Reviews WebVideo / Feminist Frequency

One does not wash out the other, but again, this shows a bias on her part, and when I know she is misrepresenting her material, it undermines her and her position. A specific instance I frowned on, she discusses Max Payne and how the death of his wife is used as a plot device, ignoring the female assassin Mona Sax who flips the damsel in distress role (twice) when Max is injured and she rescues him.

You really kind of answer your own complaint right at the beginning, here. She's not making an in depth analysis of Max Payne's 'Feminist cred', she's making a video about a certain set of tropes she considers harmful to women that are common in video games. That Max Payne features a Strong Female Character doesn't make Payne's wife's death as plot device any less of an example of Women in Refrigerators. The entire premise of these videos is to highlight what Anita considers harmful, demeaning, or dehumanizing portrayals of women in video games. That she doesn't constantly stop to make sure everyone knows that not everything about a game she takes an example from is bad is not bias but simply following through on that premise.

The subject itself is biased. As you say, she is not looking at portrayals of women in video games, she is looking at negative portrayals specifically. The fact is either way she is not representing the games she discusses fairly. Her videos would be a lot more interesting if she looked at positives portrayals more often and contrasted them to the negatives to demonstrate how women can be represented properly. Her current videos are really just a lot of finger wagging, "portraying women this way is wrong, shame on you". And she's right a lot of the time, but she needs to bring more to the table than just this.

A related point I could not fit into the review - with regards to her Tropes series at least, she picks easy targets. She is absolutely right Zelda and Mario use the Damsel in Distress trope liberally, but no one can defend Mario's storylines, such as they are, and Zelda's plots likewise never really started showing any depth until the N64 era, and the repeated usage of Zelda's rescuing being the main goal got tiresome not long after.

At some point she may decide that she wants to do a series of videos that praise video games that get female representation right, but that's outside of the scope of the current series which explicitly focuses on portrayals she sees as wrong. It's not "biased" to make a video, say right out of the gate you're focusing on particular negative tropes, and then focusing on particular negative tropes. If she were making a case that games were bad and wrong as a whole and only using these examples, then you might have a point. However, she's gone to the trouble of including a "Not All Games" disclaimer at the beginning of her video, which suggests this isn't the case.

And again, she's not discussing particular games, she's discussing particular tropes and using clips from certain games as examples to show that they are not only common but exist in all sorts of games, from tiny Indies to massive AAA titles, and from old classics to the latest sensations. She's making a focused point about these negative, demeaning portrayals, and again, making her stop to assure everyone that "Not All Games" are bad over and over again would detract from that focus.

So if Anita is going in with the intent to point out negative portrayals of women in video games without examining positive portrayals in any light, then I must ask what the point of her videos is aside from finger-wagging. "Portraying women in this manner is wrong and you shouldn't do it" is not a point in itself, so what is meant to be taken from her videos other than that?

"Portraying women in this manner is wrong and you shouldn't do it" is not a point in itself

"Because of X you should/shouldn't do Y" is absolutely a point. Clearly, as the sheer volume of examples from recent titles indicates, this is a point that still needs to be made. Is Anita's analysis the deepest I've ever seen? No. The videos are kind of a "Video Games and Feminism 101" sort of affair. But what she lacks in depth is made up in breadth, showing with the weight of all her examples just how endemic these issues are to the industry. Not to mention there are still plenty of people who deny the problem even exists, or are ignorant of it, and could use such "101" style introductions.

Didn't she actually say that she was going to highlight examples that buck the negative trends? Like, devote a video or two to it?

Yeah, one of my friends who's actually interested in that stuff said that her material is basically just "Feminism 101" stuff. Not very deep.

Didn't she actually say that she was going to highlight examples that buck the negative trends? Like, devote a video or two to it?

Perhaps, and there's certainly nothing wrong with showing some good examples of female portrayal done right. However, Anita's thesis definitely seems to be that these positive portrayals are vastly outnumbered by the negative ones in the current video game industry, and so its inevitable that there will be a greater weight on negative examples.

"But what she lacks in depth is made up in breadth" - I would disagree. If her point is just to show that tropes that are harmful to women are still prevalent, okay, but I think a much stronger and more interesting point could be made by examining *why* it's still prevalent. For example, the Damsel in Distress video. Instead of rambling off games that use the trope, discuss some of the reasons it's used, how it's used, etc. She does touch on that, but not much. I would concur with the assessment her videos are Feminism 101, and if that's her audience okay, but I'm not sure that's an audience to prefer over the audience that would prefer deeper analysis. As for the people who deny the problem, yes they absolutely exist, but I doubt those sorts of people will have their minds changed by Anita's vids.

Part of the problem with her vids that occurred to me is that their length is a huge problem. I don't know the creative process that goes into making her vids, but Anita and whatever production team works with her needs to edit their material better. The most recent vid of hers I saw was the Ms. Male Character/Smurfette Principle vid. It's 25 minutes long; that is a ridiculous amount of time to hold someone's attention with a YouTube video, and looking at her other vids this is not an abnormality among them. The specific vid I speak of could be sliced in two (one for the Ms. Male Character and one for the Smurfette Principle) and give each topic 6-8 minutes, 10 tops. She could cut out the more superfluous content to focus on the meat of her arguments, making her points resonate stronger. The video length should be proportionate to the point being made. If you can sum up the intended message of the video in one or two lines, then you don't need 25 minutes to deliver that message, and at that point the length is going to work against you. People are going to get bored, they'll pause to look at other things, they'll play a game, they'll browse, etc, and when they they aren't paying attention to you anymore.

On the other hand, if she is going to do 25 minute long videos, then she should definitely show more in-depth analysis and discussion to fill up the time.

And looking further down her uploads, it seemed she understood that in her earlier vids. If the intent of her more recent work is to produce longer videos, then again, she should give them more depth to justify the additional length.

From what I can tell, Anita is looking at common negative trends that persist in video games. I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing this out. Uncharted, for example, is a fun game. But that doesn't make up for the fact that the first game is basically a shooting gallery of non-white people. Or, as another example, you know the new Star Trek films? They have huge issues with the portrayal of women. Spock's mom Amanda is fridged and never gets a name. Kirk's mom is there to give birth and disappears. All of the named female characters have been shown in their underwear. The two main female characters were perved on. Making a video discussing these issues isn't unfair even though a female character (Uhura) now has a more prominent place in the story. The fact that there are good elements doesn't mean the bad ones are justified.

Granted, I'm not a fan of Anita, but I don't see anything wrong with pointing out trends and repeated instances of poor treatment of female characters. An individual game, on its own, might have tons of great female characters but still feed into common stereotypes at the same time in other areas.

but I'm not sure that's an audience to prefer over the audience that would prefer deeper analysis

I understand, but you're looking for something out of these videos I don't think they were meant to provide. There are plenty of much deeper analyses of these issues elsewhere on the web. There's nothing wrong though with it being a simpler, ground floor introduction to the issues, and so I don't think it's fair to label that a flaw.