A few days ago I read Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what the game is about, by Clint Hocking, and (aside from learning I was the nerdiest person on the planet) I became inspired to write some game criticism of my own. So I sat down to write about why I felt that Samus was not a truly great female hero. I worked at it for the next hour but when I looked back at what I wrote I realized that writing game criticism is difficult. I sat down and argued that a female hero is one who uses her femininity to her advantage, and was strong through being a female, not a faceless character who just happens not to have a Y chromosome.
So I went back to rewrite my thoughts about the woman in the metal suit, but I kept having Vietnam style flashbacks to the 22 pages I just had to write about the play Double Falsehood (for those of you who don't know, it is a play that Shakespeare may have written), so I quickly shelved that project and got back to playing Beyond Good and Evil. As I was playing I began to pick up very quickly on Jade as one of the best female characters in any video game. She was what I knew Samus was not.
I began to analyze all of Jade's methods and motivations I had encountered so far in the game (I told you I was the nerdiest person on the planet), so allow me to share them with you:
A) She is nurturing.
When the player is first introduced to Jade, she is running an orphanage with a pig-man but struggling to make ends meet. She continues her nurturing throughout the story as she protects the weak throughout (I'm resisting the urge to call her a mama bear).
B) She isn't aggressive, but is strong when she needs to be.
A large portion of Beyond Good and Evil is taken up by stealth sequences in which Jade can either fight or hide. Jade, however, is not particularly good at fighting these enemies, making sneaking a much better option. But Jade is not weak by any stretch. In the beginning of the game Jade has to defend her orphanage from alien invaders and she does so through brute force (once more I'm avoiding calling her a mama bear.)
C)She inspires others to be their best.
Beyond Good and Evil plays a lot like the Legend of Zelda games, which are primarily focused on fighting your way through dungeons and killing large creatures and evils. Jade could fight her way through hordes of enemies (I'm confident she would survive), but instead she chooses to take pictures of what takes place behind closed doors. These are distributed to the masses, who then start to stand up for what is right and choose to save the world themselves.
So after I made these realizations I thought back to Samus. Was she nurturing? Not really. Was she overtly aggressive? Yeah, but she was sent into these highly volatile areas knowing everyone wanted her dead. Did she inspire others to be their best? This one required some thought, as she never really came into contact with anything that didn't want to kill her.
So was Samus really a female hero? Not really, she was just a hero who happened to be female. She could really be replaced by anyone else in that suit, Gordan Freeman, Link, Quote, Chell, the guy from F.E.A.R., Soap, or Ness. This isn't to take anything away from Samus as a hero, or from the games themselves, but Samus could be a man, or an alien, or a robot and the games themselves would not change much if at all.
I get what you mean by it doesn't matter that she was female... except for the part WHERE IT DOES FUCKING MATTER.
ReplyDelete1) This is from an old-school series... we didn't have narrative or cut scenes or character development. (that trend was continued fairly strongly into the current gen titles of the series)
2) Female protagonists were unheard of back then. Women were considered weak and frail and incapable of what men could do. The whole point was the shock that this hero that fearlessly encountered space pirates and metroids and strange native creatures was not the fearless man everyone expected the faceless hero to be.
3) There are heroines and Female heroes. Heroines are feminine and use their femininity... otherwise known as the sexist typical female role, to their advantage. They succumb to some stereotypes of their gender. Female heroes are in fact Heroes (male) that aren't male, and we love them for that. Showing that women don't have to be womanly to be a hero.
In conclusion, you are comparing apples to oranges... heroines to female heroes. Not only that, but you are comparing an old-school character to a new-school character. It's like comparing Mario as a deep character to Titus or Yuna from Final Fantasy X.
Secondary conclusion. You don't like manly women. You like womanly women. In further extrapolation you are suppressing women into a stereotype... thus you are a nazi. Good day sir.
Samus is still a character now, so she can still have some sort of arc or development, rather than, SHE DID STUFF. END.
ReplyDeleteHeroes can have female qualities without being a "sexist typical female role." They can use things that aren't typical seduction to their advantages, like agility or compassion.
Typical female qualities are BORING. It is typical and expected of them. It was exciting and awesome that a woman was doing things "only men could do". It was a shock. Broke the mold.
ReplyDeleteThe same way some male heroes that are emotional and effeminate are compelling is the same way Samus is compelling for being a strong and silent female hero.
Stan, it just sounds to me like you like your male heroes weak and effeminate, possibly because they remind you of yourself, and you like your female heroes big and strong, like you like your women. And that's okay, but you're letting your preferences color your critical thought. The point is that Samus could be anybody under that helmet and it wouldn't make a difference, so she isn't exactly a role model for little girls. She's just a bounty hunter that doesn't espouse any particular femininity. And don't try to say that saying female heroes should express femininity is sexist. I'm not saying she should put on an apron and turn into Cooking Mama(though that would be an AWESOME crossover), just that if she displayed ANY of the psychological traits that define women as separate from men she would be a bit more compelling as a character.
ReplyDeleteNo it does impact the feel of the games. It would be different. The player would have a different connection to the character.
ReplyDeleteLikewise like most men you are coloring women to be lesser than men in terms of capacity for violence or physicalness stuff. You also color them to have a greater capacity for emotion. So likewise you prefer heroines wheras I prefer female heroes.
Samus also acts somewhat motherly towards the last metroid... which she did not kill out of compassion and guilt. So she does show feminine traits and it does matter that she is female.
P.S. Btw. The feminism thing was a joke so I could play the Glenn Beck nazi card on Sponkor. I thought it was a good one.
ReplyDeleteP.P.S. I prefer my male heroes strong and emotionless because I am neither of those. While I can empathize with those that have more passion (like Snow from FFXIII) I tend to prefer that they be more like Marcus or Baird or anyone from Gears of War that is not Carmine (or Carmine's siblings).
ReplyDeleteLook, the whole point of the article, aside from it being a laser guided missile designed specifically to piss you off, was to point out that Samus doesn't act as a feminine hero. She's not an exemplar of female strength or anything like that, she's really just a suit. Inside of that suit could be anybody, hell, it could be ME, and you would still have the same character. She isn't a well written, developing female character, she's just kind of there. It's like if Link were female. It wouldn't change much, if anything(though all the white knights would get pissed whenever she took a hit).
ReplyDeleteAnd for the record, women ARE less capable of physical violence than males. I'm all for equality in terms of rights and opportunities, but men are biologically designed to develop more strength than women. It's a fact of life. That's the argument almost everyone resorts to when someone says it's okay to fight back against a woman, the "Women are weaker than men, so you can't hit back even if they try to knock you out," card.
Finally, Samus saving the baby metroid may have been a nurturing act, but men(especially fictional men) are just as capable of similar things. A certain Ender Wiggin comes to mind. So that's not necessarily a feminine ideal, as a desired characteristic in almost ANY hero.