BraLoD said:
iamRockman said:
I think some people think like this because you don't see many stereotypes for male characters in games. The one thing i think needs to change is females always being the healer in RPGs, that bugs me to no end. |
The reason is because nobody looks for a "stereotype" to bitch about when it's about men.
Every single category of those 7 have male examples just as well. Are people complaning about it? No.
As that youtube post that has been quoted here multiple times already explained, one of the problems comes from people wanting to think there is a stereotype around something just because it's a female character, because when it's a white man, nobody cares.
But even worse is people thinking they have a right to put any kind of limit or rule over a creative work, that's completely absurd, fictional characters can and should be every possible way their creator imagine them, it's their work, their reality, their freedom to do whatever they want.
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Actually, historically speaking, this is not because male stereotypes don't exist, but because we have the 'right' male stereotypes.
The bitching starts whenever someone feels misrepresented. But the vast majority of male characters are written by men, to be male power fantasies. Conflict starts only when someone feels excluded from that fantasy, hence why the picture of the Hero diversified from white, straight, muscle bound male into diffrent bodytypes, skincolors, charactertypes, sexualities etc. The point is, these are being defined and written by males for males. Specifically to make males feel powerful. There's little reason for bitching, so there is little. This is the concept of male gaze. It doesn't just stop at the representation of females but extends to the self representation as well.
The problem with the female achetypes is, not neccissarily that they are unrealistic or bad writing (though some of them can be), it is that they were imposed on females by an overwhelmingly male host of writers/media creators. It does in many cases not portray how females view themselves, because it is not. It is an outside view, often paired with the desire for the female character to support the male writers power fantasy, making her readily available, sexually.
This does not mean that a woman neccissarily writes better women, or that all men write bad women or that anyone even does this conciously. We have been going through about two hundred years of mass media production in witch these tropes and stereotypes manifested, and as much as we would like to believe that all of the culture surrounding us has no influence on us, it does. Disney movies might not condition little girls to blindly marry the first good looking guy they meet, but it might lead to their frist attempts at writing mimicking what they loved as children, reinfocing views and dynamics they've never even questioned.
This doesn't mean than a man can't write an amazing women character or vice versa and it also doesn't mean that Women automatically write better women or men better men. It just means you need good writers, wich video games, traditionally have been....lacking.
This is why, even if this list is clickbait and takes an extreme point of view, it's good that it's there, because stopping one in a while and reflecting on our media will ultimately help create better media.
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