style Martian warrior-princess counterparts to the John Carter-ish Sci-fi/Fantasy Swordsmen of Mars, then I’m intrigued (and the Grimdark gamers might be a bit baffled at my niche wargaming tastes! :D )
And then, there’s the RPG gaming market, which I think is what might actually be what the “inclusion” is all about for at least some of these kits: historical tabletop wargamers might not have much use for “medieval warrior women” and see them as completely senseless… fantasy tabletop wargamers might find them useful for fantasy faction-building purposes, but fantasy role-playing gamers for sure make use of warrior-women player-characters and non-player-characters all the time, so customizable miniatures in this scale will almost certainly find a market with them!
As a pulp and fantasy RPG player/GM, I certainly make use of these kits for that purpose all the time – thus, the female resistance kit is a win for me not really because they check a box off on some inclusion chart, but because there’s just not much variety in RPG miniatures for pulp horror/detective/etc. characters of any kind, let alone women for those femme-fatale or damsel-in-distress NPCs, or for PCs for the significant number of gamers who play women characters in these genres for any reason.)
The RPG miniature market is dominated by sword-and-sorcery fantasy RPG miniatures, with popular male character types of all sorts representing the highest volume (that is, male human beardy-wizards, sneaky-rogues, muscly-barbarian-warriors, and axe-dwarfs and archer-elves), trailed by a lot of chainmail-bikini-girls… which are awesome, but in a highly individualistic, character-driven gaming genre like role-playing games, most groups I know of always include characters who don’t fit those popular molds, and the women who play role-playing games don’t seem to dig the chainmail bikini thing as much as the rest of us do – at least, not quite for the same reasons….
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