Electronic Gender Politics – Part 2 of 2
Alyx Vance – The problem with Alyx Vance is that there are two of her. Interesting Alyx, co-star of the non-episodic iteration of Half-Life 2 (the full game), might be the best female video game character ever. A resistance leader among the humans fighting back against the sinister alien combine, Alyx didn’t fall into any of the standard pitfalls of a female video game character: she isn’t oversexualized, she isn’t another bland white hero, and when she faces a problem, she deals with it rather than whining for a big strong man to come help her. Sure, she gets captured at one point in the game and you have to go rescue her along with her father, but to be fair, her introduction in the game is when you get captured and she comes and rescues you, so turnabout is fair play as far as I’m concerned. On balance, Interesting Alyx kicks so much ass you feel like she should be issued a permit.
The problem is Frustrating Alyx. Frustrating Alyx is Alyx’s identical twin sister that replaced her at the start of Half-Life 2: Episode One when no one was looking, and has been with us ever since. Frustrating Alyx spends so much time needing to be rescued that I swear at one point a Combine soldier told me he was sorry my resistance leader was in another castle. I’m actually starting to suspect Frustrating Alyx is just Princess Peach in a very elaborate costume. I mean, the entire first third of Episode Two consists of a long, involved quest to obtain a magical healing salve for her when she’s on her deathbed, and that’s not even the worst example: near the beginning of Episode One, upon encountering forcibly modified humans, Alyx freaks out to the point where she is practically begging you to hold her and make the bad people go away. This is a woman who, in the game prior to this, casually and single-handedly picks fights with squads of the genetically modified secret police and wins easily. She’s the only character in the series who is equal in badassery to the main character himself. So why, all of a sudden, does she need rescuing all the damn time? Once I can live with: having it happen over and over and goddamn over is just insulting. I liked Alyx a lot more when she was my equal rather than someone I could feel big and strong for saving. Interesting Alyx makes brief re-appearances during the sniping segments of both Episode One and Episode Two, but on the whole, she’s a character that ultimately let me down. But it’s a sad truth that despite that, she’s still one of the best of this bunch.
Samus Aran – Samus is the most unusual entrant on here. For starters, she’s probably the most popular character on this list. The Metroid games have sold a ton of copies, and for good reason: they’re about an intergalactic bounty hunter with more gadgets and powers than a James Bond/X-Men crossover who fights space pirates, sentient macroviruses, and a very persistent gigantic space Pterodactyl. Really, what isn’t to love? Yet, for the first few games no one had any idea she was even a woman. Most likely, it is because she is as talkative as Gordon Freeman and dresses like this:
Not pictured: your face, since she just shot it off.
But you know what? We were fine with the revelation when we learned it. We were more than fine with it – we thought it was great. Hey, this badass character we already love is actually a woman? Cool! We can totally respect that! It seemed like a brand new day for women in video games, a day when a female character wouldn’t take a backseat to anyone and needn’t be defined by her physique, but on the same standards by which we judged her male counterparts: namely, how much ass they could kick and for how long.
Then we started perpetrating shit like this:
Because it makes perfect sense for someone whose job consists of getting shot at to wear something that would cause her to be defeated by a stiff breeze.
Pictured: Intergalactic Bounty Hunter Mammaries Aran.
Godfuckingdammit! No! Those would not fit in that suit without seriously and irreparably damaging her internal organs.
Look, I’m fine with Samus being blonde and attractive. Ms. Marvel’s blonde and attractive, and she’s still an intelligent, thoughtful character without giving up the fact that she’s a badass. But why, when the gaming community finally discovered that Samus happened to possess a different chromosome than we had initially realized, was there a sudden, desperate rush to oversexualize her? I don’t like to believe the stereotype about most gamers having never seen a woman naked, but really, when we as a community do shit like this it’s not helping. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just desperate fans who were drawing these things, but Nintendo are the ones who elected to give one of her iterations in the Prime games a skintight turquoise cat suit. Really, Nintendo, you’ve only got three properties you actually produce games for, I’d prefer it if you’d stop encouraging people to ruin them for me.
The other problem with Samus is even worse: sure, she’s a female character…which means what, exactly? The character literally has no personality beyond the fact that she can contort into a tiny ball and shoots explosive bolts of energy out of her arm. Now, to be fair, those are desirable character traits, but they really don’t mean much. She was a woman, yes…but ultimately they did nothing with it. It was like saying she had blue eyes; ok, it’s true, but it doesn’t mean anything within a larger context.
This is just getting depressing. I mean, my God, is there any female video game character who doesn’t have some major presentational flaw? Is there anyone who could possibly…
Jaina Proudmoore – …holy crap. Holy crap! There IS one! I can’t believe I didn’t think of the Warcraft Universe’s Jaina Proudmoore sooner. In Warcraft III, she’s the only human character both prescient enough to see the writing on the wall concerning the Undead plague of the Scourge and courageous enough to assume the mantle of leadership and lead her people across the sea, saving her civilization in the process – which means she is different from literally every single male human leader in the game, all of whom ignore the dire warnings despite being told by the Prophet Medivh about them in no uncertain terms. In fact, Medivh only comes to her after first going to the reigning king of Lordaeron, the crown prince of Lordaeron, and Jaina’s mentor, the Archwizard of the kingdom of Dalaran. All of them categorically reject him. He must’ve been kicking himself after the fact that he didn’t just go to Jaina in the first place if she was the only one with enough common sense to see reason. Later she’s the only one of the human higher-ups to put aside the old racist hatreds and work together with the other races towards the common goal of peace. In Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, she ultimately sides with those same other races against her own father when she realizes that his plans would include the systematic genocide of everyone who isn’t human. In World of Warcraft’s meta-story (it has one, I promise, and the game designers care about it quite a lot – which makes it a shame that 98% of the player base doesn’t), she has consistently been the only voice on the Alliance side calling for peace, moderation, and maybe the tiniest bit of common sense (which, again, makes her different from every male character on the Alliance side). Also, during all of this, she is the most accomplished and powerful mage in the world, and we haven’t even talked about the fact that when her love, Arthas, begins to fall to the dark side, Jaina pulls an anti-Padme Amidala and gets the hell away from the psychopath, ultimately working to end his reign of terror (and serving an instrumental role in doing so). Her very first appearance in the game even mocks the damsel in distress trope; when two male characters encounter her being pursued by a few monsters, one of them suggests that they need to go rescue her. The other (Arthas before he went darkside) tells his friend that no no, she doesn’t need any help…after which Jaina proceeds to calmly obliterate the monsters like it’s nothing. Ok, so chalk up one for the good guys; I legitimately cannot find a single thing to dislike about the way Jaina Proudmoore is presented.
End Conclusion – It’s honestly difficult to tell if progress is being made. Game writers (and gamers) usually don’t seem to be the “them damned ladyfolk, let us put them in their place” sort of sexist, but rather in a way that comes from what appears to be a lack of practical experience. Some of them are at least inconsistently good; the Half Life 2 writers are the best example of this. But then in that case (and some others) it seems to oscillate; Interesting Alyx was great, while Frustrating Alyx started the cliche hoedown and only occasionally looked back. And since Bayonetta was released within the last year, while the original Metroid games (you know, the ones before the cat suit debacle) were released over a decade ago…I mean, I don’t even know what to think. I have to consider, in the end, that maybe the issue isn’t so much that video games consistently fail to present complex, interesting, and non-stereotypical female characters, but that they consistently fail to present those characters of either gender. I mean, hell, most male video game characters are rage-fueled, hormone-driven psychopaths.
Still, there are a small number of male characters who do succeed…and there are one or two female characters who also pull it off; Jaina Proudmoore is evidence of that. Since games are a new medium by comparison to other forms of storytelling, maybe they do just need to be given more time. I’ll continue to be hopeful. What choice do I have, really? I love video games, and that’s not going to stop any time soon.
