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[Loud Whispers]

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Always being the prize rather than someone you get to play as is a really shitty position to be in.

This is the exact same argument that says the nominative and accusative case is misogynist.
Except it's also intellectually dishonest in being such a massive gross oversimplification.

Mass Effect has literally changed my life.  It is the first time when I have played a game and thought: "Wow.  I am the target audience for this game.  A lot of this was done with the intent of making me happy."

See:

What exactly would be a woman-focused or a gender neutral show? Bonus points if you describe it without using any of the women stereotypes you hate so much.

Crap, I wish I watched more tv for women...
I know Charmed was really popular. I have vaguely heard about it, and it sounded kind of crappy. Still, anybody with first hand knowledge know if it is actually good?

Charmed was a really good show, the plot was solid and the characters were endearing and well written. I didn't even notice it was supposed to be a women's show until you lot started talking about it now, which is the way I think things should be; people not automatically judging shows and characters by their genders. I didn't feel:
"Hey, this show really is meant for me!"
I felt:
"This show is really nice, excellent even!"

  There really is a dearth of games where women get to see themselves doing things.  If they're doing something, they're almost inevitably sexualized all to hell and back.  See games like Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, for an example that I've played.  Dudes get clothing.  Gals literally get stripper gear.

Gals get the option to wear stripper gear. They also get the option to wear bulky combat gear.
One of the ways to solve problems easily for women is to sex everything, or intimidate, fight, persuade, talk or go all CIA-ninja-diplomat on everyone.
Men don't get stripper option ;-;

I don't care if it's a parody or not (see: Bayonetta).  Why should all the games in which I get to play as a girl be sexualized, whether as parody or played straight?

Why shouldn't the designers be able to follow up on their concept art and the game they created, without executive or audience meddling? There was a rather well known example a while back of that game where some tumblr white knight was criticizing a game dev for making one of the characters have large breasts under alleged pressure from lolicon-grognards [seriously]. The game dev then released the concept art of not just that character, but several muscly-man bears in speedos, highlighting just how much they planned before making the game.

Always being the prize rather than someone you get to play as is a really shitty position to be in.  The fact that the symbol of strength, avenging her lover, is female is a good step.  But that is very different from the crowning motivation of the main character.

I find this quite demeaning to the characters, in that you only look at whether they are man or woman before you look at their strengths. You don't look at who they are, their flaws and powers - nope!

If a man holds the door for me, I assume he intends

c. I'm polite, not a dipshit.

+1

You know, for all of the rage against Sarkeesian, I think there's something in particular we're missing: her videos are not trying to say "hey, this is what I want," but rather she's trying to deconstruct the ways in which these games which are supposed to have "mass appeal" declare themselves as "no girls allowed, not for you."  It's a medium.  Why is it gendered.

Why is she so bad at doing that?

(by the way, here's a hint.  There is a very high female demand for games in the genres I happen to like.  We're still not getting our games.  I wonder why that is.  Oh, right, because the industry mistakenly thinks that women are just fine playing stuff that marginalizes us, and men won't play games where they're not the leads.  Right.)

[No they just care about the demographic that gives them more money, they probably don't care whether you play it or not]. Where ignorance and hatred could be a valid explanation, assume ignorance. Where ignorance and hatred could be repaired, target ignorance. Where ignorance will fall, ignorant hatred will too.



ALL THE SINGLE AESIR

ALL THE SINGLE AESIR

BUT MJOLLNIR UP

WOAH DO HO HO HO HO~

The point isn't that it's sexist, it's that it's male-dominated.

Problem? The primary teaching career is so heavily women-dominated.
Should we be taking steps towards tearing down this obviously sexist distribution?

The Bechdel tests shows that a disturbing number of movies do not contain any interaction between women which doesn't center around men.  The reverse obviously isn't true, almost every movie have male characters discussing things or people who aren't women.

You put way too much value on gendered characters. Or rather, the gender you like. The first movie I thought of was AvP, where the female arctic researcher is talking to the other lass about why she was bringing a gun. This is relevant.
If they had started talking about what type of man they wanted to be subservient too, it'd be out of place shit writing.
How many movies cater to out of place shit writing?
[Michael Bay excluded].

WHO is selecting for male empowerment fantasies, though?

1. Most games are male escape fantasies, not empowering ones. This is a really big thing I feel Anita hasn't even touched upon with the weight of so much as a feather. And since most are escape fantasies, it says a lot when the overwhelming majority of players are men.
2. The same idiots with the money, who again and again after ruining franchises will still be able to work again, and AGAIN.
Case and point:
They turned engineer Isaac from a smart, schizoid engineer surviving [to such an extent you could call surviving] calamity with his resourcefulness and self reflection, into a jealous jocky crying over losing his waifu who is only capable of pushing buttons and completely ignored all of his mental conditions.
And the same people who did that will be allowed to do that to other games.
FUCKING FUCK FUCK EVERYTHING


In regards to her examples:
What the hell was her reasoning? [Of course we don't know, since she doesn't say - she only gives oversimplified-emotionally appealing anecdotes repeated to infinity and beyond].
Female characters take the roles that were once dominated by male characters, why is it when they face the violence male characters are subjected to, everything changes and it's indicative of sexism?
Dear Esther is a good example of how male characters should deal with loss?
He kills himself.
In regards to male domination = sexism
The game studios who listen to their fanbase and tailor it to them, reflect their fanbases rather well. GW is one of those companies who [when the stockholders aren't shooting them all] listen to their fanbase, which is an epic level male dominated fanbase.
However, most game studios don't listen to their fanbases. Are sexy characters wrong or sexist? Hell no. But they can break immersion so badly.

Protip: Neckbeards love immersion. They are bro-tier fanbase, and they have been abused by their overlords.
DOWN WITH THE INSTITUTION
Asuras Wrath was used as an example of promoting violence against women. She used Olga getting killed by the golden spider Chakravatin as that example, and Mithra being abused as another.
...
This is after Olga has just tried to destroy humanity with the Bramahstra and kill Mithra, Asura's daughter.
Through his entire story Asura is the only one of the eight generals who doesn't go around killing people with impunity; there's no doubt if Olga tried fighting Asura Asura would have killed her. But something about abusing his daughter for 12,500 years might have had some factor into his intent, and why on Earth would he suddenly change his intent when it's been the same for the other seven deities, even the ones who were his closest friends and mentors? Why on Earth would she use Mithra's abuse, the only thing Asura's living to fight against for, as the other example or justification?

And Olga's less sexualized than sexy Sergei!
[But that's sexism... Or something].
Dante's Inferno was about Dante coming to terms with his sins... Or not, depending on which road you went down. Beatrice was more a pawn of the archangels used to goad poor Dante into spoilers. He got plain up used. This makes a brilliant story. Beatrice isn't even close to a damsel in distress by the spoilers. How does it justify violence against women? If she wanted to use that game for that then she probably should have brought in the lust circle of hell, that level is literally only violence against women looking things.
Of course though, everything is dark and edgy. Batman.
Alan Wake
Ha ha ha ha ha
The master of sneer
[The overwhelming amount of people taken by the darkness are male, all the shades you kill are male. If his wife being taken is sexist, then what is it compared to the mass slaughter of men?]. This is because it's irrelevant. The plot doesn't even center around rescuing your wife, she is just what's anchoring you to the plot and stopping you from running away. It's around solving and stopping the mystery behind the crazy shindigs before more and more people die, as you truly understand the scope of the situation. And childhood Alan wake was sad in so many ways... This is again, a problem with the gross oversimplifications.
"Women are brutally murdered."
All got stomach wounds or headshots.
In God of War people get beaten to death with their own severed arms and Poseidon's eye gouging is infamously notorious. Nothing is morally certain in that game, whether you are like Mars in a frenzy in Actium or you are only fighting [selfishly?] for your own freedom, or perhaps humanity's freedom from the Gods. There isn't a conflict between man and woman there. Hell, you'd have a better time arguing that God of War promotes the mass slaughter of slaves and prisoners.
Gears of War:
She takes things wildly out of context for example, Dom in Gears of War. He kills her to put her out of her misery because she is being tortured and there is clearly no hope for her in this doomed world. The very fact that women are fighting is because they're out of fighters and they no longer can afford to keep women on the sidelines as breeding machines [it's that fucking grim]. The same thing happens with Tai. He however kills himself. Ultimately Dom kills himself because he is sick of having lost everything and wants to save his friends. He even shouts that he is doing it for his wife and kids. He is literally a martyr for them to end pain and suffering in their world. How in any way she even tried to twist Dom's character I have no idea.

Medieval 2:
You are revived by a scientist to fight against the BBEG who is resurrecting the undead to conquer the world.
Your girlfriend is killed by a jack the ripper villain, not the guy behind everything, just some murderer and you save her shortly after the game by going back in time and preventing that from happening, after that you resume your quest to kill the BBEG.

And what about Venetica or Never End where the protagonist is seeking revenge for the death of her boyfriend?
Mein context, rolling over mein eyes!

What irritates me most about her is her insistence that "the men only come to get the women because they want to give her the dick." Not even in detail is this explained, it's as superficial as that. She doesn't talk about how game developers try to invest the player into the relationships the characters share, or why female characters need a special aegis over male characters, or why characters already in a relationship shouldn't go rescue those close to them [because it would be sexist objectification], despite for some of the examples she had given that sexual objectification would have to be between family members and so on.

Her videos are all puritanical rants and an example of how to analyze subjects in the most shallow, skin-deep way possible. She makes no attempt to understand the underlying issues that cause the problem nor does she tackle the task of how they can be improved, she turns the problem of the gaming industry in its inability to experiment and make new risks into an issue of gender.

The renaissance was a movement that improved art and liberated it from many social stigmas, new materials and methods became readily available and were in the most part implemented with great success but the themes continued to be few in number; mainly portraits and representations of ideas associated with Christianity. Video games in a way are a similar reflection and technology has all improved the creativity, but the themes and story telling remain stale, with the majority of the 300,000 games being copies of the successful darers.
She feeds off this fact but twists it to match her perspective and what she intends to portray dishonestly, and she makes no effort to improve the medium, only point out cliches and say "men did this."

This all reminds me of Crying Freeman in which the husband and wife make a pact not to save each other if they get in trouble, for they believed that if they truly love one another, they would want their loved one not to risk their life for their sake and would rather die than for that to happen. Generally in a character driven story, you would expect loved ones to come for one another. She says that a character who loses everything is on a journey to recover their masculinity because they are a man, not that he is trying to rediscover his lost worth. A man is out to acquire something so trivial as an object - be willing to kill and die for an object, because he is a man, while she completely misses the actual point of why he holds such importance. A man wouldn't want his wife to suffer just because she has to be a strong independent woman and get out of it herself, because even if he was weaker than her - she is still worth risking his life for. That is what it is about, finding someone you hold higher than the world, because they have become your world, and defending it to all your ability. This is a universal romantic notion.

I like playing a girl, and I like the damsel in distress trope. It's not like guys are defecating on the corpses of women or disregarding them at all, the girls are important enough to risk their life for. It's a tragic experience when a girl dies, the male characters are usually horrified when they die; yet none of this is exclusive to female characters.
She talks of the kinesthetic violence orientated games, completely oblivious of just how the violence doesn't stand on its own - it factors into the setting and the characters themselves. The characters who are famous for their rage like Kratos and Asura are questioned along the entire journey of their story, "What do you live for?"
Treat your characters as people, and enjoy media.

[AlleeCat]

Thank you, Loud Whispers, for putting into words what I could not.

[Zangi]

Eh, maybe I do not relate to the main character as well as many other people with these damsel in distress games and similar in other media... 
But yea, the first thing that comes to mind is normally: "Oh hey, the girl/character/NPC I don't care about is getting kidnapped/fridged."

Maybe it is cause the 'damsels' have no... 'worthwhile character' to begin with?  Having nil significance to the player.  Just there as a simple motivator for the in-game character?  Even if the game has scenes with the main character thinking back on the damsel... they are still of no significance to me as the player.

Well, I don't pick up these sorts of games often...  So I'm not the target audience.


It might mean something if it was a significant member of my party and not done in a bullshit way?  Come to think of it... there are really no games that have a way for your minions/characters to get captured and later busted out or freed...
>.>  Jagged Alliance II has the closest thing to that...

[GlyphGryph]

In Chrono Trigger, the main character (male) is kidnapped and locked in prison, and Lucca (the girl) comes and rescues you if you fail to escape on your own. (And still arrives in the nick of time to save the day even if you manage that)

Of course, the main character there is still the dude, but I did like the inversion. And in fact, you end up rescued by the girls several times throughout the course of the game (in addition to rescuing them a few times as well), and every character, male and female, is quite capable of taking care of themselves.

It was very very refreshing, and it's a damned shame games that awesome can't be more common.

[Soadreqm]

Baldur's Gate II does it twice. Right after the tutorial dungeon, your sister Imoen gets sent to Wizard Jail along with the main antagonist, for being a wizard. You bust her out halfway through the game. Later, your love interest (if you have one) will get abducted and turned into a vampire, and you have to kill him/her and haul the body to be raised.

[Loud Whispers]

Thank you, Loud Whispers, for putting into words what I could not.

The pleasure's mine, I'm rather thankful that Anita at least triggered me into hours of most excellent research.

[Games are art. Nuff said].

Seriously though, so many games have so many stories in them, and about them. GTA has apparently always been a British satire of America as seen through the eyes of a Russian immigrant. The more you know.

[DJ]

Niko is ex-Yugoslavian

[Loud Whispers]

Niko is ex-Yugoslavian

In my defence, I haven't played GTA at length, I only know most of it through cultural osmosis.

_{[Please don't kill me former Yugoslavians]}

[Vector]

I think you need to worry more about the current Yugoslavians.

[Loud Whispers]

I think you need to worry more about the current Yugoslavians.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Chairs?

[Vector]

Rather, sorry: The Bosnian in this thread.

[Loud Whispers]

Rather, sorry: The Bosnian in this thread.

I never knew you were Bosnian!

[Neonivek]

I will admit I thought about making a parody game where you play an EXTREMELY stereotypical princess.

Where you have to save yourself after you have been kidnapped (after being trapped) by only using very stereotypically princess things like Cooking, cleaning, and singing.

But the problem with me is that I take everything far too seriously and after a while I actually liked the concept... but not as a Parody but rather as an unlikely hero using what they know to solve a problem.

To the point where I kind of would like the play that game done seriously.

[Vector]

Rather, sorry: The Bosnian in this thread.

I never knew you were Bosnian!

... I'm not... DJ is.

Wow, that was needlessly complicated >_>


I was going to say this, actually.  There is a semi-counterpart to the damsel in distress in woman-oriented media--the Grieving Knight, who just needs someone to love him and help him be less broken.  People often read Vegeta (DBZ), Garrus (ME; heck, it was even lampshaded), Vincent Valentine and Cloud Strife (FFVII), Lancelot (in all the Arthur stories post-French grafting), pretty much the entire cast of Naruto, Snake (Metal Gear), Sherlock Holmes (pretty much every representation), Claude Frollo (Hunchback of Notre Dame; again, all representations) and ... a whole bunch of other stuff that way.  Just look at which characters tend to get the most fanfiction written about them.  Almost all the time, it will be such a character.

How do you feel about it?  Genuine question.  See, I think it doesn't bother people because there's other things to their characterization than "I need help," which is why the Damsel in Distress thing is such a problem.  They don't have to be reduced to plot coupons, but they are.

I'm not talking about in games like Mario.  I'm talking more about stuff like Bioshock.

[Neonivek]

Well it isn't sort of the same thing in that...

The Damsel (which once again I think is now adays a unisex trope) loses their agency.