Meanwhile, slightly tangential topic; am I the only one who would play the crap out of a well made game with Zelda as the protagonist?

It would be an interesting take for sure, I would play it as well.

I'd play it. Not sure why anyone would judge such a game on Zelda being the playable protagonist.

Heh, I worded that poorly I was merely wondering how many people like me would e interested in such a game

The problem here is the assertion that this is necessarily bad. Genders are different, and I don't just mean the plumbing. There is nothing sixist about portraying a woman as a distressed damsel in need of rescue, unless the implication is that that is all that women can be.

I agree, again I think this is one of the things that is inherently wrong with the video, it points out all these games with damsels in distress but as far as I can see in 23 minutes I didnt really see a point as to why she was pointing them all out.

I still say the first video should have been more of an introduction to the series, touch generally on the topics that will be discussed.

Maybe her annoying earrings costed 150k.

For a minute, I was scared, thank goodness that comic had a happy ending!

I don't think that's what Colonel Martyr's trying to get at, at all. I think what he's saying is that a lot of the time the sixist narrative is imposed on a story by the reader, even when it's not really there. (The first case study that Anita provides in her video, Starfox, is a good example of this. Not only did the female character lose her own game, but, oh no, a male character is expressing sixual desire for the female form! How terrible!) Basically, he's trying to argue from a post-structuralist perspective, and I think he has a point. Sometimes a damsel's in distress and the male hero has to rescue her because the creator wanted to tell that particular story, not because the creator is acting out his sixist programming. Maybe the creator just really likes the idea of saving a woman and having her fall madly in love with him. There's nothing wrong with that. That's not an inherently sixist fantasy.

Anita acknowledges this somewhat, and then she proceeds to tell us that in view of women's status as a minority (a label with which it's possible to take issue, especially in the USA), it's a bad idea to have this trope so prevalent and that it's just lazy design. I agree with the bolded. A lot of studios just use the trope because they're really poor storytellers. But, for example, Shadow of the Colossus uses this trope, too, and I think there it's completely fine. And if every studio for the next year released only games in which women wore thongs, were kidnapped, and were there simply to enact the players' fantasies, I'd be fine with that provided that the story and game could adequately justify this in its context. I do agree that, for example, there's no reason for Catwoman to be wearing high heels in Batman Arkham Asylum, however. That doesn't make any sense in context and that's not who the character is.

In summary: I think what Colonel Martyr was primarily trying to say (before derailing ) is that trying to socialise art is a bad idea. I agree with him. I don't want people telling studios what quota of characters should be strong, empowered, independent women. That way lies really crappy storytelling. (Then again, I guess if we're going to have crappy storytelling in games anyway, then it might as well be more positive about women.)

Because I'm a lazy bastard, I'll just deal with this part of your post.

You and Longknife are both right. He's right in I don't think it's easy to just turn around and say 'Hey, let's make women the big hero and men the sidekick'. It's hard, and few have implemented the design well. Though I have found strong female characters I like.

As for your post, you pretty much have the right of it. I don't want to see more female leads soley because they need to counter balance the gender ratio, but because the narrative was designed for her. Gaming is an art form if done right as any book or cinema, to suddenly place female heroes soley for the sake of it is just as much restricting the game world as telling an author to make the character in a book be male because they want it to be, or it's clearly some sixist stride.

Ultimately, my beef is the arrogance of modern movements. Feminism being one of them, I won't name the others lest I risk derailing, but the problem with these new age movements is that for every good intentioned rational view, there is also an ignorant entitled attitude who demands vehemently they have it their way or they cry foul. It's something that's progressively become worse with the baby boomer generation on up to our own. (I'm 22 mind you, so I'm not some old fool or blind conservative crying 'DA GUD OL DAIS!'.)

OK, I've read about every post here, and it's been an enlightening experience, but has the point of thread gone off or was I missing the point?

The point that I'm referring to was that of paying somebody so much money to put out a half effort product. I mean you wouldn't give your kid full allowance for half effort in cleaning his/her room (stuffing things like trash under the bed, etc).

Regardless of the subject the video poster was making, the end product was put together in less time it took to get paid.

Am I the only one seeing this as the issue?

Nope, you're right. It's just any topic with philosophical or social issues will ultimately cause conflict.

I don't watch much TV anymore, but I think the show "Bones" on FOX is about a female FBI agent and David Borealis (sp?) is the sidekick.

But that's a HORRIBLE show. D:

Most programming today is, hence why I don't pay for cable anymore.

Castle and the Mentalist kinda fall into this category, as well. Yeah, the guys are the main characters, but they are helpless without their female partners.

This anology! Have an internet.


Yeah, really, it looks like she put very little effort into it. She spent half the video talking about multiple Mario and Zelda games (completely ignoring all the games in which Peach is kick-ass, because that doesn't fit Sarkeesian's agenda), when really that's just two examples because Nintendo rehashes everything they sequelise. And then she took some examples from Wikipedia, going so far as to use significant portions of its "damsel in distress" content. This is what Wikipedia has to say about the damsel in distress:


Sound familiar? It should, because she included this in her video. Edit: it probably explains her unnecessary use of "raison d'être", too.

Come on, Sarkeesian! People gave you $150 000! You could put more effort in than this!


No, it's just that we've already got that out of the way and now we're onto other stuff.


Uhuh ...?


It's better than a lot of other stuff on TV, or at least was. Somewhere around season 3/4 it was actually decent. But the other seasons were, yeah, pretty bad.

Lol, reminds me of Monk. Jeez, the amount of detective/pseudo-detective shows out there are multiplying faster than roaches.

And what about when these gender norms are barriers to women wanting to take on more economic and political control over their own lives? What about when employers disfavour female job candidates because "it's not a woman's role, she should be at home doing the cooking and laundry"? What about when political parties refuse to support her as an election candidate because "no one will vote for a woman"? What about when the police brush aside a woman being [censored] by her husband because "that's his right as your husband"?

Every society has its upsides and downsides. If you want to argue that highly educated Muslim women who choose to be in a polygamous marriage and submit to the Koran's tenets and appreciate their culture are oppressed, you're going to have a very tough argument to make. And that argument is really only possible to make if you think your morality/ethics/intellect supersedes theirs. Which, well, that's not really a great argument. If you want to argue that women in non-Western societies should have as many choices as their Western counterparts, I'd offer that people in Western cultures should have the freedom to adopt non-Western lifestyles, too. But that's not how societies work. Each kind of society comes with its own pros and cons. You can't have it all.

How is any of that in any way relevant to this thread? Nobody is advocating that.

Thats actually pretty well put. I like Neil, he always has very interesting input.

Err... The point is that gender norms can have harmful consequences, even if those harmful consequences aren't experienced by all women. Longknife's insinuation was that some gender norms are beyond reproach because some women are happy to fulfil traditional stereotypes. But this is false.

....only when you try to enforce them. As long as you can opt out they are fine. That's why they are called norms and not requirements.