Male Roles Vs. Female Roles in Fiction: Discussion/Analysis/Troperwank

I saw Sarkeesian's recent video on "Women as Rewards". Pretty good. Basic, 101-level gender studies information as usual, which isn't bad at all since she is reaching out to an audience that obviously needs that basic level of explanation.

I would also like to see an explanation that covers the racial aspect of the trope, as many women who occupy the damsel/reward trait typically have decidedly European features. Asian women are a notable exception for reasons we've explored before.

edited 31st Aug '15 9:01:08 PM by Aprilla

I just watched it. my thoughts on a moment...

Honestly, there's nothing wrong with providing a basic rundown of gender issues. She did indicate that she was going to talk about the exploitation of minority women in a later video as well.

i was going to take a look at the video but it's over half an hour long, i might take a look when i'm less busy. (btw isn't sarkeesian a banned topic? i recall seeing that somewhere and it'd make sense to me if it was but i'm not sure where i saw it or if it's applicable to OTC)

just going off the title and the few minutes i saw of it, it's true that videogames have had a history of "rewarding" players with titillation for certain achievements. this is more or less "expected" if say you are playing Huniepop or whatever, but it's more notable in something like Metroid where Samus usually isn't sexualized at all.

until we hit Other M which is a HUGE can of worms in and of itself. I've never personally played it, but I did watch the entire "movie" they have available of the game's cutscenes as theater mode. man that was gross...

edited 31st Aug '15 10:06:34 PM by wehrmacht

Anita is not a banned topic. It's just GamerGate that's banned. Stay away from that when discussing her and don't go psycho on us and all is good. Critiquing her is fine. Spewing bile at her, or anyone else for that matter, is not.

edited 31st Aug '15 9:49:51 PM by shimaspawn

I know. I acknowledged that.

edited 31st Aug '15 9:55:37 PM by Aprilla

talking about minority women reminds me of one of those alternate costumes for sheva in resident evil 5. some sort of leopard skin bikini that felt like 10 different kinds of insensitive.

there's also Custer's Revenge, in which the entire premise is so offensive nobody would be able to get away with it now.

I have a hard time remembering any minority women in games if i'm honest, which isn't really that surprising.

edited 31st Aug '15 9:59:13 PM by wehrmacht

It's really not since a lot of times minority women in games are either given no personality what so ever and might as well be cardboard cutouts, or they're such major stereotypes that you try to block them out.

My favourite is probably the Ambiguously Brown Jade from Beyond Good & Evil who is one of the better female video game characters in general and whose design makes her feel like she really could be any race.

A recent one I'm fond of is Pallegina from Pillars of Eternity. She's a dark skinned woman with feathers growing in her hair and is clearly the fantasy counterpart of a black woman. (Africa doesn't exist in this universe, but black people do.) She's also a deep and complex character. She's a paladin who ends up rebelling against her order and striving to find her own, better path to protect her home.

edited 31st Aug '15 10:18:40 PM by shimaspawn

Bullet point style:

• I quite like the way she handles the various ways the reward is implemented (the list format)
• It's always good to see Ride To Hell get the appraisal it deserves.
• Okay, it's interesting to talk about Samus as both mainstay female icon and titilating reward
• The concept of revealing alternate costume is indeed core to RE rewards.
• Incentivizing such actions by archievement questing does feel cheap.
• Male entitlement! Wheeee! I do have an anecdote here.*
• I understand the point she wants to make, I guess the EMOTIONAL TRUTH is indeed getting in the way of me actually internalizing what she meant there.**

edited 31st Aug '15 11:32:00 PM by vandro

I think the reason she didn't mention Dating Sims is that because the goal of the game is to form relationships with the girls it's less "If I beat the boss with major handicaps I get a hot woman" and more "If I care about this girl and talk to her she'll like me/sleep with". There are problems with the latter sure, but at the very least it shows steps that at least vaguely mirror how real relationships develop.

Where does persona fall into in that mix?

The goal is to form relationships with, and bed people...

which makes the bosses easier when you get stronger head monsters from you shooting yourself.

...

...

It is a weird game.

edited 1st Sep '15 12:00:24 AM by Imca

The best way to get max social link bonus in Persona is to be a sociopath tho.

Dating sims when done well can be good training wheels for interacting with the opposite sex. When done poorly they can be really bad. Just like any game.

Politics aside, it's a technological issue. Ben Croshaw joked about how relationship/sex scenes in games are basically two puppets getting along quite well.

If nothing else dating Sims have the advantage that they're honest about it, you don't go into a dating sim expecting any much to recive a magical "relationship" reward at the end, that's the point of the game and the game makes that clear. But other games, it's out of place there and makes no sense.

Besides, a dating sim can actually be written well to the point it doesn't feel like a shallow reward offering. Katawa Shoujo gets a lot of flak because 4chan really likes it, but it actually can offer some good commentary on how disabled people are often treated.

I have a blind friend(he played through a specially coded version of the game, that lets him use his screen reader) who enjoyed how Katawa poked fun on how everyone clumsily avoided using words "see" and "watch" around the blind girl. In general, treating the girl like a completely incapable vegetable just because she's disabled in some way is a surefire road to a bad ending.

Part of the problem video games have here is in terms of complexity escalation; most games try to start off fairly simple and then expand on their mechanics and so on to present greater challenges to the player.

In terms of depicting a realistic romantic relationship (alliteration not intended), with all the little details and ups and downs that come with it, the relationship has to be something that starts near the very beginning to the game, and consistently persists throughout it. Assuming that the relationship(s) aren't scripted into the story, but instead handled through gameplay mechanics, this becomes a problem for several reasons.

For starters, you have to introduce all available romantic options that early in the game. This has all kinds of ramifications for other elements, such as how your character is able to meet all these people immediately. But more importantly, that ramps up the early game complexity quite a bit, with that many extra NPCs you have to deal with. For a new player, you would also have no clue what to do to start specific romances, so you're also going to be struggling trying to figure out how that works, at a time when you're still getting used to the controls.

Furthermore, it doesn't leave a lot of room to people to change their mind. If you want to present the player with a relationship that ends with True Love (TM) under these conditions, there are no takebacks. Of course, realistically a person could get bored/tired/frustrated/whatever and move on to someone else, but there's this false expectation that you will find your True Love (TM), so game developers have to cater to that. Being forced to make a choice that early in a game that you can't take back except by starting over, which affects your entire playthrough...you can see why game companies are reluctant to do that.

Now throw in the usual blend of bad writing and occasional streaks of sexism, and you can see how depicting romance in video games as a gameplay feature ends up so messed up.

edited 1st Sep '15 8:36:17 AM by TotemicHero

The games could start by not having the sexual encounter being the END of a relationship subplot. The "welp, they fucked, we're done, nothing to see here" attitude is not only massively implicatory in a bad way, it's also boring.

This is the same reason ongoing tv-shows and long runners avoid getting to that point with constantly interrupted confessions and unresolved tension. Depressingly enough, most writers just don't know what to write after the characters had the secks.

Speaking of romance stuff, what do you guys think of Dragon Age Origins? Particularly Morrigan. I think she is an interesting example to talk about but I will relay my reasons later.

MORRIGAN: A man is always willing to believe two things about a woman: that she is helpless and that she finds him attractive.

Morrigan is a more complex character than she might initially appear from the Morrigan Disapproves meme. Raised by an Eldritch Abomination far away from society, Morrigan has a social Darwinist outlook that frequently crosses the line into Stupid Evil because she is a petty, selfish, and highly sadistic woman.

As female characters go, Morrigan is the temptress opposite Leliana's conflicted role as devout holy girl and experienced assassin and Wynne's unambiguous role as the wise elder. She's Ms. Fanservice, walking around wearing this◊.

She's sexually assertive, but it's because she's openly manipulative. For male characters, she's one of the two easiest characters to bed and will have sex almost immediately after joining the group, but it's difficult to argue that she breaks the mold of female sexuality existing only for the benefit of men because at no point does Morrigan ever give any indication of actually enjoying sex. She's the second-most sexual character in the game, but uses sexuality as a tool.

• Seduces the player to manipulate him.
• Flirts heavily with Sten for sadistic glee because it makes him uncomfortable.
• Has sex with Alistair, the player, or Loghain to perform a magic ritual and suit her goals by creating a magic pregnancy.

By contrast, the bisexual assassin Zevran cannot go two sentences without a flirty comment escaping his lips regardless of who he's talking to, but it's because he really, really enjoys having sex^{WATCH OUT} Which, itself, runs afoul of the awful stereotype that bisexuals are nymphomaniacs, especially when the player is allowed a foursome with an NPC and the two bisexuals in the party.

Appreciably, while the player can influence Morrigan's opinions on the nature of emotional attachment, Bioware avoided the pitfall of letting the player redeem her with his throbbing penis of justice.

As noted, she'll jump into bed with the player at the drop of a hat. She's callously dismissive of a romantic relationship. As the romance subplot goes on, however, Morrigan opens up to the player more until she presents him with an enchanted ring - with obvious symbolism, which the player can tease her about, though the ring has a practical purpose instead.

However, though Morrigan is willing to reconsider her stance on romance if she's fond enough of the player, her life goals come first. No matter what you do in the relationship, Morrigan will always reveal her plans and end the relationship at the climax: a magic pregnancy involving the soul of the corrupted villain, which can be induced by the player or one of two potential party members. Having a strong romance with her will make the final scene more tender and romantic rather than professional and businesslike if the player does the deed, but has no other influence on the outcome.

Downside is, this also has the effect of once again defining Morrigan's sexuality by the utility of her vagina. Furthermore, if the player will not or, due to the sex of the player character, cannot perform the ritual with her, the only other options have to be ordered to do it which gets incredibly rapey. One of the two outright states that he's just going to lie back and think of his dead wife. That in the act of using Morrigan's vagina as a utility, the player is allowed to rape one or two male characters is an example of exactly why game development needs more women involved in the process.

Morrigan next appears in Witch Hunt, a DLC dedicated entirely to finding Morrigan for whatever reason the player wants to have for finding Morrigan. Players are allowed to do everything from just wishing her well and seeing her off to attempting to murder her in retribution for her acts in the game. She cannot be persuaded to stay, but male characters who romanced her and/or fathered a child with her are allowed to rekindle their relationship and leave with her, whereupon Inquisition asserts that those characters became a good father and husband.

When she returns for Dragon Age Inquisition, she's still the manipulator she always was but trades in the temptress angle. Morrigan is no longer a heavily sexual character, which is not immediately apparent because she still dresses in that outfit - which now serves no purpose at all beyond empty Fanservice. If she has a child, she plays up the maternal angle but not so much that it's oppressive; her son is present for a few scenes, she clearly loves him and takes care of him, and she'll talk about him if pressed, but much like Origins, she has shit to get done and isn't defined solely by her gendered relationships.

In short, the writers did a lot of things refreshingly right and a lot of things obnoxiously wrong with Morrigan, which is probably why she's one of the franchise's biggest Base Breakers.

edited 1st Sep '15 9:56:20 AM by TobiasDrake

On the Marvel and Black Widow toys front we may be about to see some movement, as apparently the reason there haven't been any Black Widow toys is one guy (Perlmutter) who's now been moved out of the chain of command when it comes to the films (though as he's still top of the chain for the TV shows Agent Carter toys may well not be appearing any time soon ).

edited 2nd Sep '15 12:53:22 PM by Silasw

An article on The Mary Sue put forth the idea that Samus Aran may be transgender. Or rather, the headline states pretty conclusively that she's transgender, "deal with it." Naturally, this has resulted in a backlash that, depending on who you talk to, is either filled with a bunch of angry geeks that hate the mere idea of having transgender characters in gaming, or a bunch of slightly more level-headed geeks that are okay with them but question the possible canonicity of the idea.

A followup article was made the next day.

edited 2nd Sep '15 7:09:12 PM by Nettacki

This isn't a big deal. A non-issue, really.

Well, I read the article and....while is a good theory, it reach WMG at best, while the rest of the article is expend about the "fans" denials of theory as transphobia which reach strawman levels, the whole "the intent of the creator is the only that really matters" feel hollow when many other article stay the oposite view.

Thing is, a fan theory is just that: a theory, it dosent have to be true and it can be present argument aganst it, but becuase is wrap in a sensitive issue it become dificult to discust without the idea that you are sexist/racist/etc in themselve, I found that manipulative.

This is very similar to the issue with Poison.

If it turns out Samus is canonically transgender, that's fine. If Samus is canonically not transgender, roll with that.

It seems as though Samus is the former. No harm done, hence the sentences in the latter article "transgender women are women. Period."

Another female character, Motoko Kusanagi, is believed to be a transgender woman to some fans, and there are hints in the series to assert this. Again, not a big deal. Or at least it shouldn't be.

This is an unnecessary fight. Don't get baited into it.

edited 2nd Sep '15 8:18:45 PM by Aprilla