Women as action heroes, somehow it just seems to work better

Hi there, my blog, been a while. About half a year if the dates of my posts are to be believed. I realise that the infrequency of my posting kind of prevents my blog from ever becoming as significant an internet based pastime for me as my tumblr or facebook but I'm determined to keep posting anyway. Structure is really what I need, there's a full moon tonight, perhaps I'll start posting a new entry every time there's a full moon, that's nice and regular, say what you will about lycanthropes, at least they value scheduling.

I want to write about something that's been eating at my subconscious for a while now, which is the female protagonist, or more specifically female protagonists in an action oriented setting. It's ground well trodden but I've never been quite able to get my head around why it appeals to me so much until recently. In The New Yorker, Tom Bissell quite rightly pointed out that most men who play video games do so not just to have fun but to garner a sense of empowerment, which is why title characters in games are so often male, sad but true. I'm an exception to that rule, being a film-maker and having written a great deal of fiction my appreciation of single player focused games always comes from a strong engaging storyline.

Looking at the pile of games above me, there's a set of them that I've played less than half of: Killzone 2, Crysis 2 and Demon's Souls. Then there's a bunch of them I've played near to death: L.A. Noire, inFamous, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2 (there's also a pile of multiplayer games but they're exempt from this for obvious reasons). The former pile consists of a bunch of story light, action heavy shooters that I very quickly got bored of once the veneer of cathartic viscera that comes with shooting people's noses through their skulls and slicing them in twain wore off. That's not to say they're bad games, quite the contrary they're all very good but I just don't find them hugely appealing. The latter half are all the opposite, with story being a far stronger focus. If I were to list my favourite games, they would almost all be of this ilk. Bearing this in mind I don't really tend to project myself onto the characters I play as in games, or at any rate I try to avoid doing so, one of the easiest ways to establish the distinction between me and the character is to make her a woman. I'm not saying that games with male characters and good stories are any less appealing and often times such games have had to try even harder to make the player character so distinct that personal relation is damn near impossible (read: John Marston, The Nameless One and Wander) but given the choice I nearly always pick a woman (with the exception of the latest 2 Fallout games wherein the face animation is so hideous I couldn't bring myself to).

The appeal stretches beyond merely having a character that you are interested in rather than projecting your own personality on to, popular culture has been stapling the idea of a capable male hero onto our collective foreheads since time immemorial and with that image came the image of the fair princess he gets as a reward once he's done beating up the bad guy, hence the 'passive' and 'active' character role theories (which if you really read into reveal some startlingly medieval representations of women in popular culture) and the 'male gaze'. Getting the attention of a discerning reader/viewer/player is often as simple as rejecting this commonplace formula. Easiest way to do that? Once again, make the protagonist a woman. This is especially true of the action genre because a woman who does the majority of the ass kicking instantly breaks any preconceptions about representation, she doesn't even really have to do anything else and she's already interesting. Prime example: Samus Aran.

Horrible puns aside, Samus Aran (of Metroid fame) is a great framing device for this argument that a female protagonist instantly makes a story more engaging. If you compare her to Master Chief it becomes even more clear. Starting with similarities: Samus and Chief are both extra-ordinarily powerful, they both prefer to fight solo, they both wear specialised armour, they both have military experience, they both shoot aliens and they both communicate mostly through their guns. Master Chief has actually had more character development than Samus (until recently, but we'll get to that) and yet he tends to be considered the less interesting character. All that Samus had to do to become more interesting than him is be a woman in the first place, all she really does is fly around silently shooting things and that's all we need. All men have a predisposition towards violence and often heroism in men is characterised as such, Master Chief's ass kicking abilities are legendary but the idea of a man wearing cool armour and shooting every funny talking purple Muppet in sight is nothing revolutionary, the psychology is there and everybody knows it (he's called a spartan for Pete's sake). A woman doing all those things is different, it's difficult to deny that the mind of a woman is different to the mind of a man, female hormones do not typically incur violent outbursts or any desire to act violently, long story short if a woman is flying around shooting holes in the galaxy, there's going to be a complex motivation behind it. Unfortunately Metroid Other M came along recently and reduced Samus to a jabbering daddy's girl who spent inordinate amounts of time droning on and on about a generic back story neither Samus nor the player deserved to have inflicted upon them, thus negating the small, enticing nuggets of character that players had previously been treated to. Weaving exposition into a story is the best way to develop it, not just doling it out in massive lumps of dreary dialogue, but yeah that's a whole other thing.

Female characters often fall victim to very unfair representation, even meeting halfway seems to be a preferable alternative, anime is good example of give and take in that regard. A great deal of anime shows and movies involve female characters that have undergone well thought out development beyond the basic sex object/dominatrix/Electra complex/widow presets (there a probably a few more but those are the only ones I can think of right now). I'm not saying that these characters are always interesting, many aren't, but at least they've made that little bit of extra effort. So that's the give, the take comes from the visuals, often times said women are insanely hot and wear next to nothing, examples include Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, who's a shrewd gambling addict who refuses to consciously acknowledge her need to be in the company of others and is missing the first twenty-odd years of her life, she dresses in short shorts and a crop-top that leaves almost nothing to the imagination. Another prime candidate is Revvy from Black Lagoon, she's an ass kicking latter day pirate with a blood splattered past that's molded her into a gun toting psychopath willing to kill almost anyone on a whim, at the same time she develops a curious affection for a hopelessly physically inept Japanese business man who joins her company, I tend to get discouraged by romantic subplots, oft unnecessary as they are, but when the bloodthirsty pirate woman starts falling for a man who hates guns, always wears a tie and favours diplomacy over violence my ears prick up. So that's her character, guess what Revvy wears? A ridiculously revealing black vest and jean cuts offs so short they might as well be denim underwear. I suppose male gaze isn't ever really going to go anywhere and of the two options I'd rather have well thought out female characters that adhere to a ridiculous standard of beauty than badly written characters that adhere to a realistic one. If I wanted the latter I'd just watch Eastenders.