'Realistic to the bone marrow' is a pretty big exaggeration, don't you think?
No. Every woman in books who you meet is a product of world she inhabits.
Wives, peasant women are weak generally weak toward violence. There are only few woman warriors in books and all of them are ruthless. Sorceresses on other hand are dozen but they all have power and because they have power they don't fear anyone and they often are cruel toward anyone or think of themselves as higher caste than anyone.
There isn't any woman in books that works as stereotype of "strong woman" because of reasons.
That is the whole point.
No one have problem with strong characters being either man or woman if their foundation is good.
Everybody have problem if those strong characters were build on fickle foundation.
Mantra of "new design" by critics and progressive designer is to give women roles because they are equal not because of their merit or how world would behave toward them in those positions.
This is why i used Cassandra from DAI as an example. She is not fit to be commander and i don't think any man would fallow her into battle. She only exist as commander because "teh strong womyn !"
Cassandra is a poorly written character. Poorly written characters aren't limited to women in DAI. In fact, it's the rule rather than the exception with Bioware these days. In an ideal world, poorly written characters, regardless of whether they're male/female, ought to be offensive simply because they are poorly written. I don't think we need to bring gender into it.
At the same time, I think you're missing the argument. Just because a character has a plausible back story for why she acts the way she does, does not indicate that the decision to include this character in the story was random. Authors and game designers choose what characters they include in the narrative. Just as Bioware chose to make 80% of the party LGBT, CDProjekt/Sapowski chose to present a cast of female characters that is every bit as strong and capable as the males.
This isn't necessitated by the setting - medieval Europe was a patriarchal society, and while women's social status wasn't as low as it was in, say, the Islamic world, it did not avail itself to the sorts of "strong women" you see in the Witcher world. But of course, CDProjekt/Sapowski didn't set out to recreate medieval Europe, but to build around it a modern fantasy. The treatment of women characters in Witcher, to this end, shows a rather "progressive," rather than conservative/traditionalist, sensibility, which runs throughout the game not just in Yennefer, Cerys, etc., but even in simple quests such as the female blacksmith at Crow's Perch who quite literally fights and wins against sexism and stereotype.
In fact, Witcher "progressivism" isn't limited to gender. The whole setting is built around a classically liberal sensibility in which discrimination against the Other - portrayed in the Witcher as mutants, elves, dwarves, etc. - is condemned by the series's main moral compass ie Geralt, who dramatically died in Sapowski's books in a race riot trying to protect them.
Aka: Witcher 3 is a pretty damn "progressive" game, and SJWs ought to love it, had they not been too busy crusading against the lack of tokenism.
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