We are a fan of badass ladies ’round these parts, it is no secret. Feeding right into that soft spot, the awesome team over at Comediva are now bringing us a sort of parody/showcase of what might happen is some favorite BAMFy fictional characters (and Bella) became roommates. Sort of like The Real World, but with more side-braids and tortured backstories.
Obviously, no one video can capture everyone’s favorite BAMF girls, so we’ll throw it out to you to lengthen the list. Who’s your favorite? Why? How do you think they’d interact with the other girls in the house?
At first this conclusion seems like something of a no brainer, but Christopher J. Ferguson‘s study on the attitudes of men and women who have recently watched television with sexual violence in it has some very interesting results, as summarized by the Atlantic.
And no, the study participants did not watch Game of Thrones. Its just a convenient example of the intersection between powerful women and sex in television.
Ferguson’s study split 150 participants into three random groups: one group got to watch Masters of Horror and The Tudors (in which Henry VIII avails himself of many a never again mentioned concubine), one group got to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Law & Order SVU (episodes featured sexual violence but also Buffy and detective Olivia Benson), and a third, the control, watched the more family friendly fare 7th Heaven and The Gilmore Girls. Afterwards, subjects were quizzed on their attitudes towards women and their levels of depression and anxiety were evaluated.
And he found what you might expect: Watching shows with powerful women made women feel less anxious, despite the presence of sexual violence in the stories. Watching shows that contained sexual violence and passive female characters correlated with men identifying with more negative attitudes towards women.
But I found the rest of the results pretty fascinating. From The Atlantic:
Males who watched sexually violent shows with submissive female characters reported more negative attitudes about women than the control group. This effect did not occur for men who watched shows with powerful women. Women actually reported more negative attitudes after watching the G-rated shows, but how female characters were portrayed did not affect their beliefs.
Women who watched weak characters in sexually violent situations became twice as anxious as women who watched SVU or Buffy, who in turn actually reported less anxiety than the control group. The inverse occurred for men, who felt least anxious after watching The Tudors or Masters of Horror.
The idea that a powerful female character outweighs violence against women so much that women actually find those shows more reassuring than shows without violence at all is pretty amazing. The idea that the men in the study found shows with sexual violence against passive women to be the most comforting is less so. The participants were college students from a “southern university.” I’d love to know the particular politics on campus of the school, and whether they correlate with a rigid understanding of gender roles. I’d also love it if the sample size was bigger, but all in all, still an interesting demonstration.
In July, Gearbox Studios began sharing details of its oft-delayed Aliens franchise game, Aliens: Colonial Marines, which would follow a single player campaign of a customizable main character joining fellow human marines facing off against slavering Xenomorph hordes, and both cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes where players competed against xenomorphs and other players’ customizable marines. What the game didn’t feature, however, was the ability to create a female marine.
This struck many as pretty out of… well, character, for a series that included women like Ripley and Vasquez, both formidable soldiers in their own right. A petition was begun, reasoning that with yet another recent delay in the game’s release, Gearbox would have the time to create gender options. This weekend we got the exciting news that it actually paid off.
“I am happy to be able to confirm that female marines are playable in competitive multiplayer as well as co-op, complete with customization elements,” Faylor wrote to the petitioners. “This is something the team has been planning and working on for quite some time, and that work is finally at the point where we can confirm it will indeed ship with the game when it releases on February 12, 2013.”
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford stated unequivocally that there would also be female characters present in the game’s story campaign, saying that they’d been in the works for some time, but that the company didn’t want to show off unfinished concepts, so they’d remained completely silent on the issue of whether female characters were in the game. The four-thousand-plus-signature petition that included some of the original cast of the Aliens movies, however, changed their minds about keeping quiet, and so they revealed Private Jennifer Redding, a playable character in the story campaign, at PAX Prime this weekend.
To which I say: buuuuuuullpucky. (This minced oath brought to you by the discovery, by this writer, of the term “minced oath” this weekend.) The original cast of the movie your game is based on has joined a petition to include female characters, you’ve been working on them the whole time, and you can’t just come out and say “Hey guys, we’re working on female characters right now, actually! Check back in a couple months to see the results!” As The Escapist points out, the game was far enough along to have multiple trailers made from in-game footage while your female characters were still in the design stage.
So you underestimated fans’ desire for the more representative universe displayed by your source material. It’s okay, because you listened to them, and corrected yourself. Just say it. I guarantee that candidly admitting it and giving some lip service to how you learned a valuable lesson will only increase the number of people interested in buying the game. That said: now it’s up to all those people who supported the petition to support the game, and make some badass lady soldiers of their own.
Between the two of them, Joseph McGinty Nichol and Daniel Cerone share the credit for Supernatural, Chuck, Charmed, and Dexter. The two creators of blockbuster television have apparently put something together that presses quite a lot of my buttons, from vigilantes with no super powers to lady cops, to nebulous and improbable conspiracies by “the law” to work (scary voice) “outside the law…”
The project from McG’s Wonderland Sound and Vision and Warner Bros TV centers on an unconventional young female detective for the San Francisco Police Department who won’t let criminals get away with their actions. After she finally goes too far, she gets fired from the force — only to be secretly recruited by the Chief of Police to become an undercover officer posing as a vigilante, allowing her to break the law in order to serve justice. Cerone will write the script and executive produce with Wonderland’s McG and Peter Johnson.
I also admire the internet cojones it takes to just put a hashtag at the front of your TV show’s name. Will we have to hashtag this as ##Resistance? Is this a new era where all titles of everything ever begin with a pound sign? Who knows.
Hopefully this thing gets off the ground, is good, and has money. Rest assured, we’ll keep you updated.
(This picture of a cannon brought to you by Susana’s affection for the phrase “loose cannon cop who doesn’t play by the rules” and the lack of any other relevant or humorous pictures for this post.)
In 108 minutes, Wreck-It Ralph accomplishes something the entire video game industry has failed to achieve for more than 30 years: Wreck-It Ralph contains more positive and nuanced female characters than the entire current video game landscape. Three major consoles. Hundreds of major and indie developers. Mobile and handheld gaming. Thousands of writers, programmers and artists. Millions, maybe even billions, in marketing dollars. All schooled by one movie.
I applaud the filmmakers, but I’m utterly baffled, because they made it look easy. And for so long, we have been told it’s “hard” to sell games with female characters we can look up to, care for and relate to. I think $49.1 million at the box office, which is Disney Animation’s highest opening weekend in history, tells a very different story. Listen up gamers, it’s time for a revolution.
Let’s start with Vanellope Von Schweetz and her home game, Sugar Rush.
Editor’s Note: The rest of this post contains SPOILERS. Read at your own risk!
Vanellope is funny. She’s smart. And she has confidence, despite her condition, pixlexia. She is driven and willing to fight for her rightful place in Sugar Rush, which is largely made up of racing girls – not boys. The aesthetics are a marvel: the racers’ outfits and vehicles may be sugary, but they aren’t princess-y and they aren’t racing on some simplistic puff course either. These girls know how to compete and they talk trash. They want to win – and they aren’t cheering on the sidelines for their man.
It honestly made me tear up when Vanellope was transformed into a princess after winning her race, but opted to abolish her dolled up status and instead be President of Sugar Rush. Do you understand the sub-text here? Are you listening, America? Women, girls, OUR GIRLS, they don’t want to be princesses – they want to be president.
And then there’s Calhoun. An argument has been made online and elsewhere that she’s modeled after Samus Aran of Metroid. That could be true, but here’s a key difference: she’s not in hiding. You know she’s a woman. You know she’s in charge. It isn’t some big shocker at the end of the movie that Hero’s Duty has always been led by a strong, tough woman.
And it was her husband who got shot, because she failed to take care of him. She put her gun away and he needed rescuing. Not the other way around.
The primary male characters, Ralph and Felix, love these women for these very reasons. They admire them, respect them and even fall for them – because they are a true representation of our modern social relationships. It’s OK for men to be sensitive. It’s OK for them to wreck things and then feel badly about it later. It’s OK for a short dude to fall in love with a taller woman. And most of all: it’s OK for men to ask women for help.
After seeing this movie, I want to play these games. And you know what? So does my boyfriend. And my brother. And my dude friends. Sugar Rush looks like a riot. Hero’s Duty may just be the very FIRST first-person shooter I have ever been interested in. And yes, I want to find an arcade right now and hand over my quarters for Ralph and Felix.
I know many haters will say, well, Ralph is the main character – and therefore sold the movie. Yeah, I agree and you’re right. But this is why the lesson here is so critically important. The gaming industry can continue to sell their games with strong men on the covers, posters and in commercials. When you play, the men can continue to be the primary characters – but I promise you – your game will be better AND more likable if you surround your male characters with women that matter.
Last, but certainly not least, I need to give the filmmakers props for the fact that girls were playing games in the Litwak arcade in equal number to boys. And EVERY kind of game. Not just the “soft” games or the games marketed to them. (Hey Nintendo, we are gamers too.)
Wreck-It Ralph was a joy to watch, but also a major wake up call for me. If we are ever going to see a video game industry with likable and respectable female archetypes, we may just need to bring in some new voices. I think Sarah Silverman, Jane Lynch, Jack MacBryer, John C. Reilly, Director Rich Moore, screenwriters Phil Johnston and Jessica Lee might just be a great start.
Earlier this week, I was contacted by Gordon Luk, lead developer of newly-released indie game Beast Boxing Turbo. He had come across the article I wrote on what women want in female game protagonists, and was left with some questions about his own work. See, Beast Boxing’s got a female protagonist, but she’s the only lady in the game. This is a trope I mentioned as being problematic, and Mr. Luk was worried about the affect it had on his game, and if women gamers might be put off by it. He offered me a copy of the game and asked for my two cents. I asked for his permission to dissect his concerns publicly, to which he agreed. I got to playing, and now, here we are. Having recently become the boxing champion of Beasthalla, I can safely say the following:
Gordon, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
Let me quickly sum-up the point he’s referring to in that article. I was essentially talking about the Smurfette Principle, which is a fancy way of describing the phenomenon of the token woman. You all know what I’m talking about. Kerrigan in StarCraft. Chun-Li in Street Fighter II. Zoey in Left 4 Dead. This is a trend that hearkens back from long before the time of video games. It appears everywhere, and even when the token woman is a good character, it’s rather weird when you consider that women make up just over half of the human race. And yes, as a general rule, I find it annoying.
But to the game in question. Beast Boxing Turbo is a first-person boxing game set in the monstrous land of Beasthalla. You play as Char, a human woman living in the slums. Humans are an oppressed race in this world, and Char has dreamed all her life of being able to fight in the elite Beast Boxing leagues. Wearing her foolproof monster disguise, Char finds herself a coach and works her way to the top. Think Million Dollar Baby meets Where The Wild Things Are. (Now there’s a sentence I never expected to write.)
Here’s where it gets awesome. Char is, I kid you not, a non-sexualized female protagonist in a game that glorifies prize fighting. She wears full armor. She doesn’t pose or pout for the camera. She is gracious in victory and resolute in defeat. She is driven not by a desire for glory or fame, but to prove once and for all that humans can do anything. And the other characters never, ever, ever belittle her gender. No one tells her that she hits like a girl. No one is surprised that a woman wants to fight. When they mock her, they mock her fighting skills or her faux monster face, nothing more. While Beast Boxing keeps the story simple, Char nonetheless stands out as a remarkable heroine.
And speaking of monsters, yes, it would’ve been good to see some lady beasts in the ring with Char. But in this particular case, I didn’t find their absence off-putting. I spent some time chewing on why, and I believe it has to do with what usually makes the Smurfette Principle so infuriating. Smurfy stories are often written in such a way that women aren’t just the odd ones out statistically, but also in terms of character. They’re shown to be weaker than the rest of the group, or less intelligent, or good for nothing but romantic intrigue. Or barring that, they imply that an active, adventurous woman who does stuff is the exception to the rule. I’m thinking now of that brilliant scene in The Avengers, when Black Widow confronts Loki. She uses his assumptions about her gender to get inside his head, but before that glorious twist, in the moments where he was reducing her to tears over her past deeds, my thought was, “Oh, right, this scene again.” It was a typical Smurfette scenario, and the reversal was what made it so good — and more importantly, one of the reasons why many women loved the film despite the wonky gender ratios.
The same basic concept applies to Beast Boxing. I got the sense that the beasts would’ve acted exactly the same way toward a human man as they did toward Char. It’s worth noting that Char doesn’t disguise herself as a male beast, but simply a beast. And she’s not fighting as a champion for women: she the champion of the human race. This is another key point about why this trope usually fails. Feeling like I have to overcome gender prejudices within a game is one of my pet peeves (though there are rare exceptions). As I’ve said before, that’s a feeling I have to deal with out in the real world, and it’s not something I want when playing out a power fantasy. All Char has to face is prejudice against humans. That’s obviously not something real people struggle with, and therefore it didn’t bother me.
So really, the only problem with the lack of female beasts in this game is that it conforms to a very old, par-for-the-course storytelling mistake. Honestly, to me, that’s a tiny complaint when viewed alongside all the things Beast Boxing gets right. But I will say that it would’ve been easy to include more female characters. While some of Char’s opponents have male characteristics, many are gender neutral in design. You don’t need to put a pink bow on a monster’s head for us to believe that she’s female — in fact, that’s kind of the worst thing you could do. I’m reminded of Susana’s post last week on the inclusion of female Turians in the upcoming DLC for Mass Effect 3 (effing finally). She included a quote by ME3’s art director on why they it took them so long.
We usually try to avoid the females because what do you do with a female Turian? Do you give her breasts? What do you do? Do you put lipstick on her?
No, actually. It’s way easier that. I know this is a shocking piece of information, but Turians — and beasts — are not human. They don’t have to follow human gender indicators. They don’t even have to be sexually dimorphic. You don’t need to put breasts or curves or pink on a character in order to make her female. Look at Quozzle, the protagonist of Incredipede. This is what she looks like.
How do I know she’s female? Because the game calls her “she.” That’s all I needed, and that’s all the gender neutral monsters in Beast Boxing would’ve needed, too. Just a quick pronoun swap. It’s a small thing, but it is something people notice. If there had been rough-and-tumble lady monsters in this game, I would’ve been stoked.
Which brings us to the original question: whether or not women gamers — specifically those who already enjoy boxing games — would eschew this game for its lack of female opponents. Okay, I want all developers out there to pay super close attention. I’m going to show you how to sell a game to women in a single paragraph.
Beast Boxing Turbo believes in the old-school joys of quick reflexes and combo mastery. Button mashing will get you nowhere. This game demands an almost meditative level of concentration from the player, a subtle balance between offense and defense that both exhilarates and soothes. But you can’t get too comfortable, either. Every opponent’s fighting style requires a different strategy, and falling into a predictable pattern will teach them to anticipate your moves. This is a game about patience. You can’t win just by being fast or having a lot of hit points. You have to be smart. Couple that with polished artwork, delightful writing, and a never-say-die leading lady you can’t help but root for, and you’ve got yourself a treat.
Do you see what I did there? The focus was not on the protagonist, but on the mechanics. If you’re going after genre fans, pitch it exactly as you would to the gentlemen in the audience. Experienced gamers know what they like, and their primary concern is whether or not the gameplay is going to be fun. And as for women, the sad truth is we’re used to having to buckle down and bear it when our favorite games fall short on the female character front. That doesn’t make it okay, but it does mean that those of us who are dedicated to a particular genre will, to a point, keep playing despite a lack of equitable portrayal (example: that time Amanda and I spent a whole month talking about Street Fighter). The reason Beast Boxing Turbo will appeal to women who already like boxing games is because it’s a good boxing game. A lack of female monsters will not scare those players off.
But that doesn’t mean that character gender doesn’t matter. Oh, trust me, it does. Buckling down isn’t fun, and though I’m accustomed to it, it’s like having a seed caught in my teeth the entire time I play, no matter how good the mechanics or the male characters are. Keep in mind, women gamers who critique the portrayal of female characters aren’t doing so because we hate games as they are. We’re here because we love games. We adore them. We just think they could be better, and we’d like to see our stories told, too. When a game gives me a solid female protagonist, it feels like I won the lottery. And if I get well-rounded female NPCs to boot, that’s two lotteries. It’s the feeling of sitting on the sidelines all season, even though you’ve attended every practice and bought the same gear as everyone else, and then finding out that you’ve been chosen for the starting squad. By giving your game good female characters, you’re appealing to two different camps of women gamers: the genre fans who will be over the moon to see themselves represented in their preferred type of game, and the newcomers willing to give it a shot after seeing that this is a world in which they are welcome. Everyone wins.
So to answer your question, Gordon, yeah, it would’ve been cool to see Char fight some female beasts. Keep it in mind for next time. But for now, be proud of Char and the way her world treats her. We could use a lot more of that.
Beast Boxing Turbo is available for both Mac and Windows, and can be purchased from the game’s official website.
Becky Chambers is a freelance writer and a full-time geek. She blogs over at Other Scribbles and can always be found on Twitter.
Anne Hathaway’s made no secret that she really wanted the role of Selina Kyle went she went for it in the casting process for The Dark Knight Rises. It should surprise no one that she’d be 100% down for reprising her role as the character in some form. (Not that any such thing appears to be on the horizon, or is even likely to be on the horizon.)
But the emotion with which she regards the character is pretty endearing:
She told Access Hollywood:
It’s so embarrassing, I was at a press Q&A thing the other night for a screening of The Dark Knight, and the moderator asked me, ‘So what was it like to say goodbye to the character?’ And I burst into tears, because I miss her… Assuming there’s enough Kleenex in the world, yes, I would love to [reprise the character].
Do I need to add a line in here about how good female characters can have a real impact on, say, a female person? I mean, the closest I’ve ever come to acting is playing a very long-lived Dungeons & Dragons campaign in college, and I still have moments where I get a little sad that I don’t get to be a berserker paladin on a weekly basis anymore. If anyone still doubts Hathaway’s affection for the character, just take a look at this video of her talking to Oprah about the Oscars:
(I played a fighter who prestiged into Holy Liberator with a little bit of barbarian multiclassed in, so that the D&D folks don’t jump on me about alignment requirements in 3.5e.)
I never really understand when people say that I like playing strong characters. I always find that a little weird because, I could be wrong, but I don’t think people ever say that to men. It’s like, well what should I play, a weak character? Does that mean that I can lift weights? I guess it means strong-minded, right? But it’s weird because people never say that about a male actor — Michael Fassbender or George Clooney, for example — that they love playing strong characters. It’s a weird gender thing. — Rachel Weisz to The Sun.
We featured Heymonster‘s series of Patron Saints of Female Characters a while back when it contained only four women, Dana Scully, Liz Lemon, Kara Thrace, and Leslie Knope. The most mentioned possible additions to the pantheon in the comments of that post just so happened to be Ellen Ripley and Buffy Summers. Those commenters might be interested to know that both Ms. Ripley and Ms. Summers have their own prints now, also available as shirts, hoodies, and tote bags right here. Check out Buffy behind the jump.
The Cave is a game about terrible people. Yes, the artwork is charming and inviting. Yes, the oddball humor is every bit what you’d expect from a Ron Gilbert game. But underneath the surface lies a dark morality tale, where the faintest glimmer of redemption is mired in an Edward Gorey-like atmosphere of playful doom. The Cave itself — both the narrator and your host — disapproves of the sordid lives of the seven (technically eight) characters, but it does so with great relish.
Could it be that the Cave is purgatory? Are we facing judgment? Is it all — as I strongly suspect — a whimsical riff on the seven deadly sins? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that despite its imperfections, The Cave is a place well worth diving into.
As billed, The Cave is an adventure game with an old-school heart and a light seasoning of platforming mechanics. The player chooses any three characters she likes, each of which has a special ability and a unique story. Only one character can be controlled at a time, but all three must be used in concert to solve puzzles. I was anticipating something akin to Trine, in which each character offers a signature skill set, but in The Cave, your choice of characters has no bearing on your chances of success. For much of the game, only the characters’ interchangeable base abilities are needed. For example, use two characters to stand on pressure plates in order to open a door, then have the third walk through to the other side. That sort of thing.
This is where the game delivers an interesting twist. As you fearlessly spelunk, you encounter areas that can only be accessed by specific characters. These areas are the climax of each character’s story, which you unravel in piecemeal fashion through discoverable snapshots (a la Psychonauts). In other words, the accessibility of the Cave is determined by who you take with you. There’s no way to see it all your first time through. I loved this element, though the game could’ve done a better job of making it clear. The first such area I came across was specific to the Knight, who I did not have in my party. I was confused as to why I could bypass that area entirely, and for a while, I was left with a nagging sense that I had missed something. But after I realized the trick, I was fully on board. Replayability is not a major priority of mine, but there’s something to be said for a game that makes you look forward to the discoveries you’ll make on your second playthrough while you’re barely halfway through your first.
While we’re on the subject of characters, let me give a big round of applause to the conniving ladies of The Cave: the Scientist, the Adventurer, and the Time Traveler. Gender balance was an intentional component in the character design (the seventh character is a pair of twins, a boy and a girl), and their stories and appearances reflect it well. After decades of being accustomed to only one or two female characters within a playable ensemble, the combo of an even split, badass professions, and a lack of sexualization was wonderfully refreshing. This is not the only way to get it right, but it sure did work.
If you grew up on early ‘90s adventure games, as I did, playing through The Cave is like biting into a candy bar you haven’t had since grade school. There are two ways that experience can go. You either reconnect with the joy and comfort of a long-absent favorite, or remember why you stopped eating them in the first place. I imagine that players of The Cave will feel a little of both, then come down firmly in one camp or the other once the journey is complete. For me, the good times won out. Critical thinking and puzzle solving is my ambrosia, and it took me no time to settle happily into the brain-bending comfort of using the hot dog to lure the monster, but only after finding a crank to fix the broken well. However, early on, I was reacquainted with the thing that always frustrated me most about adventure games: backtracking. The Cave does away with the complicated inventory system of its predecessors, instead allowing the characters to carry only one item at a time. In some ways, this is a good thing, as it spares you the agony of sifting through a cluttered mess of useless trinkets in order to find the necessary piece. But it also means that if you set something down, or if you realize much later why that bone at the end of the tunnel was important, you’ll have to run the whole way back. There was one annoying segment involving a bowl of fruit, which was at the bottom of the area, and its recipient, which was several levels up. Discovering that the recipient needed a specific piece of fruit meant a lot of back and forth, which, after doing plenty of that already, started to border on tediousness.
This common malady of the genre is somewhat alleviated by the platforming mechanics, which keep the player engaged and focused while retracing his or her steps. I thought this was a smart inclusion, especially since no great tests of reflexes or timing are required. These elements are the meat and potatoes of a true platformer, but in The Cave, where backtracking is inevitable, working your way through flame traps or shifting platforms again and again would’ve been infuriating. But even though I found the balance well designed (or at least intentioned), its effectiveness was hindered somewhat by the controls, which were a little less precise than I would’ve liked (I was playing on PC). Jumping felt a tad slippery, and I repeatedly encountered a small glitch in which the character would push a movable block a few steps forward, even though all I’d done was grab onto it (this became problematic when pressure plates were involved). Had movement been more efficient, working my way back across the map would likely have felt like less of a bother.
I’m sure there are some for whom these drawbacks will be a deal breaker, especially those who are accustomed to the fast pace and instant feedback so ubiquitous in today’s market. But for tried-and-true adventure game fans (and, I think, for puzzle-loving newcomers), The Cave is a delightful new toy. This is not a game for the ages, but rather a game for a rainy afternoon, best paired with jammies and your favorite snacks. Look, forget everything I said about imprecise controls and repetition. When have those things not been true of adventure games? The far more important thing is that this is a game with dinosaurs, time travel, ballistic missiles, desert islands, dynamite, treasure hunters, dangerous contraptions, ancient ruins, glowing mushrooms, swarms of bats, junk food, carnival stalls, over-the-top villainy, and gleefully bleak consequences. That was enough for me.
The Cave is available on just about everything: PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox, PS3, and Wii U.
Becky Chambers is a freelance writer and a full-time geek. She blogs over at Other Scribbles and can always be found on Twitter.
The quotes from Chris Perna, art director of the Gears of War series, that have been floating around today actually say something a little more complicated than can be reasonably slimmed down to a single headline. A slightly longer summary? Perna says some puzzling things about gender presentation in character design, acknowledges that he’s proud of the playable female characters of the Gears of War franchise and that he knows that a lot of women fans of the series find those characters to be empowering, and then turns right around and shores up the self-fullfilling prophecy that games with female lead characters don’t sell.
[Female Gears of War cosplayers] feel empowered. They put on that armour and they walk around with these massive weapons and I think they get a kick out of it – I get a kick out of seeing it. From what we’ve heard, when they play the game they feel empowered and they feel good.
He credits the game’s character design, particularly how it doesn’t feel the need to give its female characters what he considers “feminine” qualities, with creating this feeling in female fans. But when asked if this means that the Gears of War franchise will ever see a female lead, his answer is:
That’s certainly interesting but I don’t know. If you look at what sells, it’s tough to justify something like that.
In fact, if you actually look at what sells, and not just how much it sells for, you will find that games with female leads also receive less than half the advertising budget of games with male leads. At the same time, they review nearly as well. To put it mildly, a pervasive, industry-wide assumption that female-led gains don’t sell and therefore are not worth the risk, and that even if you do make them you probably shouldn’t spend too much money on them, seems a very likely explanation for this discrepancy. You don’t even have to take my word for it, in fact, this is also the opinion of Geoffrey Zatkin, CEO of EEDAR, top marketing research firm for the videogames industry. If you assume that your female-led game will not sell well, and so deny it resources that your male-led title has, then, yeah, that lady-led game is not going to do as well. And you’ve got all the evidence you need to start making the case, just to pick one example, that men intrinsically have trouble thinking of female characters as a hero they want to embody.
It’s too bad that Perna appears to say that creating a game around characters that he believes women identify with and feel empowered to embody doesn’t “justify” itself based on a false assumption. There are many steps the video game industry can take to make their games and communities more welcoming to women. Acknowledging that at least one of the reasons why games with female leads don’t sell as well as the overwhelming majority of games based around male leads might be because everyone “knows” that games with female leads don’t sell well is a small one.
DC Comics teased a single picture this week, under the title “What’s New in The New 52 – Joker’s Daughter?!” (I’ve put the full picture below the jump.) And while a lot of you are probably thinking “ugh, what a trite idea for a female character,” I was thinking “Oh, neat, are they really going to bring back Duela Dent?
Now at this point some of you are probably going “Dent? Like… Harvey Dent? And Duela is “two”… but she’s the Joker‘s daughter?”
Yes. Come, lets talk about weird shit in comics, and a strange female character who maybe is getting a comeback, who knows?
Let’s put this out there first: there are a lot of Batman villains who got one, maybe two shots at becoming characters that remained in the pop culture mind, and then dropped off the face of the Earth. A lot of them deserved it. This is why nobody knows who King Tut is if they haven’t watched the 1960′s Batman television show, which, to its credit, is the only reason anybody today knows who the Riddler is. Which is not to say that villains can’t get a second chance: Mr. Freeze, for example, never really caught on until Batman: The Animated Series scrapped his jewel thief identity to give him a tragic motivation and a frozen wife. To sum up: superheroes get a lot of crazy villains.
Duella Dent’s first appearance was definitely one of those. She debuted in Batman Family #6, published in July of 1976, as an antagonist for Robin and Batgirl. Here’s the cover:
Ahh, Silver Age crack at its finest. (Although this was during the period where Barbara Gordon split her identity between Batgirl and serving in Congress, so that was pretty great.) Duela’s schtick was, well, taking the schtick of other supervillains and claiming to be their daughter while committing crimes. During her first issue she maintained she was the daughter of no less than the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, Catwoman, and Scarecrow (under the unambiguously awesome name “Scarecrone”). She was eventually revealed to only actually be the daughter of Harvey Dent, Two-Face. From Wikipedia:
Creator Bob Rozakis stated, “It didn’t take too long to decide whose daughter she would turn out to be. After all, the only married villain was Two-Face. I convinced Julie (and associate editor E. Nelson Bridwell, the acknowledged keeper of DC’s historical consistency) that Harvey and Gilda Dent had a daughter, that Harvey had been disappointed because she wasn’t a twin, and that they’d named her Duela.”
And before you start talking about Mary Sues, if I have to sit through the glorified Damian Wayne, son of the Batman, I would like, nay, I will demand the legitimacy of the Joker’s daughter.*
Now, I’ve never actually read Batman Family #6, so I can’t tell you if the original appearance of Duella was a story about a girl so desperate for an identity of her own that she would suck up to any villain in Gotham; or one about a woman so impressed by Gotham’s cast of rogues and their dedication to mayhem that she set about emulating their work in the same way that many of Batman’s sidekicks and partners do. But, as you might have guessed from my second option there, I can see potential in the concept. Duela was later occasionally incorporated (as a good guy whose ideas on her parentage were delusional) into the Teen Titans under the codename Harlequin (it’s important to remember that her character predates the creation of Harley Quinn as the Joker’s girlfriend by decades), and would make other appearances around the DC Universe that were muddled by alternate universe and time travel shenanigans of the first order.
Duela’s return to the DC universe would be interesting to say the least. There are a lot of fans wondering exactly how and when the Joker, and his face, will be making a comeback after Scott Snyder‘s Death of the Family. Oh, you hadn’t heard about the modern version of the Joker who wears his own flayed-off face as a mask? Joker’s face, and the rest of him, were lost at the end of the story arc, and if I can think of one way to bring a bit of him back without the pressure of having to live up to the best Joker story told in several decades, it would be to have somebody who just needs an excuse to sow some mayhem find it… as you can see in the picture above.
And yeah. I wouldn’t mind seeing a madwoman who’s looking to join Batman’s rogues gallery at any cost give the Batfamily a run for their money. Ideally, as far as gender representation in comics goes, we should be creating female characters who are not derivative of male characters but rather have their own identities. But Duela’s a legacy character who I’ve always thought had more potential than she was treated with, and if there’s one thing that could be really scary, it’d be a person striving to embody everything the people in Batman’s rogues gallery represents: madness, fear, cunning, intelligence, and murder.
*Jill, a big Damian fan, tried to talk me out of this sentence, but even setting aside my dislike for the character, I think the argument holds.
*Contains minor spoilers of Star Trek Into Darkness*
Unlike our own Zoe Chevat and Jill Pantozzi, I was actually very happy with Star Trek Into Darkness overall. Having been a Trekkie for as long as I can remember, I understand that it doesn’t have the philosophical weight of some past Trek stories, as well as the contention that it heavily recycles old characters and plot points. But personally I look at the “Abramsverse” as a complete remake, and my view of the new films is that they’re made differently but extremely well.
That’s not to say that I don’t agree with the gender issues-related criticisms of the film. The now-infamous Carol Marcus undressed scene was, to be sure, gratuitous, offensive and completely inexcusable. I was equally disappointed by the scene of a Starfleet Command roundtable which shows a 20-person group that’s between 70-75 percent male. But where equality appears even farther away, in Hollywood as a whole, is among another realm of film characters: villains.
Allow me to use the two J.J. Abrams Star Trek films as examples. There are no female members of the U.S.S. Vengeance crew. There were no female members of Nero’s crew in the 2009 film. Although it’s hard to tell for certain since most were wearing masks, it didn’t look like there were any female Klingons in Into Darkness‘ Kronos scene.
(To be tangentially honest it was the aforementioned Starfleet Command scene that stuck with me most of the movie. Given that most of the Enterprise crewmembers the series focuses on are male, this would have been an easy opportunity to counteract that at least briefly, and to make a simple statement on the future of gender equality in power positions. Obviously, the filmmakers completely blew it.
But at least they realized they couldn’t have no women in the scene whatsoever. Compositions of scenes like this illustrate that we’re not close to equality yet, but the situation is better than it would have been a decade or two ago. For example, check out the NASA higher-ups in Armageddon, which was co-written by J.J. Abrams, and came out just 15 years ago.)
The lack of female “bads” isn’t universal – for instance, there was the memorable (though brief) appearance of Ellen Brandt in Iron Man 3. But it’s clear that, as meager as the attempt to include “good” female characters in movies is overall, even less consideration is given to including women in antagonist roles.
I feel like filmmakers are thinking, “why does it matter if there are female antagonists – it’s not like a villainous character makes women look good.” And while this might be true in the simplest sense, it misses the bigger point. Having female characters in films shouldn’t be about getting in a few nice, positive moments for women and then calling it a day. It should be about naturally having an equal distribution of genders in film roles.
There’s no question it’s important that there be positive female role models in movies. But I’d hope such characters come about not because writers are purposefully trying to check a “strong female character” box and then move on, but because they’re writing female characters that span the range of cinematic possibility as often as they do for male characters.
Of course none of this is to mention the possibility of having a woman be the main villain of a movie, which is almost unheard of in films with male heroes, with exceptions like Dredd or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being few and far between. (And no, Jurassic Park does not count.) But it would be nice if, for instance, any of the numerous big summer male-fronted superhero films ever dug into the well of female supervillains for their big bad.
One reason filmmakers might be wary of this idea is that they’re afraid of the optics of a male hero hurting a female villain, given the prevalence of real-world male violence against women. If physical confrontation between hero and villain is absolutely crucial, it’s hard to deny the possibility that the imagery of domestic violence or sexual assault could be evoked.
The prevalence of these crimes is, of course, reprehensible on its own. It’s a lesser but still unfortunate side effect that a domain like the escapist fantasy world of film can be affected by their tragic normalcy. And – because it creates a class of characters that can only be male – in a way that serves to marginalize women, no less! That’s one example, of many, of how the different forms of marginalization of women can be interconnected and perpetuating of each other.
And besides, I feel pretty sure the film that culminates in a bloody mano-a-mano showdown between hero and villain is the exception rather than the rule these days anyway. That’s one reason I’m confident that the majority of recent villains could have been genderswapped without any troubling associations being created at all.
Another reason I say that is that the days of underdeveloped villains with few discernible traits but wickedness are mostly behind us, when it comes to well-regarded films at least. Even an unequivocally evil character like Voldemort received a fair deal of humanizing backstory. Most villainous characters will have defenders in fandom, and many have their downfalls slanted as more tragic or anti-heroic than simply an all-around horrible person getting their due.
So I don’t think one can validly make the excuse that there is something inherent about a villain’s character that would be inappropriate to assign to a woman. For instance, I’ve heard the argument that filmmakers want to avoid the femme fatale-style archetype whose villainous traits might just be thinly-veiled critiques of female power and/or sexuality.
But the solution to avoiding that, or any other troubling stereotype, is simple: Be aware enough to know to write something else. Contemporary writers have proven adept at imbuing male villains with humanity that might not have existed in the past, so the idea that their hands would be tied when crafting a female one is not very credible. (Or maybe we just need different writers.)
Though the overall effort is clearly still inadequate, filmmakers these days are usually savvy enough to at least give lip service to the idea of having female characters in their films. It’s time they realized that that should mean all types of characters, on the good-to-evil spectrum and otherwise.
Dan Wohl blogs about baseball for a living, and he also has been telling anyone who will listen lately that the primary villain in the next Star Trek film should be a Klingon played by uber-Trekkie Rosario Dawson. He would love for you to follow him on Twitter: @Dan_Wohl.
This is the second time I’ve received this question during this E3! I guess if people have strong feelings about it then it’s something to consider. I’ll keep that in mind! [laughs] — Eiji Aonuma, overseer of the Legend of Zelda franchise since 1998, when asked if he’d ever consider giving the character of Princess Zelda her own game.
Considering that in Ocarina of Time, one of the most beloved Zelda games of all time, Zelda, after spending years in martial training with the Sheikah, actually rescues an actual princess, so that said princess will be around later to help Link on his quest… Yeah, I think there’s room in the Zelda setting for a story where a princess rescues a princess.
And if you’d rather not revisit the Ocarina well, Nintendo, Aaron Diazhas some ideas for you.
Greg Rucka is a comics writer whose female characters we love to follow, from detective Rene Montoya and Kate Kane (The Question and Batwoman, if you’re nasty) in post-crisis DC comics, Rachel Cole-Alves in Marvel’s Punisher series, and that’s all without mentioning British special operative Tara Chase, Portland PI Dexedrine Parios, or steampunk pirate captain Lady Seneca Sabre. He’s got a new comic series with its first issue out tomorrow, featuring a new improbably named heroine, Forever Carlyle. Rucka sat down with us and some other reporters last week to answer questions about Lazarus. We invite you to read the interview and check out a prelude story and preview pages from Lazarus #1, which will hit physical and digital shelves tomorrow.
Moderator: We can just open with you saying a little bit about it, about Forever, our main character and the world.
Greg Rucka: Well, I dunno, we’ve been describing it as sort of Godfather meets Children of Men but I suppose that’s a little disingenuous. We’ve used the phrase dystopian future, but I suppose that’s a little tired. The idea behind the series is one of those sort of – like they used to say on Max Headroom: “twenty minutes into the future.” But it’s further than that, it’s a world that has suffered a huge economic collapse, where the rich and the poor are incredibly divided, where there’s very few of the rich and there’s lots and lots of the poor. And those who actually have wealth, you know, wealth has become the truest instrument of power, so that those who have it will do almost anything they can to keep it. And into this world is Forever Carlyle, who is the, quote unquote, “youngest” daughter of the Carlyle family, one of these sort of wealthy ruling families, and she is sort of their – I don’t want to say their secret weapon, but she is the standard bearer for the family’s defense, and as a result of that she is the recipient of everything that the family can offer. Carlyle’s wealth and power has come initially from agribusiness and that has lead to genetic modification and that has lead to gene work with people. Every family has either a Lazarus or a similar force, and it is a title, it is a slaying term for this type of person, this individual who is the sort of bloody sword and iron shield for their family. So that’s it kind of in a nutshell, and then Forever’s story is of course that she is, you know, not who she thinks she is, and it is in many ways a journey of self-discovery. I’m not sure that’s helpful, I give a really bad pitch [laughs].
Reporter: You’ve said that Forever is kind of a genetically modified human, and yet she’s still supposed to be part of the family. Does that kind of separation in biology lead to any conflicts that kind of push the story forward?
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say that (and it’s very clear, actually, in the second issue when you see her other siblings; she’s got a brother named Jonah) Forever has been raised to believe that she is the biological daughter, but she’s not. I mean, how she was made is a mystery to her, and there is a sincere concern that should she ever find out the truth behind her creation, they would loose control of her. So there’s actually active deception. We did that four page prelude story, and it was a three character story: it was her father Malcolm, talking to, basically, the lead scientist who monitors and maintains her (because she has to be maintained, she has a maintenance schedule, effectively), and at the same time were’ watching Forever off doing Dad’s dirty business. And her father tells James, tells this scientist, “She believes she’s my daughter, she believes that I love her, and that is how I control her.” You know, obviously, one of the immediate tensions is when that’s going to break. How long can you maintain this deception? And different people within the family have different agendas with regards to her, they want to control her, or they want to use her for their own ends. I don’t know if that answers the question.
Reporter: That was great, thanks.
Yay! I got one right!
Reporter: Can you talk a little bit about some of Forever’s training, what she’s capable of, and maybe the kinds of obstacles she has to face, what kind of forces she needs to be a weapon against?
Her biggest ability is (and this is, I want to say, semi-consistent through the other Lazur…i (I guess) from other families), is that she’s very hard to kill. She’s not immortal, but her ability to recover from injury is a level of technology that is almost indiscernible from magic. I did a lot of research on this and a lot of sort of speculative extrapolation on it, and it’s a leap from where we are going but it’s not an impossible leap. So that’s essentially her primary – her primary strength is that you just, you really can’t stop her. And that right there is a problem. Then on top of that you have the exact kind of genetic engineering you would expect if you were going to put this into your warrior/bodyguard/soldier/spy, she is very quick, she is very strong, she has a variety of resistances and immunities, all of which arise from the genetic level. It isn’t “I’m gonna lift a car and throw it,” but is is a high upper end human spectrum ability. There’s an interesting body of research out there right now that talks about where we’re going in, say, professional sports in the next 20 or 50 years, and how gene therapy and blood platelet replacement therapy and so on can very logically lead to sort of these malformed professional athletes. Because as you as give them denser muscle mass and so on, you need to redesign the skeletal system to support them, you need to provide a larger thoracic capacity for respiration and circulatory purposes. So that’s sort of the skill set. Now, you can take all that, but if you put a sword into somebody’s hand, with that ability, they may be able to swing it really hard but it doesn’t mean they’re going to hit what they swing at. So, she has been raised from the beginning and trained from the beginning to do certain things. And more importantly, or perhaps just as importantly, she’s been raised to believe certain things like… the family is correct. That these peasants, The Waste, as they’re called, do not matter in the face of the family. That her father is always right. And that’s both conditioning as a product of nurture as often as her design; it goes to her maintenance schedule.
There are things that she faces… in theory, the ultimate purpose of a Lazarus is to destroy the enemy of the family. To do that you have to be able to destroy the other family’s Lazarus. And since so much of what’s driving the wealth of this world is about greed and possession, the ideal conflict is one that retains infrastructure and retains material, right? “I don’t want to bomb your city, I want to take your city. I want to chop off the head; there’s no point in me destroying your people. Especially if your people don’t matter to you. My goal is I’m gonna need to be able to take you out.” So, there’s an aspect of sort of that upper level political slash military conflict that she should be able to act well on a battlefield, but she should just as easily be able to survive in very specific assassination operations or one-on-one combat. It’s not a world with monsters per se; some of the people are definitely monstrous, but certainly at the start the conflicts that she finds herself involved with are with people of meat and bone. Long rambling answers. I’m good at those!
The Mary Sue: I’ve always enjoyed your big ensemble casts in Queen and Country and Gotham Central, and I was wondering if you could talk about about the extended cast of Lazarus.
Um. Oh boy, how do I answer… Well, lets see. Obviously her family… it is a large family, so her siblings, her parents, all play a part. She’s got her dad, she’s got two older brothers, Steven and Jonah, Jonah has a twin sister Joanna, and then she has another older sister Bethany. All of them have very specific agendas and opinions regarding Forever. Her mom, we actually (it’s funny Michael and I have been talking about this a lot lately) her mom we’re holding in reserve. When her mom appears that’s actually a story for her. For lack of a better phrase, I guess, her presumptive mom, as opposed to her biological mom. Her relationships with family are all power relationships. She’s not a servant, but she is always aware of her place in the family. Some do a better job than others of interacting with her. For instance, Bethany worked with James, the doctor, one of her designers. Bethany worked with the man who created her. Forever doesn’t know this, so Forever doesn’t understand why Bethany has this particular interest in when she takes her pills, why she’s always getting checkups from her sister, other than: that’s the thing Bethany does, Bethany’s focused in the sciences. Her relationship with James is far more intimate. But one of the ways that they control her is through I think, again, that withholding and granting of affection and of approval. There are very few relationships that she has within the family structure that are not dictated by that. In our third issue she has been sent – again, I don’t think this is a spoiler – in the third issue she’s been sent to another family, at her father’s request, to basically engage in negotiations. And when she arrives, she is interacting with their Lazarus, a man named Joachim, and that relationship is entirely different, it isn’t as adversarial as one might presume. So part of what the story is, is actually how her experience with other people outside of this rigid structure she has been created in leads to more questions, and her growth, and the way she changes. When Joachim shows up I think, I’ve really, I’ve been having a lot of fun with the character. I’ve been having a lot of fun the whole book, I mean, frankly, it’s, right now, the book that I want to be working on when I’m working on other things, for the most part. Which I take as always a good sign.
Reporter: I’m curious how the working relationship with Michael Lark is different on this book than some of your DC or Marvel collaborations.
I mean obviously the editorial system with Image is entirely different. Our ability to, you know, jump in and collaborate really, fully top to bottom on it, it’s not a relationship that one can easily find at either of the Big Two. I’m sure there are people who have successfully been able to do it, I’ve rarely rarely been able to accomplish it. Michael is, I think he’s one of the best graphic storytellers working today, I mean without question. One of the other things that, you know ’cause you don’t see it, it doesn’t look like it falls into his domain when you’re reading the book, Michael is actually terribly, terribly smart and he’s got a great story sense. And the ability to collaborate with him so fully, that’s unique. I mean, I’ve just, neither of us have had this opportunity before. So I can call him up and literally say “I’m thinking this thing,” you know, or “this is the idea,” and he’ll come back with three or four other things. And the other thing that I really love in the working relationship with him is that the script is dynamic. When I’m working with Michael the script is dynamic. You work at the Big Two, you know, and you’re working on say, Punisher. The script has to be in by X time so the artist can get ot work on it, and at that point the communication and the ability to alter the script on the fly, and as inspiration strikes, is very limited. Michael and I, I give him the script, he works, and then I’ll get an email, I’ll get a call, and it will be as much about storytelling as about story that we’re telling. And I love that, I mean I just, it is so exciting and it’s so energizing. It is the fullest sense of collaboration. It’s been fantastic so far.
Reporter: Can you talk al little bit about world building and how you reveal the scope of this world to the readers? Is this the kind of story where we’re gonna have a good sense of how big this world is, how many players are involved, after two or three issues? Or is it something that’s going to take a bit longer? Or is it always going to be a little bit mysterious?
I think it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. I think one of the things that we’ve done successfully in this first arc, in these first four issues, is to sorta paint the world broadly and paint the, sort of, political tensions, the power balance of the world? We do not have a lot of opportunity in these four issues to really go down amongst the people who are suffering the most. That’s something that is in our second arc. We reveal more of that.
We don’t list all the families. You get mentions of this name or that name, we know there’s Carlyle, we know there’s Moray, there’re like 28 other families… So I’ve always… this may be an odd answer: I remember picking up William Gibson‘s Neuromancer when I was in high school and thinking that the way he had revealed the world as the book progressed was just brilliant. I loved that aspect of there being enough detail to make you ask creation questions and enough details to fill in certain blanks, but he never gave you everything. And I’m leery, as a writer, of exposition, you know what I mean? [laughs] Does the story provide the opportunity to show how the world works and to reveal more and more of it? That’s great. But the idea that idea of needing to turn around at any point and say “This is the way it works,” to me that’s boring. And sometimes I think it also risks really insulting your audience. And you know I’ve been in comics for fifteen years now and one of the things I’ve discovered is it’s a really smart audience, man. And two things that come from having such a smart audience: the first one is they know if you’re condescending in any way. And they also, I think they want to be engaged. They want that. We’ve talked about Saga as sort of our model for publishing? And I think Saga‘s also a great model for storytelling, you know? You get more the further you go, but the goal is always to make sure you have enough.
The Mary Sue: Is the fact that Forever was created as a female character… not as a female character, as a female sort of warrior/protector/sword of her family, is that more reflective of a sort of futuristic shift and more neutral thinking about which gender is more suited towards being playing a martial role in society? Or is it more of, maybe her father seeing her creator seeing… making her female would make her easier to manipulate.
I do think that… how to put it. The families are conservative by nature; there is a certain amount of sexism. There is a huge vanity in naming your child Forever, you know? [laughs] So Malcolm got what he ordered. He had a checklist. And there is very much a sense of, yeah, controlling her through that “Daddy’s little girl” thing. So it is, ironically, perhaps, among certain families that element of sexism is still extant and practiced, though it may be in many ways very much like our sexism today which tends to be a muted cultural one. Where down amongst the Waste, there’s really not, there’s no time for it. These are people who are desperately trying to survive. And desperately trying to find their way out of this horrible poverty they live in, and so issues of gender amongst the Waste are far less crucial. But yeah, there is, you know, an absolute… Forever is as she is by design, and that means she’s a woman by design. And actually once you get into the second arc, you see, and this is… trying to figure out how to phrase this because it’s just kind of spoilery. You see more evidence of how Malcolm manipulates his daughter and how long it’s been going on. And how that “Daddy’s little girl” relationship really factors into things. I think that’s the best answer I’ve got for you.
Moderator: Anything else you’d like to add, Greg?
Yeah, I actually do want to add that everything about this has been terrific. I am so excited about this book coming out. Image has been incredibly supportive. This is a whole new publishing experience for me, so top to bottom I am…
[laughs] Aside from one mistake that I caught in the first issue and it’s my fault… It’s the oxytocin/oxycontin one, and I saw it yesterday and I went “Oh god, nooo. I thought i corrected that!” [laughs] The way I’m looking at it is it gives us – now I know what I’m starting our second issue letter column with.
Look, I don’t like books that are polemics, and I don’t like reading something that feels like I’m being lectured to. We talk about the economic divide and things like that, but the fact of the matter is that this is an adventure story, this is a story about a woman, it’s about Forever Carlyle. Everything else is backdrop to that. And, you know, just the opportunity to do this story the way we want, how we want. Man, I love it, I’m so excited, and I’m so excited that we finally get to show people what we’ve been working on for so long. I really do hope folks will dig in, I really do. I think Michael has done some of the best work of his career on issue one certainly, and I’m just having a blast, so. That’s what I’ve got to offer.
I was running around a dragon’s insides with a flamethrower when I felt a pang of guilt. True, the fleshy walls I destroyed rebuilt themselves quickly, but all the same, lobbing fireballs within someone’s gullet had to hurt. And honestly, had the dragon done anything to me? Had he provoked me in some way? Under different circumstances, might we have been friends?
I scoffed at myself. It was too late for all that. I had an upgraded arsenal and a college-ruled death list. I was on my way to becoming the greatest hero in the world. Remorse was for the weak.
I’m in favor of any game whose introductory mission is “Storm the Opulent Manor.” I’m also in favor of robots, monsters, explosions, getting dual pistols and a rocket launcher as starter weapons, and kickass female protagonists. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed Bleed.
The year is 21XX, and the heroes of the world have become lazy. Banking on their former acts of glory, they no longer feel the need to defend their titles. They have forgotten what a hero is meant to be.
But Wryn hasn’t. Our confident, punky-haired protagonist is out to become the greatest hero ever, and that means taking the others down. That’s all the story we get, and really, it’s all we need. Bleed believes that sometimes, all a player wants is to jump around and shoot stuff and feel cool. I can’t argue with that.
If you’ve played any classic run ‘n’ guns, Bleed will feel familiar. I consistently had the sense that I was revisiting something I’d played before. Not in a bad way. Not been-there-done-that. There are lots of indie games with old school hearts these days, but Bleed is more concerned with polishing the wheel, rather than reinventing it. You’ve got your underground level, and your laser level, and your moving train level — all gimmicks we’ve seen, but they’re done right, with smooth mechanics and delightful artwork. It’s an homage, not a rip-off, and it works awfully well.
Just like the classics Bleed draws from, this game is a serious challenge. Wryn can dash and double-jump, but her enemies are faster, and endless. Luckily, she comes equipped with an infinite supply of rapid-firing ammo (as a friend commented, “It’s like if Mega Man had an UZI”), and can change directions in mid-air to avoid trouble. I’m not talking air strafing, here — I’m talking jumping straight up, then shooting forward at a ninety degree angle. It’s madness, but I’m all for it. Wryn can also slow time, which becomes crucial in dodging attacks, and has all sorts of nifty weapons at her disposal. The controls are easy to pick up, but utilizing them correctly takes practice. Not that the game gives you much time for that. The bare-bones tutorial hearkens back to the days of yore, when all a game had to say was “Do you know how to jump? Good. Do you know how to shoot? Good. Now go.” The first level throws you into the deep end, and the boss fights become increasingly insane. A mini boss precedes every boss fight, of course, and without a way to replenish your HP, mistakes quickly become fatal. Thankfully, the game ignores the concept of exhaustible lives, meaning you can try again, and again, and again, without needing to start from scratch (a staple of classic games I do not miss at all).
This was a wise choice. The game moves so fast, anything else would’ve been cruel. Many modern platformers give you time to assess the dangers ahead before you jump in, but this is rarely the case here. One level begins with Wryn riding a speeding elevator platform. Without warning, a flying enemy appears, firing missiles. You shoot it down. More appear. Sections of the platform start glowing red. Within a second or two, they begin to do damage. Now you’ve got missiles to dodge, glowing red floor to avoid, and fast-moving baddies to aim at. All within a narrow elevator shaft. My feet barely touched down. My guns never stopped firing.
I love moments like that. It’s like looking down from the top of a roller coaster, scarcely having the time to process how how far you’ll fall before you’re already on your way. If I had to sum up Bleed in one sentence, it would be “WHOA WAIT OH GOD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA,” followed by laughter.
As for the heroine, it’s hard not to like Wryn. Her expressions are all extremes, from effusively throwing confetti in victory, to despairingly crying “YOU PUSHED THE WRONG BUTTOOOOOOOON!!!” in defeat. Yes, Wryn is fully aware that she’s a video game protagonist, and considers you her partner in her heroic endeavors — even if she’s not always convinced of your abilities (after repeated failures during a particularly tricky bit, she suggested I find a strategy guide).
I liked Wryn for her pluck, and her determination, but also for her simplicity. There’s no deep message to consider here. Wryn wants to be a hero, and she exists in a world where that’s totally cool. That’s it. That’s her whole character. And it’s the right kind of character for a game like this. The reason Bleed works is because it never tries to do be anything more than fun. It’s got bright pixels, cheerful chiptunes, unlockable characters, challenge modes, and two-player local co-op. It’s not a game you’ll be talking about forever. But it’s a few satisfying hours of joyful entertainment, packaged with a big smile and a five dollar price tag. That’s enough for me.
I’m offering you a very late review of The Last of Us for a number of reasons. Primarily, because Naughty Dog reached out to us specifically to offer a review copy, not something that happens very often to The Mary Sue. More specifically, I’m offering it to you because our usual reviewer, Becky Chambers, does not own a PS3. Which is partially why you’re getting it so late, because I don’t usually have to factor in “playing a video game” to my job obligations. And since I’m not usually a game reviewer, and you’re not usually getting reviews from me on this site, lets get some expository information out of the way before I dive into the meat of explaining how The Last of Us is one of the strongest emotional experiences I’ve had playing a video game. And, you know, it’s pretty damn good with its female characters as well.
Lets start by saying this: I am not a fan of horror. In fact, as I put it to many friends while describing my experiences with completing The Last of Us, I am at best a “tolerator” of horror. I’ll watch Alien because it’s important to the history of women, science fiction, and horror in cinema. But I don’t enjoy creeping suspense. Twice while playing The Last of Us I had a drink before firing up my PS3 and getting back to, say, that half flooded hotel basement where a wave of squeaking, swimming rats had been the last straw in motivating me to turn off the game and do something else hours before. For another example: this review was written by a person who got to the first headcrabs fight in Half Life 2, turned off the game, and never played it again. The Last of Us loves its creeping suspense and its ambient soundtrack, and its zombie design is, no pun intended, frightfully effective.
The source of the zombies or, because nobody’s allowed to say “zombies” in zombie fiction, Infected, is the an advanced form of the cordyceps fungus (yes, that links to Wikipedia, click at your own risk) that infects human beings instead of an array of insects and arthropods. There are four stages, the first two pretty much indistinguishable from each other as far as gameplay is concerned (something that seems to be a failed initiative on the developers part). It’s the Clickers where things get really bad: aside from the body horror of having most of their faces covered by fungal plates that have erupted from their skin, they can no longer see, and instead sense through echolocation, constantly emitting a variety of inhuman clicking noises. They can only “see” you when you make noise, are twice as hard to kill as stages one and two, are tricky even to stealth kill, and if you don’t have a heavy melee weapon to keep them at bay, instantly tear your throat open upon reaching melee range. I honestly found them more terrifying than running into Stage Four Infected, which was a bummer because they’re far more common. I once nearly skipped an optional room entirely because I could hear two Clickers inside of it. Only two! (I didn’t skip it, though I had to turn the game off for a while and do something else in order to screw up my courage.)
It’s hard to say what’s worse in The Last of Us, the terrifying zombies or the terrible people, which is undoubtedly the full intention of the developers. I knew that the zombie plague in TLoU was fungus related going into the game, but I wasn’t aware that but for a brief prologue, the majority of the story takes place twenty years into the zombie apocalypse. The game opens with you piloting twelve-year-old Sarah during the hours that the Infected outbreak first reaches Austin, Texas, as she, her single parent and co-main character Joel, and his brother Tommy, try to get out of the city. It’s not insignificant that you begin the game playing a teenage girl, as you return to play Ellie later on in what was absolutely my favorite story arc of the game. If you’re really set on playing The Last of Us with 100% no spoilers, you’ll want to skip ahead now. I’m going to keep this spoiler-lite, but there’s a moment I feel I have to talk about in the prologue, so I’ll put a YouTube video after I’m done talking about the plot. Skip to after that video and you’ll be fine.
The prologue is perhaps five or ten minutes long, immediately grabbed my emotions, and ended in Sarah dying, terrified, in her helpless father’s arms. It is very significant that she’s killed not by the Infected, but by a soldier running crowd control. The aforementioned theme of humans being the real threat to the main characters of The Last of Us is a strong one, but one that is implemented with enough variety not to become overbearing. The prologue also sets up Joel’s primary flaw of having pretty big unresolved issues with loss, which, within a few hours of gameplay later, is paired up with Ellie, our second protagonist (and our second playable teenage girl)’s unresolved issues with abandonment. Ellie, as you might easily guess, may be the only person to ever develop an immunity to the cordyceps fungus, and Joel is pressured by multiple intertwined events into escorting her from Boston to Colorado in order to find doctors who are still even looking for a cure or vaccination.
Oh great, you might think, another male main character given emotional problems by killing a female one who will be “fixed” by interacting with a secondary female character. And, yeah, I was a little worried. But the reality of Joel’s character arc turned out to subvert this in a very real way. Whether you consider The Last of Us to have a happy ending may depend entirely on whether you are or have ever been a parent. Joel’s final actions could be seen as either an incredible act of selfishness, or the only possible choice anyone could have made in his situation. And Ellie is just… I find it difficult to describe how firmly the game establishes that she’s smart, capable, and subordinate to Joel only in twenty-five years of emotional experience and maybe 150 pounds. That is, without explicitly describing the events of the game. There was a point where I really thought The Last of Us was going for the old “play as the secondary character until she gets in trouble and then the main character regains consciousness to rescue her heroically,” but I was proven wrong. I was proven wrong with machetes.
Welcome back, plot spoiler avoiders! The rest of the women of The Last of Us are all characters I, if not genuinely loved, then loved the presentation of, especially in the case of one female character (who shall remain nameless for spoilers) who the game could easily have demonized but instead took the time to expand on her struggles and emotions through the system of collectable notes and diary entries. And then there’s Tess, introduced just after the 20 Years Later jump, as Joel’s partner in Quarantine Zone smuggling, a ruthless, pragmatic defender of her turf and her merchandise who is clearly the leader of their duo. This is the moment where I have to mention the superb voice acting. At one point, when a contact confesses he sold the guns he was supposed to be delivering to her, Tess responds by saying “Excuse me?” What could have been a sentence dripping with sassy lady sarcasm is instead delivered as an exclamation of genuine surprise and anger, exactly as if Tess cannot believe that he would do the thing he just said he did, knowing what she knows he knows about her, and I knew then that I loved her with all my organized-crime-lady loving heart. While the ratio of named women with speaking roles to men drops off significantly as the game progresses (at a certain point in the beginning, it was four women to three men), The Last of Us passes the Bechdel test the very first time two female characters exchange words. That said, it would have been nice if any of the groups of antagonist humans in the game had visibly included women, especially the one established as a community with couples and children. There were plenty of Infected who were still visibly female, so it isn’t as if Naughty Dog was too strapped to make female enemy models.
The tense mood of The Last of Us was bolstered by its world building: collectable documents and the occasional scientist’s recording device gives you almost universally depressing windows into the current and past lives of folks affected by the Infected outbreak. Abandoned suburban houses outside of Pittsburgh are covered in spray painted screeds announcing that the premises are occupied, the occupants are armed, and looters will be shot on sight. Things are also kept very real with the scarcity mechanics: you’re limited in how many of your craftable items (shivs, molotovs, nail bombs, etc.) you can carry as well as how much raw material and ammunition. And every melee weapon in the game eventually breaks, though you can learn to improve their durability through a skill system.
Scarcity of ammunition generally worked well to get me to mind my usage, though there were a number of handguns that I pretty much never used, and others that I would have liked to use more if found ammunition for them hadn’t dried up completely for three or four hours of gameplay at a time. It was sometimes difficult for me to gage whether my actions would alert enemies during stealth, and sometimes even hard to figure out whether I was supposed to sneak my way through an obstacle or go to Rambo mode. There were some areas where the game didn’t seem to really care, regardless of character conversations about sneaking just beforehand, and some where it seemed to be pretty adamant about avoiding open combat. Usually I only figured this out after dying multiple frustrating times. I also never felt like I understood the pacing of the game from a gameplay stance: I could never tell when I was good to relax with some curious exploration and when I was about to run into a combat or stealth sequence, leaving me unbearably tense and overly cautious for most of the game. I could chalk this entirely up to, well, being the sort of person who stops playing Half Life at the first headcrab, except that I spent The Last of Us‘ most obvious “just sit here, relax, and enjoy the nice music and this nice view and the nice emotional moment we set up for you” sequence physically tense because the scene was so laid back, horrified that the next door I opened was obviously going to pop out a Clicker to maul my face.
In a nutshell, I’ve been unable to stop talking about The Last of Us to my friends while playing it, so I can whole heartedly recommend it to anybody looking to go through some serious emotion and adrenaline ups and downs. If this horror-tolerator can play the entirety of this game during a month where her roommate is out of the apartment on vacation, you probably can, too. Aside from not being a big horror person, not being particularly experienced with reviewing video games, and not having the time to deliver them on time, there’s one more way in which I feel I’m probably missing a big chunk of perspective on The Last of Us: I am not, nor do I ever plan on becoming, a parent. I won’t say anything specific about Joel and Ellie’ journey, or it’s conclusion, because I’m committed to keeping this spoiler free. I’m not sure I’d call the ending of the Last of Us brave, exactly, but it is not at all what my cynical early guess made it out to be, and as a writer and an appreciator of heroic narratives, I expect it will stick with me for a very long time.
