I'm afraid your comparison is off.
Character design in film/TV and in video games is different. Has to be. Always has been.
This part of your post:
assumes a lot, but isn't supported by much.
What do you mean, "when it makes sense"? Do you think a woman (or anyone) always knows when she'll get brutish, and dresses accordingly in advance? Women can get violent at a party, when they're wearing a dress and high heels. And do you think "brutish" women can't turn into smoking-hot femmes fatales when they want, or need, to?
And don't you realize what you're implying when you say that for a woman who "excels at being hot as fuck" (LOL) it "makes sense" being a politician? Really, pal? Don't you realize that those designs are created to pander to stereotypes and people's expectations? Don't you know that history has seen plenty of ugly women as queens? Don't you realize that film and TV showing attractive women in positions of power
IS fanservice?
But let's get back to video games.
It's true that "fanservicey" designs had been free to go places for a long time. With different sensibilities, of course. Scantily-clad women have featured in video games for a long, long time. Arcade brawlers were full of them. Gauntlet, Dungeons and Dragons, Streets of Rage, and the plethora of 1-on-1 fighters that flooded arcades and consoles after Street Fighter II made the genre explode. Other genres were slower to follow, mainly because graphical fidelity didn't allow for detailed models and the best you could fap to were the illustrations in the game's manual.
When 3D became mainstream, both Japanese and western devs went to town with sexualized designs. On the eastern front you had stuff like Dead or Alive, which was incredibly in-your-face with sexualization, even if boob jiggle was intended to be more of a joke and a promotional feature. The in-game models were a bunch of crude polygons and making those tits jiggle in the most exaggerated fashion was relatively easy - also you could turn it off. On the western side, you had shit like this:
Blatant. Unoriginal. And completely, utterly pointless. This isn't design. There is literally nothing behind this character's appearance. It's what clueless western designers thought "gamers" liked because "gamers" seemed to like JRPGs very much, and "gamers" being stupid, of course it couldn't be the games they liked. It
had to be the boobs.
Around the time of Sudeki and similar stuff, there was a period when this kind of shit was turned up to 11. I'll take the Soul Edge/Calibur series as an example.
This is Sophitia in Soul Edge:
This is a 1995 design. It's still quite modest, even if it is somewhat sexualized. But this is good design. The proportions aren't exaggerated, yet the overall design
screams sexy even if the woman's torso is covered in armor. Sophitia is meant to be strong, but also sexy. You better believed I rubbed one out at Sophitia, LOL. More than one, to be honest. And of course Namco had a secret swimsuit costume for her, but this one was the main character design. And it's great. Sexy, but believable and balanced. This is a design that
would make sense in the game's historical context.
But then this happened:
This is a striking one-image recapitulation of what happened with female character design in the 2000s. I used to love Sophitia's design. But when Soul Calibur went HD, this is what was shown in promo images:
And this, yeah, this turned me off. This isn't good character design. You can see that the character wasn't the primary concern here. no sir.
Cassandra is another perfect example of this. And I can understand why a reaction movement to this shit started. It's silly. It's juvenile. It's gratuitous. And from my point of view, it's actually a turn-off rather than a turn-on. I didn't ask for this. I don't know who asked for this.
But there's got to be a middle line between this and current designs. Because current "designs" aren't much of designs at all. Japanese designs may be a turn-off for many and some of them are absolutely ridiculous, yes. But broadly speaking, Japan still understands design better than the west. Chara design in visual arts (compared to live-action, where a different balance must be adopted because real people are perceived differently by the audience compared to fictional graphical representations) must have something distinctive, something that makes a character look different and interesting, something that makes you think "yeah, this is how I'd expect this character to look" when you get to know them beyond their appearance. But this?
What even... IS this? This isn't design. There's nothing behind these except "they must look like this lest someone be offended", or "I think a woman should look like this". But there's the problem. When you're designing a woman character, you're not designing
a woman - you're designing
this woman. A person, not a generic fleshdoll. Same goes for the Nat Drakes, the Booker DeWitts, the Commander Shepards of the video game world. Sadly, their looks don't really seem to matter to their designers. We can recognize these characters because we've spent a lot of time with them by consuming video games. But this:
This became mainstream for a reason. Yeah, she's sexy. Yeah, the tits and the outfit definitely played a part in her success. But this design is
cool. This design screams
"Look at me, I'm someone!". There's nothing generic in OG Lara. And OG Lara still reminds us that there's a difference between a character that's sexualized for the sake of showing digital flesh, and one that can be sexy but it's much more than that.