Jaicee said:
I found more than that, but that's because, as you might understand, I consciously looked for them. It was no small feat though and there were whole years without any that I noticed. I mean I didn't even notice or think about this stuff for a while, but after long enough when you find yourself playing in mixed company, you couldn't help it. The game that actually got me into gaming for the first time was the original Metroid back in 1987. Apparently it was a big deal at the time that protagonist Samus Aran was revealed to be a woman at the end of the game. My take on it at age six was that...I always just imagined myself as the person in the suit instinctively anyway, so the revelation didn't even register as significant in my brain. Other, older people apparently just assumed that Samus was male because of the muscular build of her armored suit; they had more established prejudices that way. The instruction booklet I later noticed deceptively advanced that idea by using male pronouns to describe Samus. (Today she's probably be accordingly canonized as a transman, lol!) In time though, I came notice the rarity of characters like her in games. I don't know if I'd really hold up old RPGs and fighting games as greatly exceptional to this rule either. I think you'll notice, on even just a cursory observation, that the female characters in JRPGs back then were almost always secondary characters in your team, and more specifically assigned to the healing, supporting type roles primarily. There were gender roles, in other words. In fighting games you'd have maybe one or two women to choose from and well let me use the example of the original Mortal Kombat to get at what I'm trying to say. In the original Mortal Kombat, there was one woman you could choose to play as. In the default totem poll, she was designated the lowest rung, meaning she was supposed to be the easiest to beat because woman. Her fatality move was the Kiss of Death because woman. (Imagine if there had been one other woman in the game to perform the Kiss of Death on! And I mean the type of climate I'm talking about here isn't just confined to ancient history either. I'm not just talking about how things were decades ago, I'm talking about like 8 years ago. Things were totally different just like 8 years ago! There was a study that came out back then that found the male-to-female ratio of current-gen video game protagonists was 14 to 1. And of course this lack of quantity also came with a certain lack of quality attached as well that feminist critics have spoken to in more recent years. I'm happy things aren't still that way anymore. |
) If two girls played the game in two-player mode, one of them had to use a male avatar, which of course was never weird or awkward. You could find maybe some secondary exceptions to these rules if you wanted to fish for examples (like Chun-Li from Street Fighter II or characters like Lucca and Ayla in Chrono Trigger or main protagonist Terra in Final Fantasy VI...these characters and some others didn't seem like stereotypes, but here we're fishing for exceptional cases. These examples were NOT the rule!)Ok. This is so hard to respond to on my phone. :) I had to choose between doing it today, or waiting until tomorrow when I get back home. I wasn't nearly articulate enough. When I said that JRPG's and fighting games deserved a nod, I was lazily trying to say that although there were female characters, they weren't leads. An acknowledgement of something being there though. A nod if you will. Having said that, I'm the type if person who gets attached to the characters in games. I never really think of any of the characters as secondary. Honestly, I could say much the same about almost anything I like, or have ever liked. From Jimbo Jones on The Simpsons ( as true of an example of an ancillary characteras you're going to get), to Terrible Tornado in the One Punch Man Anime. The women in JRPG's did tend to be healers or support more often than the men. I want to point out that I only played a smattering of JRPG's in the 16 and 32 bit eras, so while not totally ignorant on the topic, I'm not the most well versed on those games by a long shot. Started playing them more in the early/mid 2000's. I'm not sure what to say about the gender role thing. I'm going to look into some of the games I played to get a better feel of how the characters were handled, at least in terms of class. It's been a long time.
So, you're dropping some nice stuff on me here. Was Sonya always at the bottom of the pole? Really? If I were on a quiz show, and was asked how the totem was organized, I would have answered that it was randomized. At least in Street Fighter, the path to the final 4 bosses was random.
Going backwards a little bit, I now want to see if I can read the Metroid manual online. Very interesting information.
I have to apologize for leaving things here, and for the quality of what it did respond to. I am slightly tired, mildly uncomfortable, and I don't like using the phone for addressing anything as detailed as your post is. I would have responded before I left home but had to get my Nep on before I left, or it would have been 3 days with no games. I had ridiculously good time.
- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."
