2013-05-29, 11:27 AM
You don't necessarily have to be outraged over these things. As an avid gamer, I have noticed these tropes in videogames but they don't make me angry.
An example of this is Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. An absolutely amazing game, with awesome characters. One of the characters is Morwen, a tough-no nonsense empowered girl with dual axes and a berserker-like gameplay, she was basically a female version of Gimli. She manages to be one of the strongest characters in the game, both in gameplay and storyline, but of course, she isn't the main character, a guy is. And obviously when there is a girl and a guy in a video game there HAS to be romance.
So this guy comes along, breaks down her rough outer shell and they fall in love (of course). and then right at the end of the game, oh, what is this twist? she forgets all of her battle training and gets stabbed from behind, with the line of "I'm going to take away something you love" thrown in complete with him holding her limp body and screaming at the sky "WHY" before going on a rampage and killing all the ringwraiths.
(Also of note is that the only other female character in the game is ALSO a love interest and doesn't really do much apart from that and being elven)
So yeah, it's lazy storytelling and it makes it hard for writers to create female characters without disempowering them or empowering them too much and making them seem like a "pro-girl power" Buffy/Firefly deal
It's not hard to see how such thinking could influence society as a whole, clearly there is an issue of people already thinking like that if female characters are written in such a way, and all it does is perpetuate stereotypes and make them common for a new generation.
An example of this is Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. An absolutely amazing game, with awesome characters. One of the characters is Morwen, a tough-no nonsense empowered girl with dual axes and a berserker-like gameplay, she was basically a female version of Gimli. She manages to be one of the strongest characters in the game, both in gameplay and storyline, but of course, she isn't the main character, a guy is. And obviously when there is a girl and a guy in a video game there HAS to be romance.
So this guy comes along, breaks down her rough outer shell and they fall in love (of course). and then right at the end of the game, oh, what is this twist? she forgets all of her battle training and gets stabbed from behind, with the line of "I'm going to take away something you love" thrown in complete with him holding her limp body and screaming at the sky "WHY" before going on a rampage and killing all the ringwraiths.
(Also of note is that the only other female character in the game is ALSO a love interest and doesn't really do much apart from that and being elven)
So yeah, it's lazy storytelling and it makes it hard for writers to create female characters without disempowering them or empowering them too much and making them seem like a "pro-girl power" Buffy/Firefly deal
It's not hard to see how such thinking could influence society as a whole, clearly there is an issue of people already thinking like that if female characters are written in such a way, and all it does is perpetuate stereotypes and make them common for a new generation.