Tropes vs Women in Video Gaming - Damsel in Distress

Before I begin with wall of text, I have to say this in jest: J2, prepare to #cutforbieber. You're lucky I cram everything into one post, I swear.

ALSO before I continue: I run into a lot of areas where we have to take into consideration other stereotypes of females in games (and even other people). The DiD isn't the only one (which I tried to focus on), but women in entertainment are constantly subjected to other areas. I also mention other groups who fall prey to similar stereotyping issues (poor people, people of colour). It's hard to address only one of these, especially when all of them are so prevalent.

Now to continue. Also, I'm sorry for length. Not for anything else.

Isn't that already achieved?
The origin of feminism was to get some privilegede WHITE women to vote.
Feminism is not what it was.

Furthermore:
I have nothing against feminism, they are doing GREAT things specially in middle-east countries where the woman is still treated as an object.
But still, the media and west society has twisted this term SO MUCH that at least to me there's no way I can support this movement on this continent.

 Spoiler

Because I just saw this comment.

What's funny is that Anita's actually addressed this in the past with the visions of what the media shows as 'being feminist.' Feminists are bad. But strong female characters who distance themselves from these crazy people who are seeking equal rights are good. It's called the 'Straw Feminist' trope; it happens all the time, and girls still do this in every day life. ("I support equality for women... But I'm not a feminist." -- Except, by definition, you are.) It's something that I've seen even before I saw her video on it, and it doesn't even need to be her saying it; it could be any other woman (or person), like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (who have both pointed this out a number of times).
That's also why the media focuses on the extremists; they make it so easy to point out why "feminism is bad," when the fact is that feminism is good. Equal rights for members of society? Yeah, there's nothing bad about that (unless you're making your living and generating your power from systematically oppressing a group of people).

No, feminism is still going because women still lack equality in nearly every facet of society. Everything from our advertising campaigns to children (watch boy vs girl toy commercials and have fun with that one), women's pay inequality (so we get less income for the same job), and a lot of other topics surrounding women's rights. It's not about denying that there are bad things about society for men (such as when parents divorce, almost every court grants custody to the woman without securing proper evidence of who the best parent is); there are a lot of negative stereotypes about men that should be addressed, too. The fact is that men (and as much as I hate putting this phrase out there, the white-straight-men -- the unfortunate part is that this group of people get turned into the villain, and I hate that just as much as I hate discrimination) aren't having the power removed from them.

for that final fantasy example, i can give 5 final fantasies which DON'T adhere to the rule. and one of the funniest cases is FF13, where a female is the damsel in distress, and the hero is HER SISTER.

So because the hero is her sister, it suddenly makes it less bad that it's (again) a female in the place of no power? Not really. I'm not saying this trope is inherently bad (which is all people seem to get from this because HUEHUEHUE LOOK AT MY SNARK), but I'm saying that it is rarely a position a male character is placed in; it's predominantly women. (Let's also read everything I said because I'm most definitely trying to not using words like 'always' and 'never.' I prefer to use words like 'overwhelmingly' and 'majority' because I recognise there are cases where the rule doesn't apply or fit entirely.)

So it's good that things are changing, but it doesn't make them inherently brilliant. It just means that we can now rescue ourselves as long as we have the help of someone else; it's showing cooperation (which is good), but it also still says that female characters still generally lack power. For instance, we can't rescue men. So while Peach may have given clues and help in the examples people are using, who's actually rescuing Mario? Why can't we?

Again, I'm not saying that this is bad. I'm saying that it's problematic because it's something we don't see enough. A woman can provide you with a useful item, but she can't be your rescuer.

and that is what moves the story in most games, it's not "oh, my personal object got kidnapped", it's someone close to you, someone you care about. your sister in FF13, FF3 has no damsel at all, FF4 has rosa being kidnapped like nuts, but the hero isn't on it just to save rosa, but also kain, his partner, so he's not doing it to claim "the ball" back, he's in it for his love and his friendship. rydia falls off the boat and when she comes back she literally saves the main character.

No one ever says "drat, my woman just got taken!" But the fact remains that the way the female's characterisation is treated is rarely done well and realistically. Whether it's the DiD trope or any of the others, they're frequently given the same treatment. Perhaps some of the best games for female characterisation are the Suikoden ones (but they still fall short with some characters because they become the stereotypical ditz females, which is another problem).

Chris is a brilliant character, and I still love her deeply. She also doesn't fit the stereotype of ranged/spellcaster; she's a knight captain, and she's one of the worst magic-users in the game. She's strong and rational, and she rarely rushes into anything without having a plan. The one downfall with her is that you rarely see how upset killing Lulu made her (which is more a problem with the way death was treated, not anything that is part of a feminist issue).

Back on FF, though:
Final Fantasy - The goal was to rescue Princess Sara from Garland.
Final Fantasy 2 - Hilda was captured and rescued by the party, but the Hilda in the cell that is rescued isn't her (and is a ploy); they then go to the Emperor's arena and proceed from there. She was still damsel'd.
Final Fantasy 4 - Rosa takes the place of a damsel in that, as soon as you've cured her illness (also a similar plot device), she's kidnapped by Golbez.
Final Fantasy 7 - Aerith. This is also a game where we get a lot of interesting class-related stereotypes being broken out of somewhat (as she's initially a flower peddler). But that doesn't diminish the story and her death, but she still is a damsel in terms of what occurs.
Final Fantasy 8 - We've already hit on Rinoa.
Final Fantasy 9 - GarnetDagger starts off as one of the most brilliant characters, and I still love her. But then she gets her eidolons forcibly extracted from her (conveniently, everyone's powerless at this point anyway). And then we've got Eiko who is kidnapped to have her eidolons extracted as well (added bonus for the child portrayal themes, too), but Mog suddenly stops it. Hilda (Cid's wife) is abducted by Kuja.
Final Fantasy 10 - Already dealt with Yuna. Rikku doesn't get the DiD treatment, but she falls into another category of female characters being too naive or excessively child-like (or ditzy). Lulu's probably the strongest of them all in terms of personality/character.
Final Fantasy 12 - Penelo got kidnapped.
Final Fantasy 13 - Serah's transformation into a crystal is a big factor for two of the people to be there (and part of why they became l'Cie).

Final Fantasy 6 is one I'm willing to toy around with. Celes actually has to be rescued from her impending execution, but she initially fights against it in favour of remaining. And while I do love Celes, I typically find that I do not like another plot device that was utilised (such as the mixture of "she's a bad person" and also "she's the love interest" being turned into the conflict point -- this has nothing to do with whether or not the character is male or female; it's just annoying storytelling).

Here's another fun thing: Hilda (the wife of Cid) in FF9 does something I consider positive-ish. She turns her husband into an oglop for being a womaniser. Positive image for "don't put up with a cheater" then gets turned into "you probably should've rethought your running away."

So while I'm not saying the DiD is a bad thing, I am saying that it's heavily entrenched and quite obvious throughout a lot of titles. As seen with Final Fantasy, though, it's at least changing. They're at least showing that women can be rescuers, but we're also overwhelmingly the victims.

Even with newer games like Amy (and it's a horrible game, so don't play it), women are rescuing women. Yes, it's a strong female lead! But she's also saving another woman. I'm not saying that's inherently bad, but I also know there are a lot of women who help men on a daily basis (ranging from answering simple questions to actually going entirely out of their way to help them); it would be nice to see that reproduced.

And a lot of times when we do get the really strong female characters, they're often surrounded by men. They become a member of a token minority, and the values of the group are dominated by the men around them. Again, Borderlands does this.

Except all the examples she gave from nintendo don't even follow that logic outside of the most barebones storylines. She picks the mario platformers - the ones that have no plot at all and uses them as examples. Honestly, assuming that peach "does nothing" while captured is just that: an assumption, you never see nor hear from her in the platformers aside from the very beginning or very end.
And this is completely disregarding the mario rpgs, the only games which really have a plot where you see that peach deliberately goes out of her way to be anything BUT a damsel in distress.

Let's also be reminded that she stressed that she was focusing on the main franchise, not the games that were developed outside of it by companies that had licensed it to create them.

And don't get me started on the fallacies of her using zelda as a example of a damsel in distress.

Even on a temporary basis, it's not a fallacy. I even addressed this using Yuna in FFX. It's fitting, even if she has a strong presence and is being helpful later. (Hence the creation of 'The Helpful Damsel,' which doesn't preclude someone from being of use at one point and then being damsel'd in another.)

And since people are begging for examples in modern games: Borderlands 2. Anyone who has played this knows that Lilith is a strong character. (Again, though, she still falls into the category of being physically weaker than her male counterparts and a mage-type that I still complain about. Which doesn't mean Borderlands is inherently bad and that I hate it. I love Borderlands, but it's not without its faults.)

But then Lilith suddenly gets captured by Handsome Jack! And you have to rescue her to advance the plot. Angel could be (when she's not screwing with you) a Helpful Damsel; she's pretty much detained by her father as nothing more than a pure object. Then you go and kill her in order to stop him. Which is what enables him to steal Lilith in the first place. That's not saying that 'using the Sirens as a mode to conjure the strongest entity' is an inherently bad plot device or makes the games terrible, but look at who the Sirens are.

Then you're not trying hard enough. Even just picking from Mario Games

Since I'm willing to be educated, I'd like more examples outside of the Mario universe. You've picked up on Luigi's Mansion (and I even pointed out Mario is Missing, which is disgustingly horrible). But this is only a handful of games that I'm seeing out of thousands that exist, which still makes it that much more problematic to me.

Surely this line of logic supports the nintendo games then? In Mario/Zelda games it's always have the lower class male character (Plumber or Farmhand/Solider/other menial labourer for various Links) saving a princess or other upper class person.

Which then leads to yet another harmful (not inherently bad, but also not entirely good) stereotype that we see in female representation, even for things aimed at girls/women.

I don't know about the other girls here, but I grew up with literally every Disney princess being shoved down my throat. Even though I moderately liked some of them despite their issues (Belle is tolerable despite her apparent Stockholm Syndrome, and I do love Mulan), it's still a difficult pill for me to swallow. Almost everything we had was relegated to "needing a white knight" to sweep us off our feet. It's taken until now to finally get characters like Rapunzel and Merida (who both still have faults) to even get a sense of characters that are more similar to real girls.

So then that begs a class-related issue. Where are your lower and middle class girls?

It's all related. It's not just women who are left out or badly portrayed in the media; it's people of colour, and it's lower class people. And if you want a great previous example, take a look at the entire movie for Aladdin. Jasmine becomes a Damsel at one point, Aladdin's actively called a 'street rat' for being poor and made into a thief (because that's what all poor people do, apparently).

But sitting around acting like we should care about what they say just makes men believe it more. If women sit around whining about "this is sexist or unfair to women" men just find the concept to be true. If all we can do is sit around pointing it out and complaining about it, that makes us seem weak. If it doesn't bother us, they can't really sit there thinking it actually has some sort of effect on us.

And I find that a disgusting way to think about it. I actually had a similar conversation with a friend today about why language is important and how the use of "status as an insult" is actually worse than he believed it was. He was telling me it's okay to tell guys to "quit being girls" or use "gay" as a reference to something stupid; he said it was fine that we use phrases like "Indian giving" or "gypped/jewed/welshed." He also said it wasn't inherently discriminatory that the Japanese have the phrase "bakachon camera" for the disposable ones (which sort of says it's a camera so easy that an idiot or a Korean could use it).

But the fact of the matter is that if you say "as a woman," it lends more power to the statement than it otherwise has. Fine, this form of sexism doesn't bother you, and you don't see it as harmful and so on (or you don't see it as sexist, whatever). Don't attach "as a woman" to it because of the very reasons raizoo gave. Let it stand on its own two feet as your opinion. By attaching those other three words to it, it allows someone else to attribute it to another woman who is bothered by it and tell her why she shouldn't be.

Language is powerful, especially when misconstrued.