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[KaelGotDwarves]

Duke nailed it for me, mostly.

It's sad that we have been at the point of having a game and not seeing "saving princesses, helpless women, love interests, ridiculous damsel-in-distress stereotypes" makes it hailed as a sort of feminist victory.

Mass Effect 3's advertising campaign of "choose the new face of Female Shepard!" makes me all internet-stabby.

[Vector]

That, too.

You don't get cookies for simply not being an asshat.  "Oh, hey!  I said hello and you didn't punch me!  Have a cookie."

[kaijyuu]

This kinda exemplifies my issues with writing strong female characters. You can't make them dealing or rejecting stereotypes too intensely because they are stereotypes. Making them just a man with a different chromosome seems pointless and means nothing to women in general. The character could be a monkey and mean the same thing. For the sake of interesting characters I think female characters need to be aware of their sex and have interactions influenced by that. Their character can't be based entirely on the fact that they are a girl, but it is something that needs to tie into their character arc in some way.

 Of course there is the flipside of male characters not necessarily being tied into their sex, although there are a lot of characters that emphasize strength, endurance, dealing with an issue and parental issues unique to males. Perhaps the baseline for a character is built around a male, so such avenues don't have to be specifically explored because it's already inherent in other attributes of the story.

 It's a great big weird thing, yeah. I want to see strong female characters, but I don't want to see what is essentially a guy as a girl because the story is a sausagefest and needs girls to balance it out. Being female should be a part of their character, and if gender isn't that important to the character knowing why they are like that grants a great deal of strength to them.

The problem I have with this is, what defines someone as acting "female"? Should she have just enough stereotypical behavior?

I'd argue it should be the exact opposite. Her gender shouldn't come into the equation at all. She should just have realistic goals, opinions, motivations, and personality traits. None of those four things are "male" yet they define a character as "strong" (especially the goals and motivations part). She should be defined by being a human being, not defined by being female.


I suppose one could argue that the "generic" settings we use in most stories require characters with "masculine" traits since most writers are male. If you're writing for a cheesy action movie or a fantasy video game and have a female lead, they're going to have to have some stereotypically male behavior (otherwise they wouldn't be swinging around a sword or gun). There are numerous reasons for the pervasiveness of such settings (rather than settings that use characters with stereotypically female behavior to drive the story), and I think one should go after those reasons rather than shout "these characters need to act more like women!" We're bloated on adrenaline pumped action.


Incidentally, my avatar. Want well written female characters? Strong without being "masculine"? Well guess what one of the major reasons I love the show so much is.

[Vector]

The point is that unless a universe takes place in a fully egalitarian society with any history of inequality extremely far in the past, having been raised in a female body will have some influence on your character and experiences.  The experience of sexism--or even the lack thereof, knowing that other women are experiencing it--will change you.

The issue with just saying "okay, he's a she now" is that it completely ignores what it's like to not grow up on the privileged side of the divide, and completely erases authentic experience.  Oh, and the company usually expects lots and lots of kudos for this irritating act.

[fqllve]

The problem I think is that male is so ingrained as the "default" gender of a fictional character.  A woman who displays no womanly characteristics is seen as a man with a different chromosome, while displaying any womanly characteristics immediately makes her gender a defining element of the character, even though both of them are effectively stereotypes.  Whereas there are many things a male character can do in which his gender is essentially a non-issue.  In the case of the Warhammer example, it's only because we consider no-nonsense military leadership a male enterprise that the character is seen as rejecting female stereotypes, even though gender has by any rational measure nothing to do with the activity.

Male isn't just the default in fiction though, it's surprising the number of places where male is unmarked. Or more enlightening, the places where male is exceptional.

Although I do give the game credit, as the blogger did, for not shoehorning in romantic tension or passion where none need exist.  That's my biggest gripe against almost any media outlet - the downright necessity of having male and female leads react to each other like there's romance somewhere.  You want gender neutrality?  Have male and female leads, no matter how stereotypical or reverse stereotypical of their genders, react and deal with each other in a purely platonic fashion.

That's a problem outside gender issues. Obligatory Romantic Tension is just boring writing and half the time distracts from what makes the work exciting anyway. I want to write Hollywood a letter: We don't want half-hearted romance plots on top of our good action plots.

[Duke 2.0]

She should be defined by being a human being, not defined by being female.

 You seem to keep getting caught on this, and I gotta apologize for not emphasizing this enough. I don't want gender to define a character unless it is intertwined with their character arc, like some characters in the Persona games. It is a detail I would like as the real world is full of gender relations, and seeing them addressed and dealt with makes the character seem more solid. As Vector said, in most societies that stories take place in sex and gender is going to change how a character interacts with the people around them. And if they don't care about sex or gender then that is a detail which fleshes out their character. It may not be integral to their story or define who they are, but it makes them more believable and less alien.

[Bauglir]

Yeah, the "Oh this is surprising therefore good!" part of my reaction isn't actually a good defense of it. In large part because of the setting (EDIT: which I thought actually was pretty egalitarian, but hell, I'm not a huge fan and have only the vaguest of notions of it), I do still suspect that this particular game isn't actually an example in the trend of frustrating, "In order to be awesome, a woman has to really be a man" games, but... it really depends on the quality of the game, itself, which I will never know because I have no plans to buy it (or any game other than Polynomial), though that could change, obviously. I could be being overly optimistic. And the fact that this wouldn't be part of it doesn't mean the trend doesn't exist, and shouldn't be fought against.

If successful, it will, of course, be taken as a sign by developers that all women should be genderless really, and if it's a failure then it'll be taken as a sign that strong, independent women aren't ready for the market yet. So that, alone, might be reason enough to discuss this game in this context.

[Heron TSG]

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/audience-tea-party-debate-cheers-leaving-uninsured-die-163216817.html

When even Rick Perry is going, "Dude, that's harsh," then you know you have gone too far. These are mostly the same kind of people who cheered wildly when Rick Perry mentioned that Texas has executed nearly 300 people under his stewardship. Scary. Mother. Fuckers.

Huh. I came here with that link in mind. Again, all the leading candidates I've heard from have been almost cartoon evil. Perry is probably the worst with the homophobia and whatnot, Bachmann is a religious zealot and seemingly a Luddite (In the sense that she is against advancing medicinal and other technologies, not that she is a 19th century British textile artisan.) Ron Paul is basing all his economics on 70's Austria, and now this.

A society that tolerate creationists, burka, or racists is not healthy.

You're putting someone else's culture on the same level as creationists and racists? I know several people that opt to wear them, and in fact few places force people to wear them. What's wrong with people wanting to strictly follow the guidelines of their religion? They're not burning puppies.

[fqllve]

A society that tolerate creationists, burka, or racists is not healthy.

You're putting someone else's culture on the same level as creationists and racists? I know several people that opt to wear them, and in fact few places force people to wear them. What's wrong with people wanting to strictly follow the guidelines of their religion? They're not burning puppies.

Furthermore how are creationists as bad as racists? People are allowed to believe in whatever cosmology they want to. The only problem is when people want to teach creationism in school.

[Vector]

I would amend that to "as a scientific theory."

Many subjects disagree on the true nature of the universe.  Science has its opinion; world religions, another.  There's no reason to get so upset about it, unless folks are also going to get upset about pi=3 not being taught in math class.

[Bauglir]

A society that tolerate creationists, burka, or racists is not healthy.

You're putting someone else's culture on the same level as creationists and racists? I know several people that opt to wear them, and in fact few places force people to wear them. What's wrong with people wanting to strictly follow the guidelines of their religion? They're not burning puppies.

I knew there was something I meant to respond to but failed to due to stupid spotty Internet earlier in the day, but now you have gone and done it for me so all I can really say is, "Yeah, that."

And yeah, I'd say creationism isn't so bad inherently (I mean, I don't hold with it, but I've got no cause to argue against the thought itself, just what some people do with it), but it gets to be a problem when it's insisted upon as scientific fact.

[GlyphGryph]

having been raised in a female body will have some influence on your character and experiences.  The experience of sexism--or even the lack thereof, knowing that other women are experiencing it--will change you.

Of course, but I think its possible for a woman who has been changed in such a way not to need to exhibit any overtly female traits in format. They can have plenty of opinions and personality traits that were influenced by this that simply don't come up for any given character - most characters aren't portrayed as deep as they could be simply because its not needed. In fact, the vast majority of characters are fairly flat - they really aren't inherently masculine or feminine because they aren't deep enough to be much of anything. And I think it's worthwhile to have plenty of females represented among their number. And even for more three dimensional characters, if someone was essentially raised in the military, I imagine any sort of "military culture" would overrule most exclusively female influences, especially when serving in a that role. In fact, I find the fact that so many roles seem to be relegated to "males", and any women filling that role makes them "men with women's faces" to be hella sexist in and of itself.

That said, I don't think any company should expect lots of kudos for introducing flat female characters that are indistinguishable from males, but considering that small gesture alone (something that should honestly be taken for granted) is pretty out of the ordinary, I really don't mind giving it a nod of the head. And this game really seems to do a lot more than that - she actually seems to have depth, even if none of it is particularly female.

[kaijyuu]

She should be defined by being a human being, not defined by being female.

 You seem to keep getting caught on this, and I gotta apologize for not emphasizing this enough. I don't want gender to define a character unless it is intertwined with their character arc, like some characters in the Persona games. It is a detail I would like as the real world is full of gender relations, and seeing them addressed and dealt with makes the character seem more solid. As Vector said, in most societies that stories take place in sex and gender is going to change how a character interacts with the people around them. And if they don't care about sex or gender then that is a detail which fleshes out their character. It may not be integral to their story or define who they are, but it makes them more believable and less alien.

Well in a story about gender relations, sure, I can see that. When talking about sexism, you obviously can't ignore their sex. Past that, conservation of detail. If it's important to the story, characters, or message that's being conveyed, throw it in. If not, throw it out.

Also, traits that define their character being "masculine" or "feminine" doesn't matter to me. The point of contention I have is the reasoning behind why she has such traits. I'm not saying that female characters shouldn't act stereotypically female; that's fine if they do. It's just that she should act that way because she's her, not because she's a woman.

Maybe it seems I'm splitting hairs here, but I'm a firm believer that we're not defined (yeah I do keep using that word) by our equipment between our legs. "She's acting too masculine" or "he's acting too feminine" are ridiculous claims to me. Maybe there's some inaccurate portrayal of the gender as a whole*; I can get behind that. I can't get behind complaints about specific characters, because if my suspension of disbelief is to be maintained, and if I'm not sexist, I can't claim any individual character is acting too much or too little like someone of their gender should.


* EDIT: See The Bechdel Test.

[Frumple]

Recent discussion leads me to an odd question re: gender in media. Has anyone seen, read, or played, something where the gender for one or more of the characters is literally not mentioned, at all? Hopefully the question isn't a derail, heh.

The only thing I've came close to seeing that, personally, was in an odd bit of fairly lengthy fanfiction, where the main character's gender in something like 2-400 thousand words worth of text was mentioned precisely twice -- I missed it the first time, and spent probably 150k+ words thinking the character was female (though I don't quite remember why, at this point -- it's been a few months since I read it, when he wasn't. It was a good thing, anyway.). This particular piece of fiction also managed to not mention the main character's name, at all, up to the point in it I had read. Was interesting, and well enough done overall for a piece of fanfic...

[Glowcat]

Let's pick apart her words to construct a bollocks accusation of hate speech, because clearly it is the white man who was the victim here...

Strawman. You know damn well what is being meant here.

The comments point out that she has used racist and derogatory terms.  You are reading more into that simple sentence than that.  You are applying the thoughts and feelings of someone else to me.  I pointed out that others have noticed the language.  I did not say I agree with what they posted in total.

Why yes, yes I do. Where's the strawman? Because this is a classic derail tactic and I am not amused. He subtly moved the focus away from the incident in question and directed it towards the woman, trying to point out her so-called hypocrisy. This derail started with "the irony" of her using the term redneck... despite Andir's own definition showing one version of the word being a bigot... and took off on its obvious course. The prior combined with his defense against the claim of racial profiling it's pretty clear he's trying to redirect disapproval onto the victim. This happens too often to reasonably be considered an innocent mistake.

I'd really like to ignore this sort of tangent but when somebody is wrong on the internet I'm often compelled to rebuke.

Considering that your word has an extensive history which says otherwise, those songs would be irrelevant.
Redneck has never meant a specific skin pigment and has always been a sub-group of people who exhibit certain behaviors.

I'm curious now, is there such a thing as a black redneck? Or a white nigger, for that matter? Google indicates there are approximately 190,000 "white niggers" vs 37,000 "black rednecks", making "redneck" even more colour-relevant than "nigger". I know it's ALL the white man's fault  , but if you want equality, you should start treating slurs equally.

Speaking of strawman... Redneck hasn't been used as a general RACE label. Unless white rural inbred Republicans are a race the word isn't a racial slur, now is it? On the other hand one only need to crack open a US history textbook or look at modern racist groups (white or not) to realize 'nigger' is primarily a derogatory term directed at skin-color when used by a person who doesn't belong to the group being targeted.

I'm not even sure how you decided that Google would be an authority in this argument. Especially given the way you decided to gather evidence here... 'Google indicates'? Was that the number of search results? Because then not only would your premise be wrong but so would the numbers, or at least from my side. 53,500 vs. 87,000. And I bet if one looks at the previous the term's context will refer to either adopting "black" behaviors (as per the common slang term) or accusations of race traitor. Find the equivalent racial charge for 'redneck' and we might talk. Otherwise your argument reads like that of the disgraced Laura Schlessinger and I've little patience for imaginary white persecution.