I love this picture! It feels so gritty and real. Normally fantasy pictures of warriors, especially the female elves, look beautiful and bad-ass. If it’s after a battle, they look victorious and bad-ass. This picture really brings out the reality of a life-or-death fight to the death. Normally when reading a book about a scene like this, I would picture something like Hollywood in my mind. with some blood and mud artfully smeared on the face and a bad-ass cut on the cheek. The armor is beat up but they take it off and are glistening with sweat and somehow it looks sexy.
I've never seen a picture that shows just how ugly someone might look after almost dying.
She's exhausted, and not in a "ha, I'm tired, can you carry me back to town?" way, but a "I'm so tired I can't even care about the fact that I'm using a corpse as a chair" she's so tired she might not even remember that she sat down on a corpse.
They can't show the bloody cuts and details like this in anime. probably too much work. or too graphic idk.
Anyways, I've read books describing characters looking like this, but the only images I can bring to mind are referenced from Hollywood and anime, which don't show the ugly reality.
She looks ugly with mud and blood, both hers and her enemies, smeared all over her body. She's ugly with dirty torn cloths and rags. Her face is not pretty, ugly with the bags of exhaustion and emotionally numb.
BUT, SHE IS BEAUTIFUL! She is alive, and life is beautiful (assuming she's the good guy. the elves usually are). And this picture is beautiful for showing me this "reality" of what battle can look like, even in fantasy.