I just saw this. A bit of a shame. I didn't always 100% agree with her but the video game industry did and still does need this sort of pointed critique
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The Lady Sidekick - Tropes vs. Women in Video Games
- Thread starter Garrett Hawke
- Start date
I just saw this. A bit of a shame. I didn't always 100% agree with her but the video game industry did and still does need this sort of pointed critique
Garrett Hawke
Member
Tropes vs. Women was only initially supposed to be a five episode series that inflated when she got more kickstarter money than she expected.
She always enivisioned it ending at some point, and FemFreq will be moving on to other things.
All of her Tropes vs. Women series is really good, but the "DLC mini episodes" are really succinct.
If you'd like something not about games, they also did a series called Ordinary Women, which are five videos about women in history you may not have heard of.
Anita's videos are great in general. She's shed /a lot/ of light on the problems inherent to the gaming industry and has undoubtedly helped it progress faster than it would without her input.
I hope we see more from her soon.
Sure, but they don't fit with the series' themes.
I can't agree with Anita on this point, the way they handled this part was perfectly done imo.
I hope we see more from her soon.
Sure, but they don't fit with the series' themes.
I can't agree with Anita on this point, the way they handled this part was perfectly done imo.
Mandela's original revolution did not take power and he was jailed for 3 decades. (This is not to diminish him or his accomplishments, goals and legacy.) This is different from places like Russia, Cuba, etc. where the revolutionaries did gain power.
CannonFodder52
Member
meltingparappa
Member
Tentatively curious what she would say about Nier, but this seems like the game that would never be on her radar.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Bingo. Infinite is pulling resources from US slavery and Civil Rights ultimately to not really have much to say other than "learn to protest against your oppressor the right way." It's that attitude that lead us to people policing how PoC and women should protest. It's what lead to people actually argue that a white supremacist nazi shouldn't get punched for saying what he wants to say. That message is dangerous.
NoblesseOblige
Banned
Honestly, as much as I enjoyed the earlier videos they quickly became repetitive and I fell off watching them even despite agreeing with most the points. I think she's covered what needs to be covered in the series but going forward I would be interested in just seeing games being reviewed under a more feminist lens to see where they may succeed or fail.
While I agree more with your interpretation than with her's, this statement is factually wrong.
The one that deals with the intersection of sexism and racism (I think it was the previous one) was great.
I'm not a fan of her new direction, since ultimately I feel like the biggest problem with TvW was how it was too broad and had a tendency to get details wrong due to her focus on trying to cover gaming as a whole rather than focusing on specific examples (Even in this thread you can see people noting how she made a mistake)
I'm still excited to see what else she can make, but I'm worried the series is going to suffer more from the same flaws that TvW has due to how she's aiming to go even broader with her subject material than before.
I'm still excited to see what else she can make, but I'm worried the series is going to suffer more from the same flaws that TvW has due to how she's aiming to go even broader with her subject material than before.
Interesting but I think the two Naughty Dog examples are quite poor. Chloe in Uncharted more obviously so as she, along with the other main female characters throughout the series, are always shown as equally adept as the main character in combat and traversal. If the sole issue is her complementing the character then that's a bit odd since the male characters in the series do the same thing too. I have no issue with the women shouting 'good shot!' or whatever, if they're portrayed as equally competent. As she says in the video, it's simply positive reinforcement regardless of gender.
I also don't have a problem with Ellie in The Last Of Us. For starters, she's a young girl who has very little experience of the world outside where she grew up, which is why she can't swim. It's essential to the plot that she and Joel not only have to develop a bond but also that the bond is one resembling a father/daughter relationship, one in which Joel feels compelled to protect her.
It would be far more incongruous if a young girl was suddenly thrust into the world able to swim and wield guns adeptly, and it would probably be detrimental to the story arc. Regardless of Joel having to help her across water or up ladders, she is shown as smart, capable and the tables turn when she has to look after herself and take care of Joel later in the game.
I do enjoy the tropes videos but occasionally they do have a tendency to rob things of their complete context in order to make a quick point.
I also don't have a problem with Ellie in The Last Of Us. For starters, she's a young girl who has very little experience of the world outside where she grew up, which is why she can't swim. It's essential to the plot that she and Joel not only have to develop a bond but also that the bond is one resembling a father/daughter relationship, one in which Joel feels compelled to protect her.
It would be far more incongruous if a young girl was suddenly thrust into the world able to swim and wield guns adeptly, and it would probably be detrimental to the story arc. Regardless of Joel having to help her across water or up ladders, she is shown as smart, capable and the tables turn when she has to look after herself and take care of Joel later in the game.
I do enjoy the tropes videos but occasionally they do have a tendency to rob things of their complete context in order to make a quick point.
This is the only problem I have with Anita's videos, sometimes her points feel a little thoughtless like she's inventing issues for ammo.
The frustrating part is she doesn't need ammo, the industry is rife with proper examples of this.
One that stood out in the past was her critique of Women as window dressing (I think it was this one), where she used footage from New Vegas to show a brothel. That game had a male brothel too, though, so it was more of an example of a game that did it right (or at least was striving much harder for equality than most) and should have been used accordingly.
It just feels a little lazy in comparison to the times she doesn't do this.
excelsiorlef
Member
And Quiet exposes a lot of skin because she has to photosynthesize... narratives explanations don't make the tropes not tropes.
Really...?
Ellie not being able to swim is pretty realistic and understandable when you factor in the setting and Ellie's harsh upbringing. It's obviously not something they simply added to make her more fragile or some shit. Ellie is very tough and competent in the game overall, especially for her age but she's still a kid. I don't see how her needing help from a parent figure is sexism/damsel in distress.
The fact that you compare that with Quiet and her bullshit reasoning for being half-naked and to be ogled at is very disingenuous of you.
You are missing the point entirely.
The problem of the trope isn't "Is this justified well enough to be okay"
The problem of the trope is that it happens over and over and over and over and over again, across games (and other media as well). Sometimes it's well justified, sometimes it's not. But even in a well written game with a fully fleshed out character, there is a section where you basically have to babysit your female sidekick because she can't do (insert basic action here).
It's not a matter of whether you can find a good enough excuse to make it plausible. It's the fact that our most basic language in how we depict women involves these things to an overwhelming degree.
I can't agree with this at all.
Characters need to be flawed in certain ways to be real enough to work. Ellie's inability to swim went against her head-strong nature and gave her some fragility which is kind of essential to building a character.
I get the trope exists, but I think ND handled it perfectly well here.
DealWithIt
Member
Creative intent doesn't work that way. Art has to speak for itself. Ken can go out on the record and see what he was trying to do all he wants, but that doesn't close the door. The rest of your post is very long, but my general response is that just because you like a game doesn't mean it doesn't have narrative flaws, and she is pointing out several major ones. It might still be a fantastic game and it might have lots of redeeming qualities but it's open to critique and that critique can be meaningful.
I mostly agree. I think she needed to engage with that subject matter quite a bit more to have her point be strong enough. It's especially problematic when you consider how the game inverts and makes Ellie the protector. i'm disappointed that she failed to engage with that aspect of the story.
Gormenghast
Member
I think this is always an issue of emergence stuff.
Making a female character fragile is okay. Having a trend of female characters that are fragile instead becomes a trope.
Individual cases are always legitimate. It's fiction and it has freedom of expression to tell a specific story. But then you start to examine a number of cases, and start tracing a pattern that repeats over and over, and that definitely exposes a bias.
So one should always be wary of confusing the two levels, but they ultimately get confused a lot.
Making a female character fragile is okay. Having a trend of female characters that are fragile instead becomes a trope.
Individual cases are always legitimate. It's fiction and it has freedom of expression to tell a specific story. But then you start to examine a number of cases, and start tracing a pattern that repeats over and over, and that definitely exposes a bias.
So one should always be wary of confusing the two levels, but they ultimately get confused a lot.
Diprosalic
Banned
i think this was her best video so far.
meltingparappa
Member
Well you certainly get your christmas wish, at least on an extremely topical level.
excelsiorlef
Member
I said nothing about it being handled well or poorly, merely that a narrative explanation doesn't make it not a trope....
Anita has said repeatedly having tropes does not make it a game bad, but those tropes are worth pointing out.
So, any fictional situation/event where a female character needs help from a man falls under "damsel in distress", no matter what circumstance or the fact it's a child being helped by a parent? I don't see how an adult helping out a 14 year old child in a zombie apocalypse is contrived and part of a sexist trope.
The trope and negative connotation lose all it's meaning with such a broad and blunt definition imo.
Agreed.
☝️
https://youtu.be/4BrKqEtG-2w
Transcript here https://feministfrequency.com/video/the-lady-sidekick/
This is the last Tropes vs. Women episode
What's she doing afterwards? Just the women in history series?
Anita playing the "oh haha too complicated a topic to talk about" when starting off with BioShock Infinite. Tell us how you really feel.
I think this is one of her weaker episodes just because a lot of her complaints aren't actually related to stuff devs can control (obviously they design the characters, for instance) but the realities of game design. Elizabeth was lauded as an awesome character in the game because she cannot get in your way, in a world of games where escort missions and "keep NPCs alive" are often the surest way to immediately make people angry. Making NPCs feel like living people is incredibly difficult to do, and Infinite's solution was to sideline her not because she was a woman, but because it made building encounters easier. The clearest indication of that is that once we reach the scripted walking simulator portion of the game, Elizabeth attains the godlike powers and suddenly becomes more powerful than Booker. Because now there's nothing interfering with the game systems.
(Mostly this is perfect timing for this video because it's like diametrically opposed to the "games shouldn't have stories" piece we had recently.)
Arguing that these characters are disproportionately female is a fair criticism, but when regardless of gender all NPCs have the same critical weaknesses, it's disingenuous to extrapolate to the degree she does.
Where is the line though? Tropes like "damsel in distress" exist, but equality isn't about turning female characters into flawless super heroes.
Quiet was ridiculous, no doubt, but Ellie was handled very well to the point she kind of defies tropes more than supports them.
I mean, as someone point out above there's even an entire section where it inverts and she becomes the protector.
The point is, at no point in TLoU did I feel like Ellie was a damsel. People with flaws needing help doesn't make them damsels, it's the way it's handled that does.
Gormenghast
Member
Neither does literary criticism.
Death of the Author is a school of thought, and far from being some universal and undisputed canon. There are many others.
Saying that "interpretations cannot be incorrect" is not exactly right either, because it's not a matter of absolute Truths. Interpretations are legitimate, and validated by the strength of their arguments. There are a myriad of positions, and the truer and most valid one is about giving each enough relevance. That means not closing the interpretation to ONE angle. That's almost always very wrong and severely hampers any real comprehension of what you're looking at.
So, to reduce a work to one unilateral angle doesn't do that work any justice and it's as "wrong" as it gets. The writer's intention does count, and a lot. Because it will likely have far more evidence to support itself than any other angle, realistically.
Garrett Hawke
Member
She hasn't said what they're doing next, but I don't see how that's "playing a card"?
Bioshock infinite's presentation of race and power IS a completely different topic that isn't really relevant to sidekicks in gaming, considering the racial component has little to do with Booker and Elizabeth.
No. That's not how stereotypes work.
For example, think of the racism of the stereotypes that black people love grape juice and watermelon.
There's nothing wrong with liking grape juice or watermelon. They're delicious. And there are certainly plenty of black people who love them.
But cultural depictions of black people liking those things have become a stereotype, and it's bad to perpetuate that.
Does that mean you, if you were a writer can never ever write a black character who loves watermelon and grape juice? No, of course not.
But it is nevertheless a stereotype. And that is the real point here. That, whether it's in good stories or bad, we commonly put female characters in roles of basic utility and it's important that we know we're writing them like that when we do.
The in-universe narrative explanation makes sense and is unimpeachable, sure. Ellie can't swim because she never would have learned, so if she encounters a body of water, she'll have trouble.
The problem with this guy of explanation is that it treats the environment and gameplay loop as exogenous, not as things the developer chose. I feel like your explanation presupposes the developer was presented with "okay, there's water here. Ellie wouldn't know how to swim, so how do we design a gameplay system that solves that problem?", but, of course, that's not what happened.
Naughty Dog made a decision to create a gameplay set piece around getting Ellie across water. They could have made it happen within a cutscene, or could have not had water as an obstacle at all, but that's not the choice they took. I feel "but is it well-justified in-universe" kind of misses the mark as an objection here.
Then why did she even bring it up then as an exemple? It's obviously not a hurtful or sexist use of the 'trope', which her series focuses on. Seems to me she just brought it up simply because Ellie is female and the player helps her, which is the whole gist of my complaint.
Any individual example of the trope might be harmless, or narratively justified. It's relatively easy to come up with narrative justifications for tropes! But when a certain kind of person keeps getting placed in a certain kind of situation repeatedly, across games, the repetition and frequency becomes a story onto its own, and saying "here's another example" to establish that it's a common thing is fair game, even if any one example isn't egregious on its own.
John Caboose
Member
Awesome, will watch later today.
Because it's still a use of the trope. How well it's done isn't the point. You're stuck on the idea of "Well, there must be no problem if it's done well." That doesn't matter in this context. You can always find an example of any trope done well.
The problem of the trope isn't how it's done in any particular game. The problem of the trope is that it is done in so many. It's an issue of the quantity of its usage, not quality.
There is also a dimension to her argument of how this trope is used to lessen Ellie, even with the justifications in place, but the foremost issue is that this is a typical way to depict women in the first place.
Tizoc
Member
Why's that? It'd be a shame if she focuses mostly on mainstream games since there are various good female characterization examples in some lesser known games.
Tentatively curious what she would say about Nier, but this seems like the game that would never be on her radar.
Death of the Author. Authorial intent has little to anything to do with how a work can be interpreted. After all, the Author could have screwed up horribly with how he or she presented their message, or they could be talking out of their ass, or so on.
Garrett Hawke
Member
Same.
We kind of see this from IGN sometimes, sometimes Polgyon, sometimes Kotaku, but it's usually only when a game is bad. When a game is amazing (see BOTW), bad representation is never really discussed.
*fwiw I think BOTW has good representation overall but at the same time is hamstrung by the damselled Zelda.
A writer can't retroactively eliminate their mistakes with a "Bu-but I didn't mean that!" later, you know.
So what is the end game, should all games completely avoid having the player help a female characther no matter what, at all times?
Making Ellie not able to swim is used to lessen her? With this mindset I guess all female charcthers should be designed without any flaws, because even realistic and benign flaws like not being able to swim is apparentely a trope.
Garrett Hawke
Member
That's silly because she also uses TLOU as a good example.
It's not black and white, Ellie being a good character that is contextualised within the game does not mean she can't still exhibit Tropes, etc.
Like Tomb Raider 2013 has Sam get damselled. She's rescued by Lara, another woman, so it's subverted and contextualised but she is still damselled.
No, the end game is people who are making games ask themselves "why are we including this sequence? Is it interesting, does it move the story and relationships forward, is it fun? Are we relying on or leaning on a lazy trope, or is this motivated by the story we want to tell?"
And sometimes the answer will be "we should keep this in", and sometimes the answer will be "we probably shouldn't". But by naming and contextualising the situation, we get tools that help us think and talk about it, and think about how it fits in the canon of (games) storytelling.
The point isn't to stamp anything out.
The way Zelda is presented initially is that of a steadfast heroine marching into danger to protect her people after the hero was struck down.
Does this become undone later on with classic damsel tropes? I wasn't expecting this game to be wonderful in that regard, but it would be a real shame if she just slides into damsel mode.
Garrett Hawke
Member
I haven't finished it yet, so this isn't really a spoiler so much as my impressions and what I've heard down the grapevine. I'll tag it anyway.
despite setting up Zelda to have a more active role, the game doesn't really allow her to do that and she is stuck in the castle pretty much the entire time. Everyone constantly reminds Link that he needs to go help her, but she's an afterthought - when you're running around completing side quests and finding things you really don't care about her, or even think about her. When she is shown in flashbacks, she has very little agency, and when she does she is almost solely defined by protecting others by... not doing anything active. It's very trope-y in that regard.
However obviously thatbgame has a range of female characters, many of whom are awesome.