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Women in Video Games

1. Super Mario

Princess Peach is a huge cultural icon, being one of the longest lasting characters within the Nintendo franchise. But unlike other characters in every mainline Mario game, Princess Peach’s main role is to be rescued. Princes Peach has to be kidnapped within the first 15 minutes of the game. And the rest of the game is about saving the damsel in distress who is dependent on the male lead (Mario). Princess Peach’s image is self-explanatory, depicting a stereotypical appearance of a princess. She is portrayed as a fragile, delicate character that needs to be protected. She carries no weapons only a parasol that acts as an an accessory to complete her signature pink girly look. Princess Peach’s name also says alot about her character. The fact that her name is “Peach” is used to degrade her to the status of a mere object, as if she is not a human being.

2. Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V gives a prime example of discrimination against women in video games. The game’s portrayal of women is viewed as uncreative props ready to be used, leered, harassed, and killed just for the gamer’s experience. While males are the main characters in the game, women are scarce and underrepresented. Despite not having any women main characters, the game also sexualizes them, allowing players to purchase them and use them in any way they like. The women in the game wear skimpy clothing that barely covers their body. They are illustrated to have a thin waist, curvy hips, and big breasts. However, women are not just sexualized but also physically abused and objectified. The game encourages players to kill the women and even rewards them for doing so. They are shown as housewives, while others are seen as prizes to be won – a very old-fashioned perspective. The game is clearly misogynistic and celebrates abuse, prostitution, and sexual assault.

3. Hachi Koi

Another game introduced in the Nintendo franchise is Hachi Koi. Hachi Koi is a game about touching girls, the male protagonist is set with a mission before he dies, he wants to be able to love every woman that has romantic feelings for him. A highlight about this game is that the creator went out of the stereotypical role for a female character, creating different types of body shape. Even though the creator created different body shapes, the main purpose of the game is to let users pick out their ideal type, to place their sexual desires upon. Hachi Koi created their content upon sexualizing their characters allowing users to touch any female character they pick, and giving them the task of fulfilling their sexual desire by tying them up or applying lotion to the character’s body. The game’s representation of women within Hachi Koi is degrading and humiliating.  

4. The Witcher 3

The Wild Hunt is the third franchise to The Witcher, a role playing video game that is based upon the fantasy series novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. The game follows a playable character named Geralt who is trying to find his adopted daughter, Ciri. Ciri is a strong girl with extraordinary powers that can destroy the world yet, she is not trusted and is allotted a man (Geralt) to protect her. In addition, many women are portrayed as monsters and creatures, obstacles created for Geralt to fight and overcome. They take the form of beautiful naked women, who use their beauty to seduce their prey in order to attack and kill them. The Witcher’s universe is oppressive towards women, by marking women’s physical appearance as a sexualied weapon to seduce men and grab the attention of  male gamers. As a result, women aren’t just being sexualized but also depicted as evil beings that are predators and men are their prey/victims. This representation of women corresponds to the numerous stereotypes of women seen within thousands of famous video games.

5. Horizon: Zero Dawn

Horizon: Zero Dawn, the game takes place in a post apocalyptic world into the future, it is a third person action game that follows the story of a woman named Aloy. Women are equally represented in the game, whether they’re a protagonist, antagonist, warrior, or leader. Where in many other video games women has the stereotypical role or sex objects. Horizon: Zero Dawn moves past the typical male and female role by focusing on the characters personalities. With this focus on mind they made all their women characters distant and different. Adding color to different women characters along with different body shapes and personalities. The game’s representation of women challenges tradition, by grouping male and women characters in tribes where both of the genders share power and spiritual beliefs. In the game, gamers also get to experience side quests, meeting different women from different tribes who are also represented as a strong symbol for women. This type of representation shows that women in video games don’t have to be male to be significant. With their strength and motivation these characters are able to make a difference within the world, even if they’re not the main. With Horizon Zero Drawn players aren’t given a single female hero but a whole collection of different women that play hero’s within their own world. This representation should be an example of how every woman should be shown and treated within every video game within the gaming industry.

6. Mortal Kombat 11

Mortal Kombat is an arcade fighting game that was created by Midway Manufacturing. The game allows players to choose any character they like to fight. In recent years the creator of Mortal Kombat wanted to empower women representation within the game. He chose to dress the characters appropriately and created them as equally strong, while some are even more powerful than male character withins the game. The art director of Mortal kombat said,”Our design is just getting more mature and respectful. You’re not going to wear a bikini to a fight. You’re not going to be showing so much skin. I think it’s just what the game is about: You’re going in to fight for your life, and you’re not going to be wearing such scantily clad items.” This type of representation of women should be followed by other games as well. Not only that but the game contains one of the most playable female character unlike other fighting games.

 7. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

There are games that let players pick a female character as main, but it is even more rare to see a female character as a default player, Ninja Theory does just that. In the game we follow Senua of Hellblade, she is one of the strongest female characters that has emerged into the gaming world. The game narrative involves Senua struggling with psychosis, players watch as Senua overcomes her darkest demons. Moreover, Ninja Theory does an amazing job at making Senua realistic by having Senua wear armor and war paint. Senuas clothing shows signs of wear, tear, blood, and mud. The proportions of Senua’s body show no sign of sexual features. The game rejects stereotypes and the notion that female characters must adhere to patriarchal expectations. Furthermore, the game shows that Senua is not defined by her ailment nor her gender, Seuna is a true representation of how female characters should be represented within the gaming world.

"Their first date, shall I say." - Jon M. Chu

“For half of Oz’s fav'rite team: The Wizard and I….” ♫ my new version of “the wizard and I” (late post)

https://instagram.com/p/BVcTr7MBLzw/

240523 WINTER

Cr. Yuya_aespa

!!!

You’ll barely notice I’m gone. You have Fiyero. Where is he anyway? Not that I expected him to say goodbye to me. I mean, we barely know each other.

HAPPY WICKED DAY!!! 

Sorry I haven't been active for a while y'all 😭 my phone broke but I got a new one

the sonic franchise has a misogyny problem

hello everyone, are you ready for another long essay by me? because i sure am. this has been on my mind for a while now. i've already talked about how the sonic fandom tends to treat the female characters worse than the male characters. but what about the franchise? do they treat the female characters better? well, in this essay i'm gonna talk about the misogynistic aspects of the sonic franchise. i'm not just gonna focus on the games, but also on other adaptations. so sit back, and lets have a long talk.

(art by evan stanley)

the lack of recurring female characters

quick question, how many recurring female characters can you name off the top of your head? no, the non game characters don't count, and no, the ones who only appeared in one game and then disappeared don't count. i can only name four recurring female characters - amy, blaze, rouge, and cream. maybe vanilla too. compare that to the amount of recurring male characters - we have sonic, tails, knuckles, shadow, silver, the chaotix, eggman. yeah you can see the problem. and these four characters aren't even utilized that well as of late. blaze especially has so much potential. she lives in another dimension for christ's sake. but sega just doesn't do anything with her. she deserves her own game to explore her dimension. like, there's so much potential with these characters but they just don't do much with them.

the way they treat their lead female character

amy rose is the main female character of the sonic franchise. i've already written an entire essay on how she's treated so i'm gonna try and keep this short. the way sega used to treat their main female character is appalling. she already got enough hate from the fandom, and sega just didn't make it better. just look at how the social media team used to treat her

i have never seen any sonic characters get this much jabs from the social media team as her. heck, i've never seen a lead female videogame character get treated as badly as amy. and the way they purposely go to exclude her? just look at what happened with mania. it was supposed to be a celebration of all things classic sonic but they didn't have her there even though she was a classic character. instead they brought two characters from an obscure arcade game. which... yeah its nice to see obscure characters get the chance to shine but you don't have to exclude a main character for that. and even in origins, though she's in the marketing and cutscenes, she's not playable. why? and before you say "oh its because she wasn't playable before", tails and knuckles weren't playable in sonic 1 either yet they were able to be included there. so what's wrong with making amy playable? what else am i supposed to call the purposeful exclusion of the classic era's only female character other than misogyny? seriously, i've never seen any other franchise do this to their lead female character. even PRINCESS PEACH gets treated better. peach got her own damn game. what's sega's excuse? if they treat their lead female like this, what does it say about how they treat their other female characters?

and one last thing. i've already touched on this before but it makes me angry so i'm gonna rant on it again. the way sega seems to think amy's role in sa2 in reminding shadow of his true promise to maria is replaceable. and every time she's been replaced, its a male character who took her place (chris in x, implied to be sonic in archie). and honestly, i don't have high hopes that they'll let her keep that role in the movie either. i don't even have high hopes that she'll appear in the movie. forgive me for being a negative nancy but i've been disappointed too many times.

archie's treatment of its female characters

lets talk about archie now. pre reboot archie sonic, especially before flynn came around, was an embarrassment to the franchise for many reasons. but what i don't see many people talking about is how they treated their female characters.

lets start with sally, since she's the comic's lead female. those who know her from satam know her as the leader of the freedom fighters, a strategic genius, a no nonsense princess who is determined in her goals. but in archie, especially when penders came along, her agency was taken away. once king max was rescued, penders didn't know what to do with sally. so she had little personality besides being a princess. and need i mention how he tried to kill off sally in the most anticlimatic way? she spent most of the time after the endgame arc being stuck in the castle, not joining sonic and co on battles like she used to. and need i mention the utterly disgusting aspect that is her """"""relationship""""" with geoffrey? there is one issue i particularly remember when geoffrey kissed sally without her consent and sonic saw it from afar. what does he do? does he confront geoffrey about it? does he protect sally? nope, he just thinks that sally is trying to make him jealous. what the fuck?! she's legit being sexually harassed and you're just going to blame her for it? i know this was the 90s but STILL. and to make matters worse, sally is 16 while geoffrey is in his 20s.

and let me talk about how characters are introduced solely to be a love interest. like mina mongoose. i've got nothing against her but lets face it, she was introduced solely to create drama in sonic and sally's relationship. and they even gave her super speed just so she could have something sally didn't, so she could be a "competition" to sally. they didn't even do anything with it later. and flynn has it retconned so that mammoth mogul was the one that gave her that power.

and speaking of which..... ig every female character has taken interest in sonic at one point. we have sally, amy, mina, fiona, bunnie.... it seemed like they wanted sonic to have as many love interests as possible. i mean just look at this cover

and if they weren't into sonic, they were into any other boy. mostly knuckles. and speaking of which, lets talk about julie-su. she's supposed to be this strong woman type character but penders made her whole personality being knuckles' gf. she occassionally showed her "girl power" when she was sticking it to vector (who was turned into a misogynistic asshole to make julie look good. granted this was before heroes gave him a personality but after that you'd think they'd change up vector's character). flynn and occassionally bollers tried to make her interesting but she just didn't do it for me imo. and lara-su, knuckles' daughter who was supposed to be the main character of the "mobius: 25 years later" arc, got sidelined in her own arc. she doesn't have much of a personality there other than wanting to be the next guardian.

now when flynn came along the treatment of the female characters got better. and even more so after the reboot. but i feel like this is something we should talk about.

"only male hedgehogs can go super"

this is, without a doubt, the stupidest mandate ever. i get it, going super is something not everyone can do and if that was the case, the super form would lose its specialness. but why specify only male hedgehogs? the "hedgehogs" part is already stupid enough because tails and knuckles have gone super before, but why the "male" part? why specify that? seriously, give me one good reason why only make hedgehogs should be able to go super. i can't think of any reason this mandate exists besides sexism.

female characters being less utilized than male characters

this kind of ties in to the first point, but the female characters are generally less explored than the male characters. we have few recurring female characters and sega doesn't even utilize them that much. again, blaze has so much potential. there's so much about her to be explored, but sega just..... doesn't do that. we don't even see her much in the games anymore.

and lately, cream is also being excluded from the games. the last mainline game she appeared in was generations. and tell me, what was the reason for cream to be replaced by the chao in team sonic racing? this is amy's little sister figure, and you're just gonna replace her without giving an explanation as to where she is? at least with espio and charmy, they had a reason to not be with vector here. but with cream, there's no reason she's not here.

the female characters have so much potential. they have interesting aspects to them, dare i say it, some of them are even more interesting than the male characters. but sega just doesn't see that.

that's all for my rant. in short, sega has a history of mistreating or underutilizing their female characters as compared to their male characters. though its getting a bit better, they still have a long way to go.