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Author Topic: Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'  (Read 309433 times)

Neonivek

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1800 on: June 05, 2013, 03:01:35 pm »

I did two minutes of research and yeah Dinosaur Planet turning into Starfox adventures had absolutely nothing to do with Krystal.

I mean nothing, it was a complete non-factor.

I didn't even have to do research because I knew this before hand, but I just had to make sure. Read interviews and what Dinosaur planet was.

The reason it was changed is as follows: They noticed similarities between Starfox and Dinosaur planet and thought it would do better as a Starfox game.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2013, 03:03:36 pm by Neonivek »
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Reelya

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1801 on: June 05, 2013, 03:31:11 pm »

Quote
They must not have thought the game would succeed with a Krystal as the main character, otherwise they wouldn't have worked for two years to remake it into a mere sequel.  They didn't scrap all that work on a whim, they did it because they thought the Damsel In Distress trope would sell their game better.  Tying in with Star Fox may also have been a real factor, but not the primary one - they could have linked the series without utterly destroying Krystal's agency, but didn't

They specifically said why they did it. Mainly that they wanted the Star Fox selling power behind it.

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The level, pits, powerups, and Peach are all objects they act upon or use.  The enemies are antagonists who try to stop them.

You are using your metaphors incorrectly right here. Since "Antagonist" is plot and "Peach is an object" is metaplot.

Yeah, its very wishy-washy here too from Anita, because nouns can be both subject and object depending on the relationship. It's a sleight of hand from Anita to always define the males as subjects and females as objects. Here's a primer on the grammar:

http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/sentenceunit.htm

Basically if Peach was to ever do anything, she's acting as the "subject" at that point. That would including giving the player a hint etc. That would make Peach the subject, and Mario the object, in relation to receiving the hint ... which blows Anita's clean little dichotomy out of the water. When you kill a monster, you're the subject and the monster is the object at that point in time in reference to that action, and vice-versa when a monster kills you. This shows no such 100%-of-the-time object / subject dichotomy exists, and it's purely an ass-pull so they can trot out the phrase "objectification". Mario is the object at any time any other actor is directing an action at him.

The reason this is a problem for Anita's specific line of argument, is that she starts from the grammatical subject/object dichotomy and works from there. But there is no such thing in that system as a subject/subject relationship, which would be required to make the "Mario and Bowser are both subjects" concept work. How would your write that as a sentence? It's completely illogical since they need to alternate being the subject and object of actions. Maybe there is a good argument to get there, but not from the set of premises that Anita starts from.

It's another example of where Anita is working backwards from her per-determined conclusion, and a few barely-related premises (and her metaphors fall apart if you even poke them slightly). But she loses herself in the "middle" - i.e. she babbles a bit of rhetoric to hide the fact that each end of the argument doesn't really fit together, just like the Starfox one.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2013, 03:42:19 pm by Reelya »
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Rolan7

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1802 on: June 05, 2013, 05:02:22 pm »

Right, the subject/object thing is a metaphor and simplification. She outright says it's a simplification, and it's clearly a metaphor because she's using sentence structure terminology to explain narrative structure.

It's not that great a metaphor, though. (Maybe it's an analogy not a metaphor, dunno)
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Soadreqm

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1803 on: June 05, 2013, 05:09:51 pm »

Domestic violence is about a power imbalance and abuse within a relationship. Physical abuse is horrific but secondary to this. It is a problem because people can't escape. They can't escape for family reasons, for economic reasons and for social reasons. The first two should be fairly obvious. The last one is where Anita's argument is focused. Because those social reasons are what these sorts of narratives re-enforce. It's these narratives that lead people to believe they deserve what is happening to them. That they would be in the wrong if they left. That they would be shunned by others if they reported the crimes.

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Where are the stories prevalent? I certainly never read them.
In common books and films (hell, try Twilight for starters). In the games that Anita used as examples. In courtrooms. In real life. In workplaces. In homes.

You have not actually shown that the narratives do that. I am now trying to picture an abused woman playing Zelda: Twilight Princess, getting to the part where you fight Zelda, and thinking:
"My God."
"That possessed princess is ME."
"My dead body has been possessed, and my boyfriend is forced to fight me. He is only cheating on me with whoever Midna is supposed to represent because they are working against the same advesary. I have to stand by him, so that he can go defeat Ganondorf and end the evil plaguing our relationship once and for all."
I do not think it evident that these beat-up-the-brainwashed-girl sequences really have anything to do with domestic violence. That bit where Zant kicks Midna out of her own kingdom might hit closer.

Also, is Twilight really the best example you can think of? It has not received a universally positive response. Indeed, from what I have heard, it is basically the worst book ever. I guess you could argue that its adversely affecting people who actually read it, ie. the target audience of teenage girls. Are you suggesting we should take measures against it? Protest this trampling of universal decency by not buying Twilight? Yeah, that's going to make a real impact. :P

As for courtrooms, and real life in general, those aren't really narratives that affect real life. They ARE the real life. That's what you were talking about, right? Narratives in fiction affecting how people see real life, because humans have a most unfortunate tendency to view things as narratives.

I mean the stories that people tell themselves and others to understand what is happening in the world. We like to relate events to stories we know and understand to help get a handle on them, especially if we don't have the details to comprehend the situation on its own. Putting aside these stories is hard, even if you recognise you are using them.

Ideally, people would put them aside. If your observations are based on narratives rather than objective reality, your conclusions run a pretty high chance of being factually incorrect, no matter how good the narratives are. :( About some of these courtroom thingies:

Quote
(1) ‘Violence’ means ‘physical assault’. By contrast to the feminist understanding of violence as the exercise of power and control producing fear, social stories about violence tend to define ‘violence’ exclusively to mean (serious) assaults producing physical injuries. This is evident, for example, in most domestic violence prevalence studies, which measure only the incidence of physical and sexual assaults.

The focus on physical assaults diminishes the scale of domestic violence, allowing it to be seen as a relatively exceptional or rare event rather than as the pervasive phenomenon suggested by the statistics cited at the beginning of this article.

These are about the narratives people build in court trials, right? If it's gone to court, what could it be other than assault? "Exercising power and control producing fear" is not actually a crime in itself.

Quote
(4) If violence is about relationship conflict, then the obvious way to end violence is to end the relationship. If violence
is caused by the stresses of marriage, it follows that once the parties are separated, the violence will stop.

(5) Women who are subjected to violence are thus expected to leave their relationships in order to stop the violence. Consequently, social stories about violence also seek to explain women’s failure to leave abusive relationships. These include the notions that women who endure abuse are willing victims – masochists – or somehow attract abusive men.

I don't understand. Is it saying that leaving an abusive relationship is a bad thing?

Quote
(7) Social and legal stories about domestic violence tend rather to deny, minimise and trivialise violence than to regard it as a serious issue. There is a degree of ambivalence in social attitudes towards violence, in that while it is abhorred in the abstract, individual claims to victimhood tend to be treated with suspicion.

In a court of law, claims bloody well should be treated with suspicion. The accused is innocent until proven guilty. :|

Even when people understand that domestic violence exists and is abhorrent they are unlikely to translate that to a situation in front of them. A lot of the time this is because it doesn't fit their own mental model of what such abuse should look like, often because that model is itself unrealistic along the lines of the points in the extended spoiler. Even once you have accepted that the violence has occurred there are whole range of excuses and reasons for it that the mind instantly brings up, fitting the abuser into a more or less acceptable narrative that is familiar and understood (even if it's utter bullshit).

And once again this comes back to choosing not to re-enforce the narratives that are behind such attitudes. Promoting media that reflect progressive or simply accurate models of domestic abuse and violence is important, as is calling out media and arguments that push outdated, regressive, apologetic and inaccurate models.

Wait, are both these paragraphs about the domestic violence stuff Anita bought up? Are you saying that being forced to beat up your possessed girlfriend in a video game is bad because it does such a piss-poor job at depicting domestic violence? Wow. Okay. You probably should have just said that from the start. I certainly did not get that vibe from Anita's video, but if you say she said that, I guess I'll take your word for it. ._. Anyway, I'm not convinced people are actually going to link that to domestic violence. The job it does is kind of TOO piss-poor. Not only does it not depict domestic violence very well (or at all), it doesn't even match my preconceived notions of domestic violence.
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Neonivek

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1804 on: June 05, 2013, 06:12:59 pm »

Right, the subject/object thing is a metaphor and simplification. She outright says it's a simplification, and it's clearly a metaphor because she's using sentence structure terminology to explain narrative structure.

Just because you say it is a oversimplification doesn't mean it isn't an oversimplification.
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palsch

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1805 on: June 05, 2013, 07:14:21 pm »

Also, is Twilight really the best example you can think of? It has not received a universally positive response.

It's the most obvious example of a best-selling book made into a series of successful films with a total franchise value well in excess of $5 billion which also happens to romanticise a relationship that is, facially, an abusive one.

I'm not entirely sure what a better example would be in this case.

As for measures taken against it, how about public criticism? You know, the sort of thing that happens around the internet. Ana Mardoll has over a hundred posts doing a page-by-page deconstruction and talking about related issues. At a certain level you can use such public examples as effective teaching tools, as examples of what and why things are problematic. Admittedly doing it in the face of rabid fandom can be tricky... but it's still worthwhile.

Just because you think something is wrong doesn't mean you need to see it banned. Maybe you ask people not to do it and try to explain why.

As for courtrooms, and real life in general, those aren't really narratives that affect real life. They ARE the real life. That's what you were talking about, right? Narratives in fiction affecting how people see real life, because humans have a most unfortunate tendency to view things as narratives.

It's the stories people tell, true or not, and the stories people carry in their heads into those situations. The models they fit events to, whether accurate or not. Listen to a group of guys in a workplace or bar discussing abuse allegations from news stories. Listen to how defence lawyers or magistrates describe abusive relationships. They are fitting the events into a particular narrative, whether they mean to or not. It's nearly universal when talking about these things.
These are about the narratives people build in court trials, right? If it's gone to court, what could it be other than assault? "Exercising power and control producing fear" is not actually a crime in itself.

I'd recommend reading the article. But no, they are the narratives that the magistrates interviewed take into the courtroom with them. Their model of what an abusive relationship is. Essentially they see the whole thing as about the events of violence, not the overreaching power relationship or more general abuse.

I don't understand. Is it saying that leaving an abusive relationship is a bad thing?

It's saying that not leaving such a relationship is seen as a sign that it's not real abuse, or the woman really wanted it, or something along those lines. It's ignoring all the factors that are pushing women to stay in the relationships.

Wait, are both these paragraphs about the domestic violence stuff Anita bought up? Are you saying that being forced to beat up your possessed girlfriend in a video game is bad because it does such a piss-poor job at depicting domestic violence? Wow. Okay. You probably should have just said that from the start. I certainly did not get that vibe from Anita's video, but if you say she said that, I guess I'll take your word for it. ._. Anyway, I'm not convinced people are actually going to link that to domestic violence. The job it does is kind of TOO piss-poor. Not only does it not depict domestic violence very well (or at all), it doesn't even match my preconceived notions of domestic violence.

Those paragraphs are directly related to the quote right before them. They are about how people treat domestic violence claims with increased scepticism when they don't fit their personal narratives about what domestic violence looks like. So if they have a narrow definition, or a definition that includes justifications or excuses ('she wanted it', 'she pushed him to it', 'she deserved it', etc) then they are more likely to find reasons to dismiss justified complaints.

The problem with the games is that they feed into those justification/excuse narratives. Maybe not deliberately or explicitly, but the language and actions are in line with those abuse narratives. The woman literally saying it's not the man's fault and forgiving him for the violence. The woman who loses her mind and has to be violently brought back to her senses. These are near stock domestic violence stories.

It doesn't depict domestic violence, but it feeds into the same narratives that surround domestic violence.

The sections of the video that talk about this explicitly (Transcript link);
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Rolan7

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1806 on: June 05, 2013, 10:07:53 pm »

Right, the subject/object thing is a metaphor and simplification. She outright says it's a simplification, and it's clearly a metaphor because she's using sentence structure terminology to explain narrative structure.

Just because you say it is a oversimplification doesn't mean it isn't an oversimplification.

But if you say it's a simplification, you can't be held responsible if the metaphor breaks down.
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No justice: no peace.
Quote from: Fallen London, one Unthinkable Hope
This one didn't want to be who they was. On the Surface – it was a dull, unconsidered sadness. But everything changed. Which implied everything could change.

Neonivek

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1807 on: June 05, 2013, 10:10:18 pm »

Right, the subject/object thing is a metaphor and simplification. She outright says it's a simplification, and it's clearly a metaphor because she's using sentence structure terminology to explain narrative structure.

Just because you say it is a oversimplification doesn't mean it isn't an oversimplification.

But if you say it's a simplification, you can't be held responsible if the metaphor breaks down.

Yes you can... calling attention to something doesn't excuse you, it just means you are aware.
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Reelya

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1808 on: June 05, 2013, 10:17:09 pm »

It's a little troubling to being up "wife murdered by husband" but not to bring up "husband murdered by wife". The overall raw numbers are fairly similar. Oh, but I know, I'm missing the point that those husbands "had it coming". Which is the standard narrative. Australian stats, but 1 husband is murdered very week here, but we have very low murder rates and 1/15th the population of the United States, so I'm sure the number is a lot higher in the USA:

http://www.oneinthree.com.au/

Scaling that up by 15, gives a figure comparable to Anita's women-killed-by-husband figure, which is in line with what other sources are saying - the spousal murder rate between men and women is fairly even, hardly an epidemic all skewed against women.

Giving only one side of an equation to support your hypothesis is as good as lying.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2013, 10:27:26 pm by Reelya »
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penguinofhonor

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Re: Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1809 on: June 05, 2013, 10:18:43 pm »

This is what I was talking about earlier. You don't disprove anything Palsch says, you just say "This other narrative exists that you didn't talk about, so you're wrong."

I don't think its omission is as critical as you're making it out to be.
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Reelya

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1810 on: June 05, 2013, 10:32:06 pm »

I'm disputing the way Anita couches her arguments, by painting only a lopsided picture of reality, and then giving a just-so explanation of why it occurs, she's not helping with solutions. Which is why things like the domestic violence abuse rate being pretty much exactly the same amongst lesbians as straight couples is a telling point. She's peddling a simplistic "patriarchy created every problem" model, which is way too simplistic. Since it doesn't address why things actually happen in real life, it's not going to solve those the problems.

If patriarchy and male socialization caused every problem, then why is there just as much of this problem within lesbian relationships?

By presenting something as a gendered problem, when in fact data shows it's more of a universal problem for both genders, we buy into a false model of how to deal with the underlying problem, and the problem persists.

http://www.uiowa.edu/~030116/158/articles/dershowitz3.htm

Quote
Wives Also Kill Husbands--Quite Often
by Alan M. Dershowitz
[...]
To put the issue in context, women in general account for only about 10 percent of defendants charged with all murders. But for all spousal murders, women accounted for more than 40 percent of defendants. And "among black marital partners, wives were just about as likely to kill their husbands as husbands were to kill their wives." Not surprisingly, when it comes to parents who kill their children, mothers kill more often than fathers.
[...]
Despite this hard data, the myths persist that spousal murders consist almost exclusively of husbands who kill their wives and are then treated leniently by the criminal-justice system. Indeed, there is one figure that is strikingly missing from this otherwise thorough report: namely, whether women who murder their husbands are treated more leniently than husbands who murder their wives. I phoned the author of the report and asked if that data was available. He told me that it was but that it had not been compiled. I asked him if he would compile it and he did, faxing me new tables that compared the outcome of prosecution based on the gender of the victim and the accused. This previously unpublished data dramatically undercuts the myth that husbands who kill their wives are treated more leniently than wives who kill their husbands. The available evidence points overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, Wives who kill their husbands were acquitted in 12.9 percent of the cases studied, while husbands who kill their wives were acquitted in only 1.4 percent of the cases. Women who were convicted of killing their husbands were sentenced to an average of six years in prison, while men received an average of seventeen years for killing their wives, Sixteen percent of female spousal killers get probation, compared to 1.6 percent for males. By almost every other measure as well, female spousal killers are treated more leniently than male spousal killers. To be sure, some of the differences may be attributable to gender-neutral factors such as prior record, provocation, or mental illness. But there is absolutely no support in this data for the claim that husbands who kill their wives are systematically treated with kid gloves by the justice system.

Despite the unexpected data produced by this justice Department study--that wives kill husbands much more frequently than media accounts suggest and that they are treated more leniently than husbands who kill--the press release issued by the justice Department to accompany the report buried this politically incorrect data under the following politically correct headline: "Wives are the most frequent victims in family murders." But even that conclusion obscures the real picture: that for all family murders--which includes killing of parents and children as well as spouses--55.5 percent of the victims were males and 44.5 percent females, and "female defendants were more likely than male defendants to have murdered a person of the opposite sex.

really, the only good data we have suggest male wife-killers are treated just as harshly as males who've killed anyone else regardless of gender, not that they're treated with kid-gloves. On the other hand the "he deserved it" meme is alive and well in courtrooms and the media. And it actually works as an effective defense, with female husband-killers being about 10 times as likely to be acquitted as a male wife-killer. The "She deserved it" meme is a total failure as a court defense - no jury is buying it, and it's universally reviled in the media. Then you have the bit I bolded at the bottom - in total more males are murdered in a domestic situation, and female murderers are more likely to have murdered someone of the opposite sex than male murderers. This hardly suggests the one-sided "epidemic" that Anita talks about.

EDIT: In fact, arguments like Anita's are playing into "Patriarchal Gender Stereotypes" about how the sexes relate to each other. These stereotypes, in the case of domestic abuse, don't actually very well match the data we have access to (highlighted by female on male abuse and female on female abuse). By ignoring half the problem of domestic abuse (I'll give the benefit of the doubt - 1/3rd of the problem), you create narratives about how the problem itself stems from those very stereotypes - but that's circular logic because you applied the stereotypes to cull the set of examples your allowed to acknowledge in the first place.

I think this kind of double-standard attitude can actually be seen in this very thread to a degree:

Woah woah woah - domestic violence is not just about an entire gender having a slightly higher average strength than the other.  There's way too much variance.  Domestic abuse is not about one partner being stronger than the other, we live in a world of tools.  It's about destroying someone emotionally so they won't fight back.  Our culture, with its depictions of women as servile AND weak, perpetuates domestic violence.  (Women victims feel like they should bear it, male victims feel ashamed that a mere woman is hurting them)
Who are you to talk about how male victims feel? By perpetuating the idea that patriarchy is the sole cause of domestic violence you buy into the notion that abuse against male victims isn't "real" abuse. And this prejudice is born out by the different rationale you apply to male and female victims. Female victims are kept their by circumstance (controlled by the man), male victims are kept their by their oversized egos. So, males are claimed to be "in control" whether they're abuser or victim. Your worldview informed you that men couldn't be "real" victims - they were clearly only kept their by their pathetic need to maintain a macho image. If only those men were better people, well, clearly they would have excaped the abuse! This is a textbook case of victim-blaming, since your really saying here that the sole reason men continue to be abused is that they're sexist assholes.

The view that patriarchy is the sole cause of all abuse, whether by male or female abusers, makes male victims the "guilty" party (as in Rolan7's idea that it's their fault for not being able to escape the abuse because they internalized macho stereotypes), and female abusers - well it's clearly not their fault, since we just ascertained the male is at fault for not breaking it off. Or, - and this is a popular rationalization - when the male is the abuser, it's his fault, but when the female is the abusers is their fault - e.g. equal blame.

To quote palsch here:

They are about how people treat domestic violence claims with increased scepticism when they don't fit their personal narratives about what domestic violence looks like. So if they have a narrow definition, or a definition that includes justifications or excuses ('she wanted it', 'she pushed him to it', 'she deserved it', etc) then they are more likely to find reasons to dismiss justified complaints.

In fact, there are pages and pages of men on the web who were abused talking about how they felt, and it's not that different to the female version of the narrative. What is different is the utter disdain these people were met with by the police and legal system if they ever had the misfortune to report their abuse - now here, we do have an actual problem related to the institutionalized acceptance of the abuse, and a "victim blaming" ideology.
http://www.batteredmen.com/gjdvstor.htm

There's a real reason domestic violence occurs. It's called relationships. And that humans are fallible.
« Last Edit: June 06, 2013, 12:55:52 am by Reelya »
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Neonivek

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1811 on: June 05, 2013, 11:18:09 pm »

Ehhh I think I'll delete this for taste.
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Max White

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1812 on: June 06, 2013, 02:22:27 am »

When the social context of an act makes that act abhorrent you avoid that act.

In this case the social context around the use of a particular plot point makes the use of that plot point sexist. So people (like Anita and myself) are saying maybe we should at least think twice before using that plot point.

As for not focusing on the stuff surrounding X, in the case of a trope the trope is it's own context. I'm still trying to find a way to phrase this that you will acknowledge, but when the social context is in no small part shaped by how a trope is used and how common it is then criticising and discussing the trope is a central aspect of changing that social context.
Except here is where you are wrong. There is nothing making these plot points sexist. Just because something complies to a common theme doesn't make it bad. You know what is bad? A conscious effort to remove or change anything that doesn't comply. That is the problem here, something very much missed in the series.
The only time she even touches on it is when she mentions Starfox Adventures, and even that is horrifically misrepresented. It was changed to drag it out of development hell and recoup some losses by stapling it onto a popular franchise. Her explanation is "Shigeru Miyamoto said it should be Starfox so it was because women don't get a chance!"

You know what? I'm flexible. I can debate your grounds if you are unwilling to compromise. Lets define a few terms, so to speak.
So now a trope is as you say it is, and its prevalence is an essential part of being a trope. I don't agree with this at all, but for the sake of conversation we will treat it like it is so that we are both using the same term in the same way, no use debating semantics.
So there are two parts of a trope: What happens, and how often it happens. For example, what happens might be that a woman is kidnapped, and how often it happens would be found with some statistics that I don't think anybody actually has, we just assume it is past some imaginary threshold that we have decided is too high. Lets call this 'what' a plot device.
So a woman getting kidnapped is a plot device, independent of anything else, and then when you look at it in a social content you have yourself a trope.

Now, Anita carefully describes the plot device, and she provides examples to prove it actually exists. So she is presenting a plot device. And then she calls it sexist.
She never actually goes so far as to explain why this device is a trope, because she never really goes into any level of prevalence. She never explains just how common it is, beyond "It happens all the time guis!!"
As such, without explaining the broader social context, she never presents a trope, she just points her finger at a plot device and calls it sexist, and assumes you will agree with her. She does go to lengths to find many examples of the plot device, but proving there are multiple examples of a plot device means nothing towards social context, this is call anecdotal evidence.
At one point she mentions real life violence against women, but this is an irrelevant appeal to emotion (I'm going to point out the irony of appealing to the audiences emotional response at the idea of violence against women while criticizing games for appealing to the audiences emotional response at the idea of violence against women) as there is also violence against men in the real world, but the difference is that men are supposedly portrayed as asking to harmed less often in games (I say supposedly because once again this reference to prevalence is never made, it is just assumed we will agree) and as such it isn't a problem.

It is reasonable to assume she is against the plot device and believes any use of it is sexist. As if had the damsel in distress device only been used once in human history, it would be sexist. Perhaps she isn't actually against the trope, that is just a word she mistakenly uses to describe a plot device, but is instead actually opposed to the plot device. She think women should never have been, and never again should be, anything less than the protagonist or at least given the same amount of agency in a video game. In a medium where the protagonist is the only one with any sort of real agency.
Her argument is poorly constructed and reminiscent of second wave feminism.

Quote
Killing gay characters off at a higher rate than straight has a historic and social context going back to the Hays code. It's still surprisingly common today. It's a trope that has harmed people in the past, through either explicit attacks on homosexuals (by showing them getting punished for their sexuality) or simply removing gay characters from the public eye by having them die out of stories. As such if you are trying to write a story that is accessible to gay people you probably want to think twice before shoving your only gay character into a fridge. At least if you are going to do it understand the context and why it is very likely to piss a lot of people off.

It's akin to having a horror film and killing off all the people of colour leaving just your white hero and heroine at the end. Sure, the story might naturally flow that way. But the historical context are going to make people view it a certain way, and you had damned well better be aware of what you are doing.
Read the name of that article you linked. What does it say? "Why does the gay character always have to die", now that sounds a little different to what you are saying, that the gay character isn't allowed to die. Once again, when there is a mandate that the gay guy must die, it is offensive, when it just happens because that is how it happened then so be it. A homosexual character has the same rights to an interesting story as any other character, including a death.

Also, reductio ad absurdum. Do you see the difference in having a black character who dies and having a cast of black characters who all die and only two white characters live? Suddeny having a single homosexual character die is "akin to having a horror film and killing off all the people of colour leaving just your white hero and heroine at the end"? You don't see how that is an absurd exaggeration?
I don't know if you are arguing from ignorance of if you are choosing misleading fallacies.

Rolan7

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1813 on: June 06, 2013, 02:45:12 am »

Killing off the only homosexual character is similar to sparing the only white character.  In both cases a character's fate is correlated with a demographic.  Not absurd at all.
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Neonivek

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Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« Reply #1814 on: June 06, 2013, 02:48:53 am »

Quote
At one point she mentions real life violence against women, but this is an irrelevant appeal to emotion


I don't know, it could work if it was context with her delving deeper into the subject matter. Trying to link the psychology of real life violence against women to the mannerisms and justifications inside the game.

But I guess that is the thing. These videos aren't very deep, in fact they so lightly skim the surface one could say they are shallow.

Which would be alright if these videos were meant to be an exploration and thus it was up to the viewer to make up their mind, but there is a clear argument and a clear goal of her examples.

I am trying to grasp the overall fundamental problem with the two videos.
« Last Edit: June 06, 2013, 02:52:50 am by Neonivek »
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