I finished up Dragon Age: Origins a day or two ago, and I admit that I’m pretty impressed. It has its failings where inclusiveness and sensitivity is concerned, but it also has some real strong points, many of which lie in your PC’s potential relationships. I’m thrilled that the game made romance optional and gave touching dialogue and important interactions to platonic relationships; I also really love that characters in romantic relationships are reasonable and adult, and resolve things through talking. Furthermore, the romance plots integrate smoothly enough into the party dynamics as a whole that they’ve made me think about how video games are in a unique position to subvert a lot of the subtler expectations in heterosexual romance.
See, we’ve moved past the “women can’t be action heroes, nope, not ever” thing, for the most part, and that’s great. But there are a lot of less blatant attitudes that don’t generally get questioned:
- Like: women don’t inherently have the same potential for violence that men do; they need a reason to be tough.
- Like: women can only be violent if that violence is sexualized, or if they have Traumatic Pasts.
- Like: women can only be sexual if they’re Truly In Love, or have Traumatic Pasts.
- Like: men should always be more powerful, more sexually experienced, and more comfortable with violence than the women they’re involved with.
- Like: any situation that contradicts the above must be an in-story Big Deal.
That last one is subtle, but it’s the one that trips up a lot of people most these days, me included sometimes, because it leads to a weird place where you’re waving your arms around about how this character is female and awesome and awesome and female instead of just writing a character who is awesome and also happens to be female. Alice is no longer the ace starship pilot who likes country music and is weirdly superstitious about the socks she wears on every mission, she’s an ace starship pilot and a world-class guitar player or she’s an ace starship pilot WHO’S A GIRL OH MY GOD, at which point everything becomes about her issues being a girl and she starts wearing skin-tight flight suits when everyone else is in mecha.
Then there’s the love interest. An Action Girl’s love interest is almost never someone in a subordinate role. In Buffy, you have Angel and Spike (enemies turned independent agents), a handful of one-episode losers, and…Riley, who gets all pouty and Proving My Manhood Guy about ten episodes after he stops being a super-soldier.
One of the things that really seems to work in terms of avoiding the above is to make a gender-neutral protagonist. Or, rather, to start with a guy and then switch genders and basically nothing else midway through. It’s a sad commentary on our society, but the default gender has been male for so long that it has a lot less baggage associated: the idea of male heroism encompasses everything from John Wayne to Bertie Wooster. Starting with a guy resulted in Ripley, who’s competent and violent without being fetishized or broken, and it gave us Kara Thrace back before the addition of stupid backstory and WTF metaphysics.
And now, video games, and how they do this particularly well.
See, western RPGs have a pretty long tradition of having the PC be what TVTropes calls an “Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person”. Interactive fiction started out that way–though most of the stories I’ve played lately have featured a very specific PC character–the Wizardry games did it, etc. The theory is, I guess, that it’s easier for the player to project themselves into the AFGNCAAP than to identify with a random plumber. Fair enough. As games and their settings got more complex, the PC attributes switched from being neutral to being customizable. Within certain limits, you can choose your face, your age, your culture, and your gender.
This is fun and all, but it wouldn’t have a big impact except for, well, the “role-playing” aspect, by which I mean dialogue. In early games, haggling with shopkeepers or ASK PROFESSOR ABOUT DEMON was about as good as you got, but then came dialogue trees, and morality options, and all sorts of other strange pathways for your character’s personal interactions to go down. You could actually choose how you wanted to relate to other characters and develop semi-complicated relationships…well, as complicated as the AI would allow.
Which is where, I think, an inadvertent point of awesomeness for gender equality emerged. A game primarily focused on slaying the evil wizard and restoring peace to the land isn’t going to have completely different dialogue options for male and female characters. There’s only so much memory, plus I’m given to understand that the people who design such games are actually mortal and have families who like to see them at the end of the day. Re-writing the witty-banter-where-you’re-clearly-in-charge dialogue that a “default male” PC has with a sidekick to significantly alter the power dynamics just because the player took the female option? Not happening. So you have sidekick banter plus romantic interest… where the woman is the leader and the guy is the sidekick…and that’s pretty cool, because there aren’t many places where you get that dynamic.
Going back to Dragon Age: Origins as an example, neither Alistair nor Zevran have any problem with your female PC as a leader. Their dialogue once you initiate romance plot doesn’t involve testing your leadership of the group; they both seem as happy to take orders from you as the rest of the party does. (Alistair can defy your leadership to get himself killed at the end, but that comes off to me as taking the bullet–a role which has often been filled by female characters, like Eponine and Lilly Potter–rather than putting himself in harm’s way because He’s Manly and You’re Not.) Apparently BioWare is good about this sort of thing, which is why I plan to buy more games from them in the future.
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Basically, the breakdown is this:
Males, first game: 1 female human, 1 female (very humanoid) alien.
Females, first game: 1 male human, 1 female (very humanoid) alien.
Males, second game: 3 female humans, 1 female alien (who is not conventionally sexy, but was made romanceable by fan request).
Females, second game: 1 male human, 1 female human, 1 lizard-like alien, 1 bird-lizard-like alien (who was made romanceable by fan request).
All of these romances do have their fan bases, so it’s not really fair to say that people didn’t find them sexy. I really enjoyed the human male from the first game, and in fact stuck with him all through the second. And I know there were others who loved the human female from the first one, as well. But that’s all getting into YMMV territory. In the second game, there were two humans, one male, one female, who were VERY fanservicey, but their romances were (at least in my opinion) less well done than the others. Though I did find Jacob’s lack of brooding angst refreshing.
silver1881(Quote) (Reply)
At least one thing we can take from this is that ME fans are anything but racist (speciesist?). There are lots of people who wanted to romance Wrex, Mordin, Samara, Kal’Reegar, hell, even Legion and EDI. Any ME romance forum ends up like an issue of Fornax. So at least we embrace diversity, even if the makers of the game themselves don’t!
silver1881(Quote) (Reply)
Never underestimate the power of an awesome personality (and a really sexy voice >_>).
If Garrus wasn’t so adorably awkward despite being a vigilante or Ashley wasn’t a mix of kickass and genuinely caring with actual flaws then they wouldn’t be as well liked.
I actually completely forgot about Jacob though. >_> He just doesn’t stick in my mind all that mind, though he’s actually an okay character, and his side mission was both creepy and heartbreaky.
As an aside, I personally wanted to romance Jack, Thane, Garrus (did), Kaiden (jerk broke my Shepard’s heart in 2!), Joker, Legion, Mordin (he sings Gilbert and Sullivan!) and Ashley. They’re all really nifty to me.
SarahSyna(Quote) (Reply)
Never underestimate the power of an awesome personality (and a really sexy voice >_>).
That really sums it up, doesn’t it? One of Bioware’s major strengths is characterization, and it shows so much in the ME series. They’re able to make these complex, three-dimensional characters with devoted fanbases, all with a minimum of dialogue and interaction. (Compare the conversations with squadmates in ME to the ones in Dragon Age, where you can spend hours talking to your party members as opposed to the rather brief between-mission dialogues in ME.)
I did test out all the romances, and while Garrus’s was very sweet (and Jacob’s was a little weird), my heart belongs to Kaidan and his ridiculously sexy voice. I wouldn’t say no to a Mordin or Kal’Reegar romance, though, that’s for sure.
silver1881(Quote) (Reply)
This question is for silver1881, but I couldn’t reply directly to her comment: I’m curious what was considered “fanservicey” about Jacob. I found him very physically unattractive, as did the other straight female ME player I’ve surveyed in real life — I thought his face was uncannier than most, his bodily proportions seemed radically off, and the other woman said his teeth kept clipping through his mouth when he talked. His personality seemed really boring to me too.
I can readily see Miranda’s fanservice qualities (in that outfit, everyone can see her fanservice qualities, ba-dum-chh) but I don’t see it for Jacob. He doesn’t even have an accent Americans are generally considered to find sexay (Australian.)
As a sidenote, while I suppose it’s cool that there are so many romance options in ME2, I wish they were a little easier to deflect, especially preemptively (I wrote a blog post about this here, rather tongue-in-cheek.) With so many characters, some of them rather unexpected, interested in Shepard, just talking to my squaddies starts to feel like going out to a club to dance and having to dodge come-ons constantly. Yecch.
Mass Effect is, for the record, the only media I’ve consumed with a romance between a female hero and a male sidekick, as laid out in the original post here (I haven’t played Dragon Age because I heard it was mostly text dialogue, not voice-acted.) and I *loved* that. Obviously, fraternization regs are the only thing that bothered Kaidan about that situation, and that was very appealing.
Felicity(Quote) (Reply)
To Felicity: I actually didn’t find Jacob physically attractive either; when I called him fanservicey, I was thinking about his abs (they’re quite lovingly rendered, and that’s all anyone seems to remember about him) and that he seems to get almost as many close-ups of his tight-spacesuit-clad ass as Miranda does. I guess it seemed to me that they tried to do the same thing with him that they did with Miranda, except it didn’t really work as well. Trying to make any of the characters very physically attractive as a selling point is kind of pointless, considering the current graphical capabilities. Miranda’s face delves into the uncanny valley at times, too.
I thought it was a lot easier to avoid relationships in the second game; the lines that would indicate your interest were pretty obvious and easy to avoid. In the first one it was easier to accidentally find yourself in a relationship. Interestingly, Jacob’s was one of the easiest to stay out of. I had to WORK to get him into a relationship, and it actually felt a little bit like I was browbeating him into it, and that was kind of uncomfortable.
I, too, loved being a female with a male sidekick (you do also get this in Dragon Age, and it’s just as fun, despite the text). Some of the relationships really felt organic, as you said; with Kaidan and Garrus, at least, it felt like you had already known each other and were attracted to each other for a while, and what we saw was what naturally came next in that relationship. It wasn’t abrupt like Jacob’s and Thane’s seemed to be. I haven’t done any of the male-PC relationships, or Liara’s, so I don’t know the details of those.
silver1881(Quote) (Reply)
Bioware has learned a lot. They used to be famously awful at it.
The female characters in Neverwinter Nights were classic in their horridness. There was also some dubious things in Kotor. They’ve hired much better writers for their newer games.
You should play Mass Effect 2 (skip number 1, it’s too clunky to play in comparison). There are good and bad things about the gender roles in it. Dragon Age does it better I think, but Mass Effect is still excellent.
Tim(Quote) (Reply)
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