The RPG Duelling League
Social Forums => Discussion => Topic started by: Cmdr_King on November 22, 2018, 12:46:25 AM
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A month or so back, I tossed an open question at chat: how many games could anyone think of that didn't embarrass themselves in feminist terms?
We didn't get very far before deciding very few existed outside the indie space. And that's to be expected: I'm not entirely sure any game released by a publisher of any size, at least in modernity, has had predominantly female creative teams. Broadly speaking the makers of our video games are dudes.
But honestly I feel like this is a question I'd like to see more people explore. I should probably clarify a bit though.
I don't really mean completely unproblematic. I mean, nothing is that. And among the first games I thought of for the exercise was Bayonetta.
Moreso, at least for myself, I think of this as games that don't say, whether explicitly or by implication, that masculinity is the superior position. The ones that prominently tell the stories of women (not necessarily the main character mind, but it'd be hard to do without that of course), that show feminine traits positively, ideally as powerful. The ones that go out of their way to buck the male-centric norms of the medium and society at large, whether by eschewing violence, by showing sexuality as something owned and used by women rather than something that exists for men, all sorts of things.
Really I want a wider pool of people just kinda examining their own idea of feminism and the empowerment of women, and how that manifests in their video games.
Or if it does, but I suspect I was too narrow originally, so... welp, here's the floor.
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Well the problem is that feminine traits don't make for good gameplay. Social interactions don't lend themselves to action games. The games that do rely on social stuff are little more than glorified Choose Your Own Adventure games. And most of those are harem games anyway.
The Tomb Raider reboot was good at making Lara utilize male traits without objectifying her. But it's not remotely feminine.
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Violence is integral to video games, but for many games it is more cerebral than hyper-testosterone so I wouldn't code that as necessarily masculine.
Gender roles in games have evolved some for sure. A part of that is the greater complexity of the genre's stories.
I can think of Tales games where the earliest protagonist was presented as a hyper masculime hothead and later protagonists were far more balanced (even female or 'effeminate' men).
I wouldn't say that they on the whole present a progressive view of gender roles but they definitely have more variety than they used to?
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Part of the other problem is that the target audience for games has largely been males. The idea of sitting at home and playing a game for several hours just isn't something you see on the list for most women. I'm not sure if this is because games don't market themselves to women or if women are inherently turned off by the idea. But from personal experience, it also has to do I think with a large part of what our culture expects from different genders and what you do in early childhood. Many of the biggest titles are also more imbedded with male oriented concepts as Capt K has mentioned because those are much more entertaining.
I would say games have come a long way though compared to how they were back in like the 1970s-1980s. Maybe not a huge step, but a step nonetheless. Look at something like Wild ARMS 3. Sure, it isn't a mainstream title and it's not modern, but it was released in an era when these concepts aren't as frontline and it has the following:
- A good female protagonist that isn't in questionable attire
- A good female antagonist that isn't in questionable attire
- A female foil for the protagonist that is pretty good overall
- No damsel in distress moments. In fact, the one time a character leaves the party for crisis of faith moments is a male, and the most experienced/logical one.
- The male characters do not overshadow the female protagonist - in fact you can remove many of them and the story still works
- The first male antagonist you meet is a complete tool and is treated as such
- The female protagonist is arguably the best character in the game in fights (and isn't just because she's a good spellcaster)
- One can make an argument that by the end of the game, the female protagonist has certainly outgrown the two most likely mentor characters for her, both of which are male.
That's pretty good for a game that was released over 15 years of ago. There are other games too where despite maybe having a male protagonist, there is a lot of focus time on what the female protagonist/characters are doing in a smart way. Suiko5 comes to mind for this - a game in a setting where it is operated through a Queendom, has the female lead be in a Damsel in Distress situation but is actually very smart through being politically minded (something her brother/protagonist isn't good at), has key decisions being made by his female strategist and blind sided by his aunt.
I think the key really is to just produce good games without the need to be pandering to certain concepts. People don't like it when you shove things in their face - but do it subtly in a good context? They are more likely to bite onto the idea.
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On violence: certainly I think the fact that we associate violence as a masculine trait has impacted the way video games developed, but I don't think it's disqualifying in itself. Academic feminism does tend to shun violence entirely, but certainly in pop culture people don't tend to read THAT much into it; your average layperson would certainly buy the argument that Buffy was a feminist (or at least feminist-influenced) work for example.
The big distinction there I think is separating violence of conquest from violence of survival. I havne't played the modern Tomb Raider, but Lara fighting and killing when she's isolated and people are seeking to kill her is quite different from Kratos tossing people into machinery because it's slightly more convenient to kill someone than not.
More than that it's entirely possible to have a game with robust gameplay that doesn't particularly use violence. By which I mean let's talk about Celeste (one of the games I was gonna talk about anyway~)
Celeste for context is a Super Meatboy-inspired indie platformer, wherein a woman named Madeline attempts to climb the titular mountain. While there are a few "bosses" in the game, they're essentially mobile stage hazards for the end of about half of the levels, and you don't attack or damage them: two of the four you can jump on, but basically they act like any other platform and immediately return if you do. You're not hurting them, just bouncing off them to get ahead.
The game has a super sparse cast, but what's here does play into fairly friendly themes. You encounter another hiker named Theo who encourages you and usually gets you to try and stop and enjoy the climb during his interludes. His dialog is sorta flirty, but there's nothing definitively suggestive of Madeline wanting any kind of relationship and Theo remains friendly and doesn't press the matter, which is nice. The other character you interact with is Part of Me, a manifestation of Madeline's... well, it's left vague but whatever combination of depression and anxiety lead her to climb a mountain that has a monument to the fallen, Part of Me is a reflection of it.
Essentially the game is a literalization of Madeline's quest to find herself and prove she's capable of living. Heck, that she deserves to, is the implication I got.
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The idea of sitting at home and playing a game for several hours just isn't something you see on the list for most women.
It has been estimated that women play roughly the same amount of games as men. However they're of the card-game/Facebook-game variety, i.e. Freecell and Farmville. Women don't generally buy the AAA console titles that get a lot of press. https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/ (https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/)
Notice how low tactical shooters are on that list? There's one notable exception: Overwatch. An estimated 16% of Overwatch players are female, four times the normal number for shooters. So why do women like Overwatch? Diversity. Roughly half the playable cast is female. They come in a variety of bodyshapes, from Mercy's mom-bod to Mei's short and chubby to Tracer's twig to Zarya's bodybuilder. And there's even Widowmaker's comicbook proportions if you want that option.
Mercy in particular is popular with female players because they can contribute to the team without having to actively shoot enemies or have godlike reflexes.
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I would be really interested to see how Fortnite breaks down by gender, on that note.
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I wouldn't confuse strong or non-stereotypical female characters with the project of feminism, either. I mean, the American market isn't just male it's also white male and I suspect the largely white male writing and developing rooms are translating most for this demographic. I think a more conscious genre of gameplaying is emerging now, but I've always thought of the form of video games as seeking that suspension between fantasy and interactivity that's not some metanarrative useful to the situation of being a real human being right now. As an outlier to data on women gamers, I'd rather see games being good at feminism first within the industry. For example, if debates on minority characters and film are any evidence, it's that the current impasse in quality characters rests on allowing people of different identities to write their own. I'd support any push that doesn't keep only availing to white cis males all the opportunities to try and be better, though they need space to grow critically too.
I suppose this is why I've always played RPGs that are a bit convoluted in storytelling and character development, and though most are not successful in the "I'd recommend this game to my millennial feminist sister so we can toast" kind of way, they do tend to get caught up less in gender expressions by rejecting simplistic fairytale narratives and investing more in being grand, elitist, snobbish intellectually and purposefully pedantic.
Not representative of this list above, exactly, but. . . you know, Suikoden III, Xenosaga, female characters in Tactics, the absurdity of maleness in Shadow Hearts, etc.; lesbianism in FFXIII etc.
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I've definitely wondered at times if that sort of thing is why I take more easily to jRPGs (or indeed Japanese works in general) than US ones: there's subtle differences in how patriarchy, sexism, and dominant culture in general manifest in Japan, so the cliches are less cliche and the bad parts are easier to grapple with while also being easier to miss because they're just a little different from my own day to day.
And yeah, I don't expect to see major-publisher releases overtly tackle feminist issues in the near future (in the sense of directly grappling with patriarchy, the consequences thereof, and how to dismantle or cope with them, whether named or unnamed), but we are starting to see a lot of that (and also a lot of queer-centric works) in the indie space, for probably exactly the reason that without the barriers to entry a big company has, women and LGBTQ creators are making their own danged games.
Suikoden III is interesting in this discussion.
For the most part only Chris' storyline really says anything one way or the other, but it's sorta fascinating it deals with the topic at all. Suikoden does do a pretty good job of showing different parts of the world having different cultures, so it varies, but on the whole the series does what a lot of RPGs do and imply a theoretically gender-egalitarian world. That is, men and women can largely pursue any field they so choose, and rarely suffer discrimination or barriers in those fields. The exceptions, like the Warrior's Village, are often portrayed unswervingly as backward for it.
Funny how most worlds like that still end up with overwhelmingly men in the leadership roles though. But that's more a topic for Suikoden V.
Anyway, Suikoden III does imply (or outright state? It's been a minute and there's no good Suikoden III LPs to check) that Chris is basically the only woman in the Zexen knighthood, and that the Council does treat her wearily for that reason in addition to all the other ones. So one of the things Chris does grapple with is the sort of imposter syndrome women in a society like that (eg ours) deal with, in a way that seems fairly realistic and nuanced to me. Certainly I think part of her going along with the dangerous and potentially murderous Karaya Raid in C1 is as a sort of "I have to be More Than A Man to maintain my authority, and that means more bold and willing to kill".
It's neat they go into it. The rest of the game isn't really *bad* about these things, but in a very "we're a more-or-less egalitarian world and gender issues are rarely explored one way or the other" way, which is cool but not really relevant to this topic exactly.
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Hmm... reading this Suikoden III talk made me wonder what the writer of Suikoden has been doing since he left Konami.
...apparently not much until this past year, when he served as writer for The Alliance Alive on 3DS. Has anyone tried that out? Does it tackle any feminist themes?
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And yeah, I don't expect to see major-publisher releases overtly tackle feminist issues in the near future (in the sense of directly grappling with patriarchy, the consequences thereof, and how to dismantle or cope with them, whether named or unnamed), but we are starting to see a lot of that (and also a lot of queer-centric works) in the indie space, for probably exactly the reason that without the barriers to entry a big company has, women and LGBTQ creators are making their own danged games.
My really inconsistent, well nearly... nonexistent, gaming since school hasn't helped to change my consuming habits. While I'd love to really figure out Steam on my technology for once, I simply haven't and just stick to what I can see on walls in boring game stores. Ranmilia suggested a few browser games to me, and I think some on Steam, but I'm just not consistent enough given these two factors. I've always hoped to get back to it when all's more stable.
Suikoden III is interesting in this discussion.
Anyway, Suikoden III does imply (or outright state? It's been a minute and there's no good Suikoden III LPs to check) that Chris is basically the only woman in the Zexen knighthood, and that the Council does treat her wearily for that reason in addition to all the other ones. So one of the things Chris does grapple with is the sort of imposter syndrome women in a society like that (eg ours) deal with, in a way that seems fairly realistic and nuanced to me. Certainly I think part of her going along with the dangerous and potentially murderous Karaya Raid in C1 is as a sort of "I have to be More Than A Man to maintain my authority, and that means more bold and willing to kill".
Chris was one of my first thoughts when I cited Suiko III, and for those reasons. What I'm attracted to most, though, in your suggestion that we search for our own definition, is that feminism to me is equality of all people. And I remember Chris being supportive of Hugo in a way that suggested cross-racial solidarity and support. I wouldn't mind replaying it to confirm but she wrote him some letter indicative of a sentiment at least. It would have been interesting to see writers pursue that in deeper ways but it was notable nonetheless. Since I read most of the characters as humans, I thought that was incredibly unique.
I notice you did not want to touch Xenosaga with a ten foot pole! Hey, that's fine! ::)
For me, though, there is absolutely something in unpacking the asymmetry between Shion, KOSMOS and T-Elos: Shion often representing the trap of white femininity and agency in tech; KOS-MOS representing that heroic superwoman femininity that ridiculously and tenaciously tries to protect all, but especially women of her affection; T-Elos representing femininity of color equipped for handling the same evil and viciously looking for recognition that's blocked due to being most controlled by industry. These tend to be the most lucid scenes and narratives, if not for the stereotypes of romantic tragic woman and soulless or monstrous bitches at our disposal. GNOSIS can then be representative of more than lingering defected human consciouses. I'd have fun arguing about the implications of what I see in this section of Xenosaga as symbolizing a metaphorical battle between exploratory female experience and total abjection. I mean, for casting too, Xenosaga had numerous female characters, a perceptively gender neutral yet incredibly pivotal male-expressing figure (chaos), all having to tangle with the different cancerous tropes of maleness and world control. I mean, whatever Soraya Saga is involved in almost always carries one female with narrative texture. It'd be interesting to think of Valkyrie Profile in adjacent terms of feminine power and antagonist male power but I must admit that I've forgotten a lot outside of the perverse Lezard Valeth scenes but the mythology already lends itself to a grandiosity of godlike women with too many emotions as their achilles heel.
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Dunie as always is carrying the water I am too frustrated to find the words for, can't elucidate or plain don't see.
Like I think you hit the main thing I had been struggling with (though it isn't your central point) with the exercise in that like, the games just don't need to be/can't be some glorified pinnacle of any Feminist ideal. That isn't really an achievable goal, though we can talk about games that do well/better with representation, that is both laudable and something we should do, it also misses the way more interesting conversation you have going on here on where you can find good/bad things in the things we already like and consume.
Cause like, to be real, if I am going to find that pinnacle of representation and theme anywhere, I don't expect to find it in decade/s old big budget RPGs coming from such homogenous spaces as game dev were both all the world around.
Your take on Xenosaga is way more positive than I could manage (all of this is after some wiki walking to remember names and plot points), I couldn't really get past the relationship Shion and T-Elos both have with Kevin Wincott and how little agency either of them has the whole time. So the take on it being about the fight against the influence of technocrats and leaning into the feminine representation is pretty neat thought experiment.
Going to the wiki to refresh my memory certainly didn't help alleviate the knee jerk eye roll at presentation that the series does though (Trivia and downwards on KOS-MOS article are a big W O W). Returning to Momo's stuff because I remember liking the character reminded me just how ick the stuff in the first game with her and Albedo is and how bad the end of the third game is. Her outfits in 2 and 3 are still rad as hell and she wears sick berets in both games.
VP hits some interesting notes in the way that like ultimately a lot of the driving force ultimately comes down to the Valkyries and Freya as the actual active participants. Odin and Surt are barely present on screen and especially Odin are fairly passive (the back half of VP2 I can't speak too strongly for), Lezard is mostly a catalyst until specific key points in 2 where he becomes the primary antagonist and by my reading seems to still be pretty passive? I don't know how much it says about anything, but it is neat to have a couple of games where at least the camera focus is on women doing things and women being the driving actors in most (?) situations.
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dunie: actually I've been trying to hit at least one game per post with the ol' "Let's Think Positive!" treatment, and Suikoden III was the one I could do easiest. THAT SAID I'm not gonna lie, not sure at all how to feel about Xenosaga III. I will add that T-elos is the only character in the game with a clear ethnicity within the narrative... which is Semitic, so her being a person of color is complicated to say the least. ON THE OTHER HAND, while most of the cast does have suggested ethnic backgrounds (I mean names like Uzuki, Yuriev, Margulis, and Winicott have traceable national origins), they're all done in the anime "ambiguous cross between white and Japanese" style... except T-elos, who is definitely brown.
Although that makes her role in the plot kinda weird, because she's essentially a soulless reanimated corpse. I mean the plot there is essentially Kevin stealing Miriam's body to use it as a vessel to contain her soul so it can be forced to complete the blah-dy blah. So basically the endgame in XS3 is appropriating a Jewish woman's body to serve the needs of an ancient patriarch, only for the woman's soul to reject that body and place her faith in the hands of an innocent woman-child.
Wild.
Shadow Hearts would be WAY more interesting from a queer lens. So like if I have a brainwave I'll put that here but otherwise i feel like I want more formal knowledge of that discipline.
Gref/Everyone: Oh god yeah. Like I said, I definitely don't expect any mainstream games to be explicitly feminist works, this is more an exercise in "hey so let's look at these games and find the parts that aren't dude stuff".
So like Tide has a great post. Hey Tide!
speaking of, let's pick a game off the shelf.
Grandia II is extremely anime in several of the ways people make tacky jokes about, but there's something to say about the concept behind Elena and Millenia. Grandia has weird ideas about what Nuns are (for obvious translation reasons) but fundamentally they do paint Elena with some of the western Nun tropes as well. Like, they don't really specify that she's supposed to be chaste or whatever but certainly she's sheltered and naive to a comical degree, and as the plot goes it's clear she's been taught to repress herself a great deal, particularly romantically/sexually. And at the start, like all of the Valmar bits, Millenia is meant to be a Darker Me incarnation of Elena, indulging all her deepest desires and shedding morality. So she specifically becomes sexually fixated in Ryudo, and ain't takin' no for an answer.
But unlike all the other examples in the game, Elena and Millenia remain distinct personalities rather than a corruption angle, and start to influence one another. And while they become separate people by the end it's entirely too easy to start thinking of it as Elena's repressed sexuality manifesting as another person, and her coming to integrate aspects of it back into her life as it forces its way out to explore on its own. But wild, unrestrained sexuality in turn tempers itself with experience, rejection, acceptance, etc etc until both become very different people: Elena embraces the life of an entertainer, living for others like she once did as a nun, but with a fuller expression of who she is. Millenia meanwhile ultimately relates best to children, who have the same untamed energy she was born with.
I'm not sure if it's a great viewpoint of femininity, but taking a sorta virgin/whore dynamic and bleeding both into each other until they become rounded people as the story and characters mature is an interesting approach.
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Echoing others, I am not sure it's enough to call a game "feminist" just for failing to embarrass itself; I would kinda like a feminist game to tackle some of the issues women face in society and acknowledge their struggle. But I'll settle for doing a good job on the failure-to-embarrass front.
As already mentioned in the original post I think things are made more difficult by the fact that game writing is currently dominated by males. Not to say males can't create feminist works (or that women writers can't create decidedly unfeminist work for that matter), but it's certainly something that would help. No idea how to encourage change here from the ground level though.
Anyway, as far as "things games to do not embarrass themselves" go, there's a few things I look for. I'm gonna focus mostly on JRPGs here because they (and the odd adventure/VN-type game) are the vast majority of what I play for narrative. This is kinda the baseline of what I'm looking for even in games that aren't specifically addressing feminist issues.
1. Representation. The story should, y'know, have women in it, at every level of the story. Don't just have a couple playable women and populate your entire NPC cast with men (old games tend to be really bad about this). If your story mostly excludes women, it sends the message that they don't matter.
As an added bonus, representation tends to almost invariably lead to diversity; more women in the story mean more roles for them to play (including less "traditionally feminine" roles such as villains), more personality types, even body types as Captain K aluded to.
2. Relevance. Similarly, the women in the story need to actually matter. A good rule of thumb is to imagine what a 200-word summary of the game's story would look like. If women aren't mentioned, or are mentioned only as the object or passive subject in a sentence (e.g. "Bowser kidnapped Princess Peach", "Eliwood accidentally killed Ninian"), that's a problem.
Yes, yes, before someone says it: there is a space for stories primarily about men, and there is a space for stories primarily about women. However the former is grossly overrepresented in video games as is and the latter hardly exists. The world is populated by men and women; therefore the large majority of stories that deal with more than 2-3 characters should be about both men and women.
3. Avoiding (much) narrative objectification. Female characters should not exist primarily to motivate male characters, which is typically accomplished by either killing them or more often abducting them (FFT is an excellent example of a game which does both!), though can also be done just by making them a one-dimensional love interest for a male character. At best, this cuts down on your relevance above; at worst, it sends the message that women basically exist as objects for the conflicts and desires of men.
4. Respecting their female characters. Let them be capable, let them be cool. As always there's space for a mix, but it's not uncommon for games to make the men have most if not all of the "cooler" roles - the chosen hero, the savvy veteran, the cunning manipulator. The man is the doctor, the woman is his assistant. The man has an ideaistic villain plan, the woman follows him because she loves him. etc. I think this is one which a lot of games can be quietly pretty bad about, especially older ones.
Some games I think do a pretty good job:
-Valkyrie Profile. The 20th century is a bit of a wasteland for feminist games tbh, but VP is definitely one of the better ones. The game unambiguously stars a woman (uncommon; many female mains before then like Terra had to share a stage) and features a diverse playable female cast (Lorenta is pushing middle-aged, Mystina is a horrible person, Aelia is a powerful warrior who transforms into a dragon, etc.) which it generally respects.
-Suikoden V has a LOT of major female plot players. Lucretia, Sialeeds, Lymsleia, and Lyon are all central players with a diverse set of motivations all of whom help drive the plot, and all of whom I would say the game respects a good deal. Minor characters like Raja, Bernadette, and Silva also play senior roles in the player's army. It's actually a rare game where the overall cast comes pretty close to being balanced, though there's still a bit of a male skew to the villains even if Sialeeds is included among them, although when the Godwins embody conservative nationalism that's perhaps unsurprising.
-Star Ocean 3 is very good about letting women have positions of authority they aren't normally given. Aquaria, the nation where you spend most of the game, quietly has not just a queen, but a female head of scientific research and a female head of special forces (and military in general? Game's not clear that I recall). Cliff is also a member of a secretive paramilitary organisation and spoilers, turns out a woman is in charge of that too. If not for the nation of Airyglyph I feel like SO3 might even have more women than men, and like S5 there's a clear choice to make the villains rather patriarchal.
-Have I sung Tales of Berseria's praises enough recently? Let's do some more. Female main character, two more super-important female PCs (there's little doubt the women have more story relevance than the men overall), who embody a diverse set of motivations and all of whom the game respects. The game also definitely wades into gender issues, with the reason vs emotion given a definite gendered bent, with the game clearly skewering the hypocrisy of the assumed-superior male point of view. It's stuff like this which helps bolster the game's writing cred from great to excellent in my books.
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I'll just expand on a WA3 point that is a bit more obscure since we're going into games in more detail. NEB's already done that for Suiko5, so no point in re-hasing that really.
Looking back on it, I'm actually more satisfied with how Clive is handled as being a relatively static character. One of the things that I mentioned in my post before is how Ginny eventually outgrows both of her mentors in the game. It's quite clear that Werner is the first one - the game doesn't do anything to hide this.
But Clive being a mentor to Ginny is a bit more subtle. In Ch 1, he's the one who encourages her to keep going after Maya scolds her. He's also the one who suggests the group team up in the prologue and he's generally the voice of reason for a good part of the game. The group takes to heart most of what he says cause it's logical. Ginny falls back on to Clive for a lot of the harder decisions that sometimes she isn't sure about (see opening of Ch 3 for example).
However, by the time Ch 4 rolls around and the ending, she's grown past him. He has his crisis of faith and when he does come back, it's Ginny who scolds him on being selfish. At the end when Ginny tells them to empty out their ARMs, they all listen because, despite how illogical it is it lets them maintain the set of values that she's worked hard to achieve. You'll recall that when Clive made suggestions, he had to do it with reason - here Ginny is able to get them to do something because of the trust that she's earned, which was something he wasn't capable of doing.
The fact that she outgrows him as a leader I think hits all 4 of the points NEB was mentioning and it makes more sense to me now as to why Clive is relatively static. He's the barometer which the game is using to show you how Ginny is growing, so if they make him change too much, it becomes harder to keep track of her growth through the game.
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Echoing others, I am not sure it's enough to call a game "feminist" just for failing to embarrass itself; I would kinda like a feminist game to tackle some of the issues women face in society and acknowledge their struggle. But I'll settle for doing a good job on the failure-to-embarrass front.
Yeah, one of my starting premises is that there's probably no such thing as a major-release feminist video game at this time. But I've been trying to parse a distinction I was making there, and here's the best I've got:
A feminist story is one in which exploring the nature and impact of patriarchy and exploring themes of overcoming oppression and misogyny are front and center. Additional possibilities are asserting the nature of feminine power and how it can thwart these same forces, but for me a full on feminist work deals specifically with structural sexism in one form or another.
A feminine story meanwhile would be one that deals simply in the stories of women, in highlighting and valuing femininity, and exploring the variety of expressions women and femininity can take. So a feminine story would score higher based on (positive) representation, regardless of what particular aspects of the feminine experience it dealt in.
So really while I don't expect many if any of the former, I do think people underestimate the degree to which the latter exists or at least informs a lot of games, so let's find them!
I was able to think of a couple examples that are... at least possibly outright feminist games. And we've mentioned one of them repeatedly, so let's expand on that!
Like any game of its series, Suikoden V touches on a lot of themes, but the specific quirks of Falena lend itself to a feminist lens. I think the fact that the villains are overwhelmingly men isn't a case of positive discrimination, but a plot point.
A lot of games, or at least ones with large casts, exist in a weird limbo in terms of gender politics. On paper settings tend to be gender egalitarian except where specified otherwise: that is, in most RPG settings (heck, fantasy settings in general), there are no prohibitions stopping men or women from entering particular occupations or achieving similar degrees of wealth and status. And usually areas within the setting this is not true are specifically highlighted as backward or looked down upon for it.
It's not really true usually. Writers tend to be dudes, society is still largely male-centric and associates power with masculinity, so the leaders in such settings will be disproportionately men, but nothing is actively causing this to happen within the setting. Just kinda does.
Suikoden V is a lot more deliberate about this. The actual ruler of Falena cannot be a man. by tradition and law of course, but this is magically enforced: a man cannot wield the Sun Rune, because it's the rune representing nuturing and a woman's wrath. It's specifically feminine in both its aspects. But it's telling to me that nearly every other leader within the setting, or at least among your enemies, is a man. I know Ciato is replaying the game lately, so if she wants to confirm/deny/expand on this point please do, but my memory is this is explicitly an aspect of both Godwin and Barrows' plans: a Queen may have to rule due to the Sun Rune, but without the ~Wise Council~ of distinguished lords like themselves she cannot possibly do so! The conflict is usually framed in terms of the Nobility trying to reassert influence of the the Crown, but I'm willing to say the subtext is deliberate: it's a game about how even when women achieve positions of power, Patriarchy will still demand she act according to its whims, whether directly as a puppet (I mean, this is LITERALLY Gizel's plan: marry Lym and be shadow ruler while she's underaged) or indirectly by applying pressure to act as aggressive and callous as a man would (which is more or less what Barrows engineered by stealing the Dawn rune and causing Lordlake's devastation).
I do think the game loses this thread a little bit because... Lym isn't the main character. That narrative would make her the natural heroine of the story, but it's instead about her brother trying to act in her interests (and later as her proxy). Which is fine, Suikoden V is still real good, but it loses thematic cohesion by giving in to tradition and putting a mute male figurehead in charge.
... that almost feels like meta-commentary when phrased that way.
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Another thing about a proper feminine game is that it shouldn't shout about how it portrays women. "LOOK HOW PROGRESSIVE OUR GAME IS!" Women should be presented in strong roles without it being driven into the viewer's face.
An analogy would be the Deadpool 2 movie. Deadpool goes to the X-Mansion, sees Negasonic Teenage Warhead standing next to another girl. "Who's your friend?" asks Deadpool. "This is my girlfriend, Yukio," she replies. Then Deadpool is just like "Ah, cool." And the conversation moves on. This was considered a great portrayal of LGBT because it was presented as being a perfectly normal thing.
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Another thing about a proper feminine game is that it shouldn't shout about how it portrays women. "LOOK HOW PROGRESSIVE OUR GAME IS!" Women should be presented in strong roles without it being driven into the viewer's face.
Do any games actually do this, to the extent it turns off people who weren't going to be anti-feminist anyway? It seems like a non-issue to me.
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Yeah I was about to comment on that.
Also being in your face about it is better than not portraying women at all IMO. If it makes you uncomfortable, it's probably doing its job correctly.
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When it comes to feminist-friendly narratives in JRPGs, honestly my first thought is Trails in the Sky. It is originally from Japan, true, but something like 90% of it was translated and localized by a woman, which I think gives it an advantage when it comes to positive portrayals of women in games as written *by women*. It may not succeed at all times, but overall I think its diverse representation and fleshed out female characters go a long way towards creating a solid foundation for a feminist narrative.
Starting with its female protagonist seems like a good introduction. For one, it seems like the game was originally conceived with a male protagonist with a secondary female lead. The developers apparently decided they wanted to go with a female protagonist instead and simply swapped their genders (so at least part of the progressive stuff in the game is in the original, even if the female-led localization probably accounts for more of the subtle ways it feels feminist to me). It's amusing how far this goes towards contextualizing Joshua's role in the story to me. Originally, apparently the dynamic was going to be the slightly naive rural boy as the son of the Legendary Hero while the secondary lead female was the Mysterious Waif with the equally Mysterious Dark Backstory. I think the reverse in roles helps round both Estelle and Joshua out by defying some common tropes. One example that comes to mind is how Joshua, despite being this badass assassin, always kinda feels like he's the damsel in distress, even though I don't think he ever gets captured (his distress is mostly self-imposed). Whereas Estelle, despite actually being captured (by a 14-year-old girl who ends up being the best antagonist) never feels like she's lost control or agency. When she's alone and unarmed behind enemy lines is when she narratively makes the biggest crack in the villains' armor.
While the shadow of Cassius looms over a lot of the first game, the narrative *does* introduce a large number of female foils for Estelle to play off of. She has her anime rival Anelace, who is both initially more skilled than her as a slightly-older Bracer AND trained in the same sword style as Cassius to give it some personal weight. She has her romantic rival and hot-cold opposite Josette, who starts as a comedic character but grows by the second game so that their dynamic is more of a true personal ideology juxtaposition. There's also Schera, who acts as all of mentor, mother, confidant, and sometimes-dependant throughout the course of three games as Estelle matures. If you're ever curious where in her development Estelle is, you can look at her relationship with Schera. You can also add Chloe and Queen Alicia here to a point, but they are less foils and more 'best friend/sounding board' and 'ideal to strive for who isn't Cassius'.
I like Estelle a lot. I like how she has a fairly wide range of interests from Bracer training to bugs to Joshua to acting to sneakers. I like how they managed to give her a romantic subplot that didn't feel like it was trying to be the WHOLE plot. I like her snarky, playful dialog. And I like that she's regularly depicted as using her empathy, interpersonal skills, and ability to read people as her strongest weapon, even as she steadily overtakes all of her allies in sheer physical strength/determination. Counterpoint: I do worry that she can be read as 'a Mary Sue', but I feel the struggles and challenges she faces end in failure often enough that she certainly wouldn't read as 'too perfect'. Perhaps her somewhat flighty personality early on can come off as following the 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' trope, too. Worth addressing, but for me she always sounded like a real person, with a mix of humor, seriousness, faults, talents, and interests.
The wide range of female characters in the Sky series goes a long way to making this game feel very feminist to me. You have a wide range of ages, professions, intelligence, strength, competence, interest in romance, and even *some* diversity in body types! (No one is fat, but you have short, tall, busty, slim, and muscular, which is pretty diverse for anime female standards, at least!) It's worth noting that the male cast has a pretty diverse set of characters, too, so a lot of the flaws in the female cast can tend to be found somewhere in the male cast as well, balancing out how poor the representation can be in my eyes.
The country is led by a Queen, reminding me of Suikoden V a bit (the OTHER really good for represenation game that comes to mind immediately). Alicia doesn't get much screentime until game 3, though, coming off as mostly just super-competent but in an impossible position for most of the first two games. Chloe herself becomes the heir-apparent to the throne after a nice parable about keeping incompetent men out of power when Estelle verbally owns Chloe's uncle Dunan, the previous next-in-line. Captain Julia is notable for being the most skilled (non-Cassius) soldier in the army. She even gets a short arc in the later games about how this has brought a lot of fame on her that she really didn't want and has to struggle with balancing a professional public appearance with her disdain for being fetishized in the public eye due to her gender.
Calvard, the Far East-inspired neighboring country also has a female Ambassador. And Kilika, characterized as the strongest (non-Cassius, again) member of the Bracer Guild also hails from there, and just has a great presence during the arc where she's around. I love her disinterest in the shounen love triangle rivalry that Zin and Walter have going on around her.
On the other end of the spectrum, characters like Tita and Dorothy have a more vulnerable and sensitive personality, but both of them manage to have surprising skills and drive that keep them from simply being victims. Dorothy in particular gets to be a comic relief character forever while still having meaningful character arcs in the later games, which I found to be an interesting balance. I'm curious if she has a more important role in the larger meta-narrative as more Trails games come out.
Tita's mom shows up in game 3 and is clearly the one in charge in every situation she's in. She's a loud personality with a lot of talent... perhaps to a fault? Worth pointing out that she's introduced as a duo with her husband who is also a scientist, but she's clearly the more skilled and noteworthy of the pair.
The female villain cast is less stellar. For all that I think Luciola's backstory works, she's just not very interesting in the present. Captain Amalthea works pretty well as a foil for Julia later, but she makes a pretty terrible first impression as a love-struck hanger-on villainess.
Where I think the female villain cast DOES work is with Renne. They set her up as a foil for all of Estelle, Tita, AND Joshua, and the multiple cast relationship dynamics helps to sell her as a threat AND as a person. Her backstory is SPOILERS so don't read this: She suffered some awful trauma in the past, similar to how Joshua did, and somewhat remniscent of Estelle losing her mother. And directly in contrast to Tita's relatively-trauma-free life. However, I have to say that Renne's being sold into child prostitution and having to disassociate herself into ~5 personalities that she slowly fantasized as dying off in order to protect her is WAAAAAAY worse than anything anyone else in the series goes through. It is no wonder that it takes 5 games of Estelle's concentrated efforts before Renne can finally emote like a relatively healthy human. (It tooks Joshua like 7 years. Estelle's getting better at this!) While I'm wary of any narrative using 'rape as a backstory', I think Trails gives it the time and seriousness to actually respect the topic, and isn't gratuitous or flippant about it.
I'll toss a note in here about Olivier too, since it's really rare for any game to feature a bisexual playable character at all, and Olivier manages to be funny without ever being a complete joke. He does a nice job subverting the 'dandy playboy' trope or whatever it's called, due to using the overt flirtations as obfuscation much of the time. But he also seems to genuinely love his companions, male and female. I feel like more could be done with him in this sense, but I haven't played the Trails games where he shows up outside of the Sky subseries.
And outside of the Sky subseries, I don't know how progressive the series is. The Zero/Azure duology focuses around teenage police officers, one of which appears to be a magical construct shaped like a little girl (...why?). And the Cold Steel games are apparently set in fantasy High School, with some harem-y aspects. Not a great look, but it's possible there's more going on beneath the surface there (I hope!). After all, Trails in the Sky manages to have a lot of great feminist qualities despite Cassius Bright existing!
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Oddly enough, of the last 4 games I've been playing, no less than 3 of them have been problematic from a feminist perspective. (Odd one out being Dragon Quest XI, which while not anti-feminist or anything, still isn't breaking any new ground here as being yet another chosen one male hero. Beats out the other 3 easily enough, though.)
Anyway, my perspective... The short version is that I think it's more interesting to look at this from a systemic perspective than an individual game perspective. Take the Overwatch example brought up before and just on a cast representation basis. Suppose we're making a similar hypothetical game with a large cast with no historical setting/mood issues to influence us, we're pure fantasy. Having a Widowmaker in the game isn't a problem, and is probably a good thing. If, however, this hypothetical game had 30 male characters and 4 female characters, and 3 of those female characters were Widowmaker-esque, then we probably have an issue. But.. it isn't necessarily any one of those 30 male characters individually that's the problem, nor are the Widowmaker-esque sexy comic book ladies problematic. So... take that problem from a hypothetical single game, then zoom back out to the video game industry level. It's perfectly good and healthy to have, say, games which are "male heavy" in terms of which characters are the leads and the most important, just as it's fine to have games which are female-heavy (Atelier games and the like?) and games with fully balanced ensemble casts and games with controllable gender - the issue is that the ratio is slanted too much in male's favor at the moment. So it's less that any one specific game is somehow "at fault", since even in the hypothetical happy feminist future, these games will still exist - it's that the system as a whole needs to shift to be less lopsided, and that's going to be a long slog. So the thing to celebrate will be the likes of adjusting representation from 32% to 34% in a year or the like, which yes, I know is a boring and non-splashy thing to be worried about - but that's the real progress.
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Re CK's later definition... hmm, I'm not sure if this is just a terminology quibble or I'm interpreting your standards as too high, but a game explicitly about a struggle against structural sexism sounds like it runs the risk of ending up "preachy" too much, like a documentary. Which has its place, of course, but I think that for games in particular, the general gaming public err on the escapist end, so they'll just take an empowering story about a woman who saves the world and makes friends and lives happily ever after, which is also an implicit rebuke to any assumptions she can't do such a thing. (Or, to put it another way, if we switch genres to television.. Take something like the Mary Tyler Moore show. It's about an independent single woman who's gonna make it all on her own, despite the barriers in her way. It's a struggle, sure, but it's not a war; the goal is to eke out happiness with her friends & coworkers not start a revolution. Hopefully that would still qualify as feminist! And if so, then a lot of games should too. Or, to go back to Suikoden V - I don't really see Suikoden V as a direct struggle against sexism, except in so far as it's the Prince proving he shouldn't be underestimated! It's more of an alternative society that is less sexist to serve as an example / inspiration.)
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Re what Captain K noted: I don't know if this is exactly the same point he was making, but there's something to the idea that traditionally, male is the "default" gender, and female is the "othered" gender. This comes up when somebody is described as "the first woman to do something" or "the best woman X", which while sometimes okay, also implies that of course males did it earlier and better, but hey, have a ribbon in the junior division. It's often better just to let a female's accomplishments stand for themselves, including fictional females. Overplaying it can inadvertently also lead to the assumption that female excellence is an unusual abberation, if nobody will shut up about how Jane is the Best X ever even though she's a woman, did you notice that she's a woman yet is still good at X, amazing. (That said, I also agree with Elf & Laggy that I doubt this problem is ultimately that bad or even that common any more - but it is still something to think about.)
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Like I think you hit the main thing I had been struggling with (though it isn't your central point) with the exercise in that like, the games just don't need to be/can't be some glorified pinnacle of any Feminist ideal. That isn't really an achievable goal, though we can talk about games that do well/better with representation, that is both laudable and something we should do, it also misses the way more interesting conversation you have going on here on where you can find good/bad things in the things we already like and consume.
I often find myself feeling like feminism in general will always be an ideal though, and by that I don't mean feminist actions haven't made gains or won't make any more or that I'm perpetually fatalistic. I wouldn't expect perfection from an all-woman's dev and production group, for example, because... hierarchies, donors, etc.If anything, it insistently removes a veil telling us to just be better and examine gendered and raced institutions. For that reason I do think games can stay in search of such but will likely fail if it's written for a default white male audience. I'd love to play one that does such splendidly though if only to get more opportunities to chat with dudes about stuff.
Your take on Xenosaga is way more positive than I could manage (all of this is after some wiki walking to remember names and plot points), I couldn't really get past the relationship Shion and T-Elos both have with Kevin Wincott and how little agency either of them has the whole time. So the take on it being about the fight against the influence of technocrats and leaning into the feminine representation is pretty neat thought experiment.
Baha, yeah. Thought experiments are fun. My waxing on XS possibilities doesn't negate the real realities of the disappointment that you and CK've said. For me, what better way to reconcile that personally by dwelling in a XS project of abjection?
Going to the wiki to refresh my memory certainly didn't help alleviate the knee jerk eye roll at presentation that the series does though (Trivia and downwards on KOS-MOS article are a big W O W). Returning to Momo's stuff because I remember liking the character reminded me just how ick the stuff in the first game with her and Albedo is and how bad the end of the third game is. Her outfits in 2 and 3 are still rad as hell and she wears sick berets in both games.
Wow. I forgot MOMO and maybe on purpose. I really did see her character as representing the young female generation's experiences of residual effects of the abject world I was trying conceptualize. It got really nasty. And they paired her with ZIGGY who's pretty much a simulacra in a simulacrum for much of the time to be her protector. This reminds me about some unease I have about those old dusty JRPGs you speak of: I really had to take a step back from lots of similar Japanese things (adjacent anime for example) because the line blurred between adult and child, thus sexual and innocent, is far far far too much for my own ethics and is just foul. I might replay Xenosaga again because.... yeah, I hated that Albedo moment and it's as visceral in my mind as seeing a big shiny sword pierce through Aerith. The very sadistic acts of violent towards women to move plot really fucked with my young girl mind, and chatting through the ages with dudes "erected" a big incongruity between joking and my feelings. At that time it wasn't so different in film. And I was thirsty to see women survive and hold big swords even through representation doesn't mean empowerment, despite it being empowering. But at the end of the day with stuff like that I just feel grimy, feelings matter, and I just disengage.
VP hits some interesting notes in the way that like ultimately a lot of the driving force ultimately comes down to the Valkyries and Freya as the actual active participants. Odin and Surt are barely present on screen and especially Odin are fairly passive (the back half of VP2 I can't speak too strongly for), Lezard is mostly a catalyst until specific key points in 2 where he becomes the primary antagonist and by my reading seems to still be pretty passive? I don't know how much it says about anything, but it is neat to have a couple of games where at least the camera focus is on women doing things and women being the driving actors in most (?) situations.
Right? Like they were these disembodied voices, the #1 trait of all-watching but not all-powerful gods.
dunie: actually I've been trying to hit at least one game per post with the ol' "Let's Think Positive!" treatment, and Suikoden III was the one I could do easiest.
I hear you. I wasn't trying to be positive, I was trying to be engaged. But I wholeheartedly see how that is difficult for a thing that is Xenosaga. ;D
THAT SAID I'm not gonna lie, not sure at all how to feel about Xenosaga III. I will add that T-elos is the only character in the game with a clear ethnicity within the narrative... which is Semitic, so her being a person of color is complicated to say the least.
Could you explain this more? I've understood Semitic to not just be white-presenting Jews, so also of afro-asiatic origin (thus brown) too. I mean, the whole discussion of racialized characters is interesting because so much is placed on sartorial and physical characteristics perceived by the gamer that it can become a shit show really quickly, especially with terminology. IE whereas some categories like Black can be political and racial and ethnic, people of color is just a descriptor of non-white folk as we understand them anywhere where Westerners colonized. I did definitely read everyone of Shion's tone as white though, but maybe that wouldn't have been the case had I see previous examples of Japanese in space or whoever in TV and film. Or something. Which is also absurd because "KOS-MOS" WAS BROWN in her PAST LIVES. WUT.
ON THE OTHER HAND, while most of the cast does have suggested ethnic backgrounds (I mean names like Uzuki, Yuriev, Margulis, and Winicott have traceable national origins), they're all done in the anime "ambiguous cross between white and Japanese" style... except T-elos, who is definitely brown.
Then I want to also be white because of my last name! I want to be trans-white. #transwhitematterstoo
Although that makes her role in the plot kinda weird, because she's essentially a soulless reanimated corpse. I mean the plot there is essentially Kevin stealing Miriam's body to use it as a vessel to contain her soul so it can be forced to complete the blah-dy blah. So basically the endgame in XS3 is appropriating a Jewish woman's body to serve the needs of an ancient patriarch, only for the woman's soul to reject that body and place her faith in the hands of an innocent woman-child.
Wild.
The perfect abject state in a realm in which you're just utilitarian. I mean, Shion is an incarnate herself so her scope of human agency is sort of the stuff of textbook reincarnate power in JRPGs/anime. Someone correct me on the anime though, but I was thinking most recently of Naruto and reincarnates and perpetual ying/yang until centuries of the right circumstances show up.
A feminist story is one in which exploring the nature and impact of patriarchy and exploring themes of overcoming oppression and misogyny are front and center. Additional possibilities are asserting the nature of feminine power and how it can thwart these same forces, but for me a full on feminist work deals specifically with structural sexism in one form or another.
A feminine story meanwhile would be one that deals simply in the stories of women, in highlighting and valuing femininity, and exploring the variety of expressions women and femininity can take. So a feminine story would score higher based on (positive) representation, regardless of what particular aspects of the feminine experience it dealt in.
I'm not sure the rubric here is necessary because once qualifications lead the genre rather than strategy, it'll always be distinctive in its difference and never a general audiences-already-implied-in-the-genre situation. It's like the whole Women's Fiction category (I'm parroting something from a podcast here to be honest...): women comprise the majority of fiction readers here in general, and many Women's Fiction books are labelled absurdly as such just because of authorship rather than content. And fiction content varies wildly already.
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Could you explain this more? I've understood Semitic to not just be white-presenting Jews, so also of afro-asiatic origin (thus brown) too. I mean, the whole discussion of racialized characters is interesting because so much is placed on sartorial and physical characteristics perceived by the gamer that it can become a shit show really quickly, especially with terminology. IE whereas some categories like Black can be political and racial and ethnic, people of color is just a descriptor of non-white folk as we understand them anywhere where Westerners colonized. I did definitely read everyone of Shion's tone as white though, but maybe that wouldn't have been the case had I see previous examples of Japanese in space or whoever in TV and film. Or something. Which is also absurd because "KOS-MOS" WAS BROWN in her PAST LIVES. WUT.
Okay so there's a few things I was thinking of here. One is what I said a bit after that about the characters mostly not having ethnicity: the series is set 5000 years or so in the future, so obviously things are going to be *really different* from our current pespective. But more than that, basically everyone except T-elos has some Mukokuseki (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mukokuseki) going on (short short version, a style in anime where characters of nominally different ethnic/national backgrounds are visually indistinguishable). So while the names might suggest that Shion is Japanese, Jr. is cloned from a Russian man, Margulis an Ashkenazi Jew, realistically they all look "anime". And given the far-future setting, it's entirely possible that there actually aren't many ethnic differences between the characters. Race might not be a thing anymore. Who knows!
But T-elos is very definitely brown. And we know exactly the way she is, because she's the cyborg corpse of Miriam of Magdala, a Semitic woman from 1st Century Judea. So on the one hand, in that time the people of Judea would certainly have been people of color by our modern sensibilities: she's middle eastern. But... on the other hand, usually when we talk about people of color, we don't include Jewish folk in that calculus, regardless of where they're from, because... well, antisemitism has it's own specific and distinct history. And for the most part, the bulk of modern Jews are 'white' as the term is usually used, so I rarely (never?) see them considered as people of color.
I guess I mean that really T-elos probably can be thought of in that light, just it's weird because without the visual signifier you'd more readily apply Semitic approaches to how she's used rather than Racial ones.
Xenosaga's weird.
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Uh, shoot, didn't have a game ready to gush about today. Um. Oh! Duh.
So the Atelier series can get a bit... weird at times, like sometimes the "touch on all the major Moe Fandoms" aspects of the designs are a bit distracting and more importantly go against the themes and tone within the stories themselves. I mean, few game series are as consistently devoid of romantic tension as Atelier in my experience. But an entire series of games that reliably star women are worth exploring in this context.
But I kinda wanna stick to just one for brevity so let's look at Atelier Totori.
So Totori wants to be an adventurer! And really nothing is made of this within the setting, a girl using her skill at brewing potions and bombs to join the adventurer's guild is perfectly normal so long as she can pass the exams. But more than that is her background: she wants to be an adventurer because her mother was an adventurer who disappeared. It's a way not only to follow in her footsteps, but a way to chase after and possibly find her. Or at least, know for sure what happened.
What's fun about this is it's the backstory you give a shonen hero. Like, most of the main characters in Grandia games are this, but with all the genders flipped. And to Captain K's point, sometimes making gender flipping just... normal is kinda nice. And for my purposes it's nice that they take this sort of egalitarian approach: Totori is a 14 year old girl, with the sort of stats you'd imagine, but y'know what? She can get the job done by having close allies and using her skills (read: items) to do her part. She doesn't have to be an amazonian tough woman to travel and fight monsters. Flipside, your first companion totally IS an amazonian superwoman who smites punis with a very large axe to the face. And in terms of just general representation, the cast does lean female, including in the party members, and while none of them are amazingly written, everyone is pretty distinct.
Basically it's not a game that has much substantive to say about the Woman's Struggle, but it definitely isn't afraid to just be about women doing what they want without artificial barriers. It's fun.
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When it comes to feminist-friendly narratives in JRPGs, honestly my first thought is Trails in the Sky.
Wow. Okay, I'm going to try to respond to this as politely as possible.
Trails in the Sky FC is a game which is, whatever merits it may have, problematic enough on a feminist front that one of your female friends ragequit the game for that exact reason. You are, I'm pretty sure, aware of this.
Yet for some reason you turn around and, of all the games you could have chosen to hype in this space, chose to hype that one. The fact that you chose this game suggests that you don't really have a very good understanding of what makes a game feminist or feminist-friendly, which itself is a bit frustrating but ultimately not that big a deal. But the fact that you chose to post about it knowing full well that this game hurt one of your female friends is just a shitty thing to do, sorry. "Hey I'm sorry that this game affected you this way but I as a dude with no personal stake in this think you're so wrong about this that I'm going to state the polar opposite!" What the fuck, man.
I'm going to ask yourself how you would feel if a particular game got under your skin on a front you care about. Imagine, for instance, that there was a game which portrayed a gay or bisexual man in an incredibly negative light (I'll let you decide what that means, that's the point!). It affects you greatly, and you post about the game on RPGDL, letting everyone know how you feel. Imagine then that one of your friends, a straight person who has never had to endure an iota of stigma for his or her sexuality, knowing how you feel, hypes that game as the most LGBT-friendly game he or she has ever played. I can't imagine you'd take that well, nor should you be expected to.
Obviously I disagree with a number of comments in your post itself (at least as pertains to FC) and if you really want I can explain which ones and why, though I'm not sure if this thread is the right place. I don't want this post to come across as "I don't have the arguments to counter yours so I'm attacking your decision to make them", because believe me I do have the arguments. Perhaps more to the point, so does Ciato, who has made those arguments before! But the arguments themselves aren't why I'm upset and disappointed right now.
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But T-elos is very definitely brown. And we know exactly the way she is, because she's the cyborg corpse of Miriam of Magdala, a Semitic woman from 1st Century Judea. So on the one hand, in that time the people of Judea would certainly have been people of color by our modern sensibilities: she's middle eastern. But... on the other hand, usually when we talk about people of color, we don't include Jewish folk in that calculus, regardless of where they're from, because... well, antisemitism has it's own specific and distinct history. And for the most part, the bulk of modern Jews are 'white' as the term is usually used, so I rarely (never?) see them considered as people of color.
I guess I mean that really T-elos probably can be thought of in that light, just it's weird because without the visual signifier you'd more readily apply Semitic approaches to how she's used rather than Racial ones.
Definitely room for both of those things to be handled though. Like especially in the thought experiment Dunie put forward there, regardless of the plot or actual ethnic background, "black" and "white" are pretty demonstrably just visuals when it comes to the way other people treat someone (without wanting to bog down in the valid discussions to be had about self identification and cultural roots). There is room for a take on her both just as a Semitic woman, a black woman or a Black Semitic woman (replace woman with cyborg? Questionmark?). Like when diving into intersectionality there is definitely a desire to do the take where you try and get the view of the perspective where you hit all the boxes, but that is kind of not the only valid take. Sure you take a nod that there is more to this character, but if what you specifically want to view through the lens of then there isn't anything wrong with purely viewing it through the lens of her skin colour and the way/what that presents.
I mean you can most especially do that because because she is just a character, you aren't doing some injustice and erasing part of a persons identity there, it is purely allegory and focusing in on a specific component lets you examine different aspects in different ways.
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Wow. Okay, I'm going to try to respond to this as politely as possible.
Trails in the Sky FC is a game which is, whatever merits it may have, problematic enough on a feminist front that one of your female friends ragequit the game for that exact reason. You are, I'm pretty sure, aware of this.
Yet for some reason you turn around and, of all the games you could have chosen to hype in this space, chose to hype that one. The fact that you chose this game suggests that you don't really have a very good understanding of what makes a game feminist or feminist-friendly, which itself is a bit frustrating but ultimately not that big a deal. But the fact that you chose to post about it knowing full well that this game hurt one of your female friends is just a shitty thing to do, sorry. "Hey I'm sorry that this game affected you this way but I as a dude with no personal stake in this think you're so wrong about this that I'm going to state the polar opposite!" What the fuck, man.
I'm going to ask yourself how you would feel if a particular game got under your skin on a front you care about. Imagine, for instance, that there was a game which portrayed a gay or bisexual man in an incredibly negative light (I'll let you decide what that means, that's the point!). It affects you greatly, and you post about the game on RPGDL, letting everyone know how you feel. Imagine then that one of your friends, a straight person who has never had to endure an iota of stigma for his or her sexuality, knowing how you feel, hypes that game as the most LGBT-friendly game he or she has ever played. I can't imagine you'd take that well, nor should you be expected to.
Obviously I disagree with a number of comments in your post itself (at least as pertains to FC) and if you really want I can explain which ones and why, though I'm not sure if this thread is the right place. I don't want this post to come across as "I don't have the arguments to counter yours so I'm attacking your decision to make them", because believe me I do have the arguments. Perhaps more to the point, so does Ciato, who has made those arguments before! But the arguments themselves aren't why I'm upset and disappointed right now.
Well, notably I'm talking about the three Trails in the Sky games as a whole, not just FC, which I think would change this discussion immensely. I feel pretty strongly about these games and they did come across as feminist-friendly. I'm not trying to disregard Ciato's or your feelings at all! I may not have the correct perspective to see the problematic things in Trails in the Sky FC as instantaneously or feel them as viscerally. But when I was playing the games, this is the impression I got, genuinely trying to look at the story critically. I wanted to share the good aspects that I picked up on, not insult anyone else's perspective...
You say "of all the games I could've chosen", but honestly, that list isn't very long... and most of them seem to have been touched upon already. These games meant something to me, and I wanted to discuss their good points... If you think the problematic parts outweigh the good, then I'll defer to your/Ciato's perspective. But it seems counterproductive to just toss out the things the games did do well, especially if I didn't pick up on the problematic parts intuitively. I did try to keep in mind the comments and criticisms that you both made about FC before when I was thinking about what I liked about how Trails in the Sky progressed throughout the three games! I'm not dismissing your feelings and critiques, though I guess I am challenging them due to how Trails SC and 3rd continued the narrative... I am prepared for the possibility of being completely wrong. Maybe there's some scene or dynamic that I just completely forgot about or wasn't paying enough attention to in Trails that is absolutely abhorrently at odds with my morals. That happens. I'm forgetful. But that long hype post was my genuine emotional impression after playing the games, and I think it's worth discussing. If for nothing else, then perhaps it's a good segue into how games with surface-level "good feminist qualities" might have some seriously abrasive "anti-feminist problems". If it fooled me, someone who is actively turned off by anti-feminist ideals, then what do game writers need to do to be better?
It's also worth noting that I have talked to Ciato about this game series specifically before. We discussed how the Trails games changed over the 3 entries, specifically repudiating some of her complaints that she critiqued in her forum posts. I kind of wanted to write a lot of words about the goods points of the games specifically to highlight how much the series improves over time. It doesn't feel right to just disengage and ignore this series when there's a lot of feminine/feminist themes here to engage with.
...I wrote all of that just now, but I also want to unambiguously apologize. That was my logic for why I wrote the hype post, but clearly I may have misinterpreted the point of this topic, and somehow fell into some kind of mansplaining trap. I am sorry. It clearly hurt your and Ciato's feelings that I would post something so counter to your previously stated opinions. I wish I could say that I did it without thinking, but honestly, I WAS thinking about both of you and how I wanted to share why I thought the series did a good job. That was dismissive of Ciato's unique perspective of the topic and for that I do apologize. ...I just... I don't know how else to express my opinion and have this discussion? I am 100% willing to accept that something is problematic, but I have to actually see and judge HOW something is problematic. I know it's easier and wiser to just accept the opinion of someone with a better perspective, but that runs counter to every other discussion of narrative and media that I've ever had, so I guess I have trouble doing that.
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A month or so back, I tossed an open question at chat: how many games could anyone think of that didn't embarrass themselves in feminist terms?
We didn't get very far before deciding very few existed outside the indie space. And that's to be expected: I'm not entirely sure any game released by a publisher of any size, at least in modernity, has had predominantly female creative teams. Broadly speaking the makers of our video games are dudes.
But honestly I feel like this is a question I'd like to see more people explore. I should probably clarify a bit though.
I don't really mean completely unproblematic. I mean, nothing is that. And among the first games I thought of for the exercise was Bayonetta.
Moreso, at least for myself, I think of this as games that don't say, whether explicitly or by implication, that masculinity is the superior position.
Can we revisit this? Is there a chat log for that discussion? A wise one definitely brought to my attention that absenting the individuals who do such work already undercuts the possible results but also isn't feminist in the deconstruction of said patriarchies/institutions. The historian in me does find it necessary to revisit previous important moments to excavate ignored themes (and it is the easiest for me to do in all practicality at this point), but I suppose my question is: are there ways to talk about industry more than content in terms of the failure of games and feminism? I'm the type of political being that puts my money where my mouth but so far I've done nothing to support indies that are trying at least. I just read this snippet:
“We had [some companies] tell us, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,’” said developer Jean-Max Morris of Remember Me, a cyberpunk game featuring a woman who hacks the minds of others and steals their memories.
https://hellogiggles.com/reviews-coverage/5-feminist-video-games-need-play-right-now/
Whenever the mainstream absorbs smaller creations it always homogenizes it, so I don't find the inclusion of indies as any adequate answer. But, what would a future of equalizing resources and opportunities do (IE my feminism is "equality of all people?")?
We can keep talking about content. It's fun, useful, a crudely belated forum conversation. But just what type of feminism are you really trying to highlight or enact?
Or if you want to stick to content: Is that mostly only translatable through women for you OR could we also consider games that engage toxic masculinity or asexuality? FFXV has enough traditional male characters to do such, especially when it slightly verges to meta? Or why the hell can strong female characters only be androids or knights or valkyries? Why is the sword or fist but nothing in-between always "masculine" when dudes shot bows like bosses too?
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I think as a philosophical thing I like the idea of interrogating what we engage with daily or while growing up not for its failings, which we focus on so much in internet culture, but on where y'know... maybe this wasn't so bad. Maybe elements of positive and forward-looking messages slip through the cracks of male-centric creation processes and the demands of marketing.
I'll admit I also shy away from the indie space because I don't know it very well (aside from megahits like Celeste and Undertale), and also it's a space with a lot of single-creator auteur stuff, so the metrics are very different.
Beyond that I'm not sure how to engage with the ways the industry became so exclusionary without broad strokes assumptions since I'm not familiar with the creation process in games directly, and well.. I feel like exploring that is more getting into the negative space which is valuable, just not really what I was looking to do here.
Positive masculinity definitely has a place in this discussion! I am perhaps not the one to dig into that.
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The DLiest if challenges assess SaGa Frontier as a feminist work probably as individual paths but the whole is great if you’ve the energy send post
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Well I am pretty sure there is one way to work on that gap in indie stuff that lines up with advice I had been giving you >_>
Now a developer that specifically works towards a feminist agenda is an interesting one. None come to mind but that is because Dev teams tend to work away in obscurity either by design in Triple A for marketing purposes or just in actual obscurity because of no visibility.
Also there is the question of like, do you put a lower limit on team size? Like a one person studio count if that person isenrifies as a Feminist?
Probably the noteworthy one is Motion Twin, they are an attempt to run as an anarcho syndicalist collective (https://www.kotaku.com.au/2018/07/game-studio-with-no-bosses-pays-everyone-the-same/) but they are sort of known for the success of the game (Dead Cells) rather than that. It is also conflating chunks of my socialism with feminism (though ofc I think they are tightly intertwined)
Some pet favorites from local stuff, Route 59 who are working on Necrobarista (https://www.necrobarista.com/) generally seems pretty on board, but that is based on hanging out on their discord and them being generally super cool people and being small enough that they can just be social on the internet.
Otherwise you get into smaller teams, I should probably be able to think of more, but from a panel at PAX I can throw a shout out to Glamow (https://glamow.itch.io/) who were super cool at the best panel at PAX Aus and a good representation of just how deep the rabbit hole of Indie games expressing a singular idea can get.
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An interesting topic and one I want to give a more thoughtful response to than a cynical "yes, games are that bad" in a feminist context. Have a bunch of scattered thoughts and if I try to organize them, I'll never get around to putting any of them down so rambling follows:
Not everyone here is going to see feminism the same way. Which is OK until people start laying into each other trying to convince someone their point of view is wrong. My stand is for a society where women have an equal playing field so to speak. Ideally, they would have the same opportunities are far as life paths to take without others shutting doors on them because of being female. This does include a society where women aren't experiencing sexual assault at a far higher percentage than men though that's a conversation for a different space.
What constitutes a strong female character? Can someone be girly-girl in appearance and even have some of the same stereotypical interests and still be a strong female. Jessica of Lunar says hi. She's capable of looking and acting ladylike and also likes adventuring. She's also very willing to speak her mind. If she encounters someone objectifying women, that someone has a tongue lashing coming and possibly a beating too, even if never shown. The first character that came to mind with the original question is Alys Brangwim of Phantasy Star 4. She's a skilled professional who is aware that some are attracted to her feminine traits. She doesn't posture and doesn't turn into a "love-starved twit" over the attention she receives. Alas, not the main character and (REDACTED) so PS4 doesn't really fit the feminist game criteria.
Being a action girl like Samus, destroyer of planets, is not the only way to be a strong female, I feel. I do find it a Good Thing (TM) that such characters exist so that women and girls can picture themselves in such roles though would prefer that not being a stopping point. Not a game but Belle from the animated Beauty and the Beast manages to be a strong female lead without ever needing to "prove" herself by getting into a brawl and coming out on top. Letting women choose how they wish to express themselves without condemning them is an important element of feminism, I feel. If a women enjoys frilly dresses and tea parties as a voluntary, conscious choice and someone condemns her as being non-feminist, well that doesn't say anything about her but says a lot about someone's compulsion to criticize.
One more random thought before I peace out. I'm going to single out Atelier Meruru. Haven't played it but do have a little bit a familiarity with the premise from outside sources. Meruru is altruistic royalty who deosn't care for pretentiousness and wants to use alchemy for the benefit of the citizens. She's a capable fighter who willingly fights dragons head-on if she's looking for dragon ingredients for alchemy. So far, so good. Her outfit has an extremely short skirt and it may be intentional design for the purpose of showing off her bloomers. Does her appearance make her non-feminist? The line will be different from person to person. There isn't a set right or wrong point of view. I did deliberately provide an example that will make some readers uncomfortable. My take is that she can still be a strong character in actions and character and that exploitative appearance alone isn't enough to make her weak. Sometimes it's obvious a line has been crossed (what happened to the Valis games) but things aren't always so cut and dry.
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Well I am pretty sure there is one way to work on that gap in indie stuff that lines up with advice I had been giving you >_>
Now a developer that specifically works towards a feminist agenda is an interesting one. None come to mind but that is because Dev teams tend to work away in obscurity either by design in Triple A for marketing purposes or just in actual obscurity because of no visibility.
Also there is the question of like, do you put a lower limit on team size? Like a one person studio count if that person isenrifies as a Feminist?
Probably the noteworthy one is Motion Twin, they are an attempt to run as an anarcho syndicalist collective (https://www.kotaku.com.au/2018/07/game-studio-with-no-bosses-pays-everyone-the-same/) but they are sort of known for the success of the game (Dead Cells) rather than that. It is also conflating chunks of my socialism with feminism (though ofc I think they are tightly intertwined)
Some pet favorites from local stuff, Route 59 who are working on Necrobarista (https://www.necrobarista.com/) generally seems pretty on board, but that is based on hanging out on their discord and them being generally super cool people and being small enough that they can just be social on the internet.
Otherwise you get into smaller teams, I should probably be able to think of more, but from a panel at PAX I can throw a shout out to Glamow (https://glamow.itch.io/) who were super cool at the best panel at PAX Aus and a good representation of just how deep the rabbit hole of Indie games expressing a singular idea can get.
I checked all of those out a little bit ago after you had already posted this. Thanks for sharing this. You know I always found feminism more useful as a tool rather than some ontological pinnacle. From the last posts I'm now comfortable redirecting my thought to how feminism my be useful within the industry, for contemporary game and narrative development, and for reconsidering Old Things.
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Depends what is meant by the question. Feminism is kind-of trendy right now, so companies will try to ride that wave at least on a shallow level. Overwatch is about 50% female in its cast for example.
The games market has also been 50% female for a while now, like more than 10 years, just the female-audience games are much more like facebook and mobile games, which are not really the focus of the RPGDL (unless they are facebook or mobile games based off of Fire Emblem). A game with a more than 50% female audience doesn't necessarily make it feminist (you could argue about stereotypes when it comes to stuff like Cooking Mama). But such games will also avoid the kind of things that tend to drive away female audiences (such as scantily clad female charcters). So...free from stuff that actively drives away female audience, but often still a slave to the gender binary.
And obviously there are indie games that are actually feminist and made by feminists.
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https://jackofalltrdes.blogspot.com/2018/12/wright-wednesday-turnabout-sisters-day.html
The presentation is a bit internet video (it's all text, but ... well anyway) but they get into how Mia's death is used in the first PW game and it feels relevant to the discussion, in part because most folk here have in fact played Phoenix Wright.
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The writers there do a pretty good job of going into that one. Fridging is an unfortunate trope, but Mia's case has enough huge asterisks (the fact that informs Maya's motivation as much as Phoenix's, the fact that she continues to play a major plot role) that it feels like a rather non-egregious version. Still happy to see it brought up.
The games market has also been 50% female for a while now, like more than 10 years, just the female-audience games are much more like facebook and mobile games, which are not really the focus of the RPGDL (unless they are facebook or mobile games based off of Fire Emblem). A game with a more than 50% female audience doesn't necessarily make it feminist (you could argue about stereotypes when it comes to stuff like Cooking Mama). But such games will also avoid the kind of things that tend to drive away female audiences (such as scantily clad female charcters). So...free from stuff that actively drives away female audience, but often still a slave to the gender binary.
I think a lot of this is spot on too. Although I am somewhat inclined to quibble with the scantily-clad female characters bit. To use the example already referenced, well, the aforementioned mobile Fire Emblem has quite its share of those, and enjoys (anecdotally at least) a large female audience. Though in FEH's case (and other such games successful with women), (a) there are a wide variety of female characters and the state of dress varies tremendously, so it's easy for a player to choose what appeals to her, and (b) there's definitely some similar fanservice involving the male characters too, if not as often.
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I would be really interested to see how Fortnite breaks down by gender, on that note.
Recently reminded of this because I was watching TV and there was a commercial for...some streaming thing, don't recall what, starring Ninja taking a young black girl under his wing - kind of a strange spot considering Ninja is on record saying he won't stream with women because he's apparently a younger Mike Pence, but the more interesting part there is the target audience.
Fortnite's playership is about 75% male, 25% female, apparently (compared to a 7% playership of FPSs generally, according to that other study). Not sure about age breakdown but anecdotally, dominated by teens. I couldn't begin to make a serious argument about gender roles in Fortnite, but if we're looking at where games are headed, the one with the biggest media presence is a good place to start.
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There was an article about Ninja in ESPN magazine last month. The reason he doesn't team up with females is because he doesn't want to stress the relationship with his wife. Which I understand. Gaming partners have a version of intimacy (not sexual, but closeness) that can be stronger than real life at times.
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What a profitably unbold and convenient damage control statement to make.
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The response to that for me is basixally the same as for Mike Pence: if you're creating a special space for networking and advancement and that space can only be occupied by men, you're reinforcing the glass ceiling.