Mansplaining female protagonists, part 1: "Female Characters" versus "Characters With Ladyparts"

Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
-As Good as It Gets

Okay, so, there's an article on Polygon (archive link) saying, essentially, that only women can write great female characters "in gaming."

Now, I personally wonder what makes a female character in a video game different from a female character in a film or a TV show. The only difference I can think of is that a male audience can interact with her, either by directly controlling her if she's the PC, or via his virtual avatar if she's an NPC. I don't think that really matters.

From the article:

Yes, writers are required to create convincing characters who are different from themselves. But in video games, writers have tended towards idealized versions of themselves.

1) citation needed, and 2) that's a case unique to video games all of a sudden?

So let's talk about female characters.

Hold up. In order to talk about female characters, we're going to have to talk about "female characters." I know that sounds kinda circular, but bear with me. In typical male-viewpoint binary* form, I think there are two kinds of female characters: female characters, and characters who happen to be female.

*A note to all sociology people: I'm sorry-not-sorry for interchanging "sex" and "gender" throughout this piece. Deal with it.

Let's do some case studies:





The first one is Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise. Let me tell you something you might not know: in the original film, the writers (men) wrote every part without regard for sex. An actor of either sex could play any part.

YES THEY PUT HER IN HER UNDERWEAR AT THE END. I know that. I saw the film.  Personally, I thought those scenes were there more to emphasize her vulnerability than for fanservice, but you're welcome to disagree. Either way, that one sartorial decision was not exactly the centerfoldpiece of the film.

Pictured: the centerpiece of a film

 I think - not going to put thoughts in anyone's head here - that Ridley Scott had one idea for Ripley-as-woman and James Cameron had another. (No, there were no further sequels.) Anyway, here's a side-by-side comparison of Ripley in Alien versus Ripley in Aliens:


Yeah, I see a bit of a difference. Scott took a sexless character and made her a woman. Cameron did something a little different. See, it takes the better part of 2+ hours of Aliens's run time for the Ripley on the right to show up. And when she does, it's for a very specific reason:

The only reason Ripley straps on all those guns at the end is to go and rescue a character she's basically made into a surrogate daughter. I'm not saying that negates the greatest six words to immediately precede a puppet-fight in cinematic history, but the character motivation is almost explicitly (the Director's Cut drops the "almost") a maternal one. Pretty sure Newt calls Ripley "mommy" at one point, but I forget if this is before or after the rescue.

The motherhood angle is one thing. Here's another: because of the overt sexual imagery in the Alien designs, I believe that Aliens can be read as an allegory of a rape survivor coping with her trauma. And then picking up a baseball bat and going right for the testicles of the next rapist she comes across. Was that Cameron's intent? Dunno. The motherhood one comes across easily, especially in the Director's Cut, whereas the second reading is more my own interpretation. Either way, Cameron's definition of a female protagonist is different from Scott's. In Alien, Ripley's "woman-ness" began and ended with a few shots of her running around in skimpy underwear (the reason she doesn't go chasing the alien in the ducts, for example, is because the captain pulls rank, rather than the "sexism" card, on her). In Aliens, the fact that Ripley is a woman is kind of essential to the story, regardless of whether you see it through the "mama bear" lens or the "rape survivor" one. (I don't mean to flippantly dismiss this, but men can't get raped in 80s action flicks.)

Now, I don't know about you, but I thought Alien!Ripley was kind of a cipher compared to the character we saw in the sequel. I would describe Ripley in the first film as "a character who happens to be female," and Ripley in the sequel as "a female character." A particularly well-done female character, I might add.

Okay, at this point you're wondering what all this has to do with video games. Right. I now present the most famous female video game protagonist of all time:

By this stage, it's pretty obvious that Samus is female. There's even a TvTrope about it. Here's the thing: just like Ripley, Samus started off as a genderless protagonist. The modern design of her armor has hips and a boob plate, yeah, and yet, the fact that she's female never almost never never affects the story.

Here's the second most yeah I forgot Lara Croft another famous female videogame protagonist:

Mass Effect allows you to play as either a male or a female character. This has no effect on gameplay and only a minor effect on the story. Aside from who you can romance, there's one scene that plays out very slightly differently if you play as a Female Shepard (FemShep), when a mercenary calls you a stripper. (Yes, guys, FemShep can get 2 more renegade points than you can!)

Oh, but what about the whole lesbian thing in the first game? (You could romance either an opposite-sex human squadmate or a bisexual alien whose species are all mono-gendered yet look entirely female.) That would get the SJW legion riled up, yeah?

Er. Um.

By the way, "Rogue" FemShep? It's called "Renegade," sunshine. Mass Effect - and particularly Mass Effect 2, the game Wu's referring to there, is built on a morality system where the morality of the character's actions is weighed. It's not so much good-versus-evil as hero-versus-antihero, Superman-versus-Batman (or, more accurately, Superman-versus-AzBats, but I'm not going there). You cannot simply decide "oh, my character's going to be a Paragon" or "oh, my character's going to be a Renegade" at the start of the game. You actually have to make those decisions all the way through.

So let me get this straight, then. A character who is absolutely no different from her male counterpart and whose actions are determined by the player, and thus who cannot be a violent psychopath unless the player chooses to play as a violent psychopath, is your favorite video-game character, when she's played as a violent psychopath.

(Okay, benefit of the doubt: it is possible that Wu is talking about the Mass Effect 2 FemShep, in which Shepard goes rogue in that he/she doesn't work for the Alliance as he/she does in the other two games. Given that ME1 Shepard is basically a blank slate and ME3 Shepard is wracked with survivor's guilt to the point of being obnoxious, I'm inclined to agree that ME2 Shepard is the best Shepard.)

Moving on, what you have with both Samus and FemShep are female characters who are not defined by their femininity. With Ripley (or Sarah Connor) it matters that they're women. With Samus and FemShep, it really doesn't. That's the point I want to make here - that this dichotomy exists, this dual paradigm of "strong female character" type where one model treats "female" as purely aesthetic and the other does not.