By David Futrelle
Last week I wrote about the wave of transphobia that followed the leaks that revealed one of the new characters in the upcoming postapocalyptic survival game The Last of Us 2 would be the woman above, a buff, butch badass named Abby who is apparently very effective at beating other characters up.
With her small breasts and muscular arms, some gamers have decided that she couldn’t possibly be a cis woman; she has to be trans. Cue a million “that’s a man, baby” jokes and, the internet being the internet, much worse. Meanwhile, more “serious” critics accused the game developer, Naughty Dog, of kowtowing to evil SJWs and trans activists pushing a cis-hating agenda.
I took a look at the Last of Us 2 subreddit today to see if the angry gamers were still at it. They were, posting bad transphobic jokes, ineptly-drawn cartoons and a photoshopped picture of Abby sporting a beard.
But I also ran across an argument I hadn’t seen before, accusing the game developers of “erasing women’s bodies” by featuring a butch woman in their game. This “misogyny” would not stand, a Redditor called Ralmoren declared.
“Funny,” she wrote, doing her best to sound like a feminist,
I bet SJWs like Neil [Druckmann, the director of the game] and Anita [Sarkeesian] think that making women ugly is only punishing male gamers. By doing this they openly admit their bigotry: that they think the female body only exist through the male gaze.
Abby isn’t ugly; she’s butch. And making a character butch is hardly a proclamation that one believes “the female body only exist[s] through the male gaze.” I mean, what? This is cargo cult feminism, adopting the language of feminism without understanding the theory behind it.
“No female gamer would feel empowered by playing with a pretty female avatar, right ? Female gamers need to identify with our characters, so let’s make them ugly (gee, thanks)! Women are only pretty for men, if it weren’t for men they would certainly look like baboons !”
Spoken like a true straw SJW.
I’m a woman, I play videogames and when the game gives me the opportunity I like to play with a female avatar. So now I should be penalised with an ugly avatar because some male gamers are attracted to overtly sexualised female characters (like it’s a bad thing? )? I mean, translate that to the real world, it’s like telling me “When you get out of your house you should keep your hair covered because some men may look at you a certain way.”
It’s really not like that at all.
F*ck this misogynistic bigotry.
Can we get creative game developers who have sane relashionships and views of women or is that to much to ask for ? Like not I-do-stealth-missions-in-panties-because-I-breathe-through-my-skin sexy, nor Mass Effect Andromeda ugly, but something in the middle ? Please ?
Here’s an idea: how about a range of female characters that in some small way reflect the diversity of women in the real world?
In a later comment, Ralmoren cites Bayonetta as an example of the sort of woman she’d like to see more of in video games. Here’s the totally-not-sexualized Bayonetta, who I’m sure would have fit in perfectly in the gritty postapocalyptic world of The Last of Us.
As Ralmoren explained,
Feminine, elegant, and kicks ass. Bayonetta is a much happier and empowering female representation than the austere, masculine woman trope we’re getting recently.
Ralmoren insists that, as far as she’s concerned, “there’s nothing wrong with being a masculine woman (I’m not especially feminine myself).” Never mind that she spent much of her previous comment attacking Abby as “ugly”
She continues:
but I dislike that this trope shows that female characters can only be strong if they emulate men, meaning that by opposition anything feminine is weak and needs to be shunned.
If all female video game characters looked like Abby, this argument might have some merit. But having one butch character in a game is hardly the same as declaring that “female characters can only be strong if they emulate men” (my emphasis). Again, if games actually depicted women more as they are in the real world, with a variety of body shapes and sizes, this wouldn’t even be an issue. In the real world, moreover, there are a lot more women walking around looking like Abby than there are women looking like Bayonetta (except at game conventions).
Elsewhere on the Last of Us 2 subreddit, others offered up even dopier objections to Abby’s looks. Like the dude who insists that she’s simply too buff to live in postapocalyptic times.
Abby is literally the only human, male or female, with that sort of muscle mass. In a post-apocalyptic dystopia. With no commercial protein supplies. Or working steroid/supplement factories.
The calorie and protein requirements alone are prohibitive in a context within which there is food and resource scarcity. But even granting that they gather enough food through hunting and they have this amazing gym that auto-produces steroids, why is she the only person in her group with that sort of build?
She’s either taking a disproportionate share of the group’s food, or she eats any members of the group that exceed her in size to both maintain her gains and insure that she is the only person with that degree of musculature.
So Abby’s not just trans, she’s an actual cannibal?
This game sounds better and better all the time.
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@An Impish Pepper:
Personally, I found Kill la Kill to be a mixed bag. There were some positive and potentially empowering elements to it, some perhaps unintentionally. And there were some negative and rather cringey elements to it as well. Disclaimer: I am very much of the pro-nudity for both sexes pretty much whenever persuasion, so my views may not be typical.
@ snowberry
It’s just meant to be paint.
Major Boothroyd gives the example of dancers who paint their bodies but leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to breathe.
But this is from a book series that suggests gay men can’t whistle; so I’m not sure how reliable it is (in fairness even Bond is sceptical about that).
@Snowberry
I know that humans don’t actually breathe through skin, it was just a plot device. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that.
@Catalpa
Honestly, this sounds like a character that Kojima would really have created.
Speaking as someone who loved The Last of Us and really enjoyed Bayonetta, I think the problem is not so much sexualised female characters per se so much as the complete oversaturation and inequality of such characters. I haven’t played WoW in over a decade, but while you could make really horrific looking male characters easily even literal walking corpse female characters were pretty sexualised and with fairly limited body types, and a lot of the armour and clothing you could get would be a fair bit skimpier on female avatars than male ones. (I’ve heard this is no longer true – so good for them I guess – but it was true for a long time).
The Last of Us had the major female protagonist as a skinny teenager, and a bad ass one at that; it looks as though the sequel is continuing to provide well rounded strong female protagonists, and it is disheartening if depressingly unsurprising to see that the same sorts of dickheads that started GamerGate a decade ago are now adding transphobia to their misogyny bingo card.
Oglaf did a comic poking fun at this trope (mildly NSFW, though it’s blisteringly tame by normal oglaf standards):
https://www.oglaf.com/dimorphism/
The thing about “Quiet” from Metal Gear Solid is that there’s also a character who has photosynthesis (although he didn’t breath through his skin): “The End” from Metal Gear Solid 3. Does he run around with a bare minimum of clothing? Nope, ’cause he’s a 100 year old man! Now if Kojima had had “The End’ run around in just tighty whiteys all the time I’d have been willing to overlook “Quiet”. But no, it’s just pandering that gets excused because Kojima is this “renegade genius”. (I do LIKE the Metal Gear Solid games, but don’t piss on my leg and tell me its raining)
@Alan Robertshaw:
I’ve seen that in an actual, otherwise surprisingly enlightened book on sex by a researcher in the 1930s, so apparently it used to be a widespread belief. The 1930s writer at least hedged his bets and said “are *sometimes* unable to whistle.” I wonder if it’s related to the various myths about physical changes that supposedly accompany loss of virginity in women?
Or for that matter, the TERFs who claim they can always tell if a woman is trans.
@Schnookums
Yeah Jim Sterling has a great video called ‘A quite conversation’ about how ridiculous Quite’s character design is and points out the discrepancy between Quite and The End. I tried posting a link the the video earlier but the post never showed up.
@GAZZA
Transphobia isn’t really new to GamerGater types, the original GGers were pretty transphobic as well. And GamerGate led to the alt right, which is also known for its transphobia.
Re: whistling
I’ve never been able to whistle, and I’m a bisexual trans* woman. Does your book say anything about if bi women can whistle?
@Snowberry
People don’t breathe through their skin, but I think it’s entirely possible that a person could die from being covered in gold paint. Consider the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Here’s what Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Haley
@Kat: Probably not from the gold itself, assuming the paint contained actual gold; it’s pretty inert and non-toxic to humans. And if it happened due to some other substance in the paint, that still falls under “poison”.
Though to be fair, there used to be cosmetics containing arsenic, which could at least potentially kill someone if it covered their entire body… not that I heard of it ever happening, but I suppose could be a source of that myth if it did.
> Cyborgette
Does someone say Rogue or Angband/Zangband ?
On topic
Many magical girl stuff often go through a “change” phase where they are generally naked (and with many sparkles and other “magical” effects). It is pretty weird, especially when they are young.
I do not remember a male character going in full frontal nudity as a power except in some erotic manga, but bare chest is a common. Let just remember Kenshirô and many other male characters in Hokuto no Ken who are used to quickly lose their top when a fight become serious (that is also an hint if they are fighting mooks or dangerous characters).
About photosynthesis person, there are some in the first Dominion Tank Police manga (not the anime). They are engineered entities thought as a way to fight against the ultra urbanisation of the Japan (in the manga). They are human sized, with kind of fairy wings, green (informed, it is a black and white manga after all), nude, and all have female breasts. Yeah, that is Shirô, all right.
For whining against transgenders in video games, let us not forget about the Metroïd’s Samus and Final Fight’s Poison (designed as a trans for a very shitty reason, though), who had their fair share of hating at the time.
And this is the merged part of the hate. Like in youtube comments, reddit and the like, if you delve in Steam reviews, you will also cross many negative reviews against games who happen to have even a minimal degree of “wokeness” (is this a word now ?). It is no more about having fun with games, it is about how much anger and hate can they get from them. May they gag on it.
@occasional reader
That aspect is something of a staple, if not in fact a codified trope as old as the Magical Girl Anime Genre and even the Super Sentai Genre (I.E. think Power Rangers and Beetle Borgs) themselves, known as a “Henshin” (or Transform/Transformation), though their are various differing flavors extents and styles of transformation and within differing Anime Genre’s.
Allegedly such transformation sequences; aside from being visual spectacle for the viewer (in any and all senses of the word) and giving a visual cue to the fact the character is unleashing their “secret powers” or “adopting the form to call for their magical abilities” also, supposedly, serves as runtime filler padding and to provide easy to use animation resources to ease up on the budget, although admittedly it’s debatable if any of this is actually, the case, if so to what degrees and which specific series IP your looking at and the publishing company backing the IP in question.
I actually remember 1 non-erotic Anime series off the top of my head, that specifically featured a “magical boy” genre but with the Henshin sequence of a traditional Magical Girl series transformation. If I remember correctly; it was called “Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love!” or “Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! ” Although it seemed to be framed as a deliberate parody of the Magical Girl series and use of Hensin sequences and applying them to a “Magical Boy” genre and was written by Michiko Yokote who wrote the Mermaid Melody series.
I know their is probably some interesting discussion surrounding these various factors but I’m not sure how to try initiating broaching them so I’ll digress those points for now.
WWTH : it’s not the plot of the game that require it. Or the plot of anything.
It’s the character itself. Bayonetta is defined by the fact she openly shove her sexuality down the throat of anyone close to her.
Sure, as Impish said, you could have another character and the game itself would be mostly the same. The only part of the character that the game depend on is that the main character need to be extremely skilled and extremely confident, which tons of people happen to do without showing boobs.
That’s similar to James Bond because, seriously, one could remove the sexual part of all the James Bond and no relevant plot would be lost, but the secret agent would be another person entirely, for good or bad (mostly good methink).
(and as far as I have seen, the Smash Bayonetta isn’t exactly more prude than the main videogame one. The main actually visible difference is more that she don’t brutally kill and maim people. Yes, sure, her skin is colored black instead of white, big difference all that)
@Naglfar:
I feel like Havelock Ellis must have *known* about bisexuals, I just can’t recall if he had anything specific to say about them.
@Moon Custafer
I don’t know much about Ellis, but I know that Ray Blanchard seems to still think that only AFAB people can be bisexual and that bi AMAB people don’t exist. So sexologists seem to dispute the existence of bi people a fair amount, more so than the existence of gay or straight people.
IIRC Kinsey recognized that bi people exist but he didn’t like that term because he had originally used a similar term to refer to intersex people and thought it was too confusing.
I am a girl and a very dedicated gamer, and I could not care less, about what way developers decided to protray a charcter (playable or NPC). I play games to immerse myself in another worls, and be someone else, may it be another woman, a man, alien, goose, dog, monster or anything else. There is a variety of people and some will find their representation in a game, some in anotherand that is the beauty of fiction- that anything goes, and by seeing cis and trans, busted, buffed, curvy, petite, disabled, modified people we gain more empathy and understanding for differences.
@Snowberry
Just garden variety ignorance. The bit about asphyxiating via the skin being covered was widely believed at the time that movie was made, to the point that the actor’s abdomen was left unpainted so she could ‘breathe’. There was then a persistent rumour that she’d died from the paint IRL, because she left acting and the public eye soon afterwards.
@Ohlmann:
Well, the whole Bond thing is transparently a male fantasy. Get paid to travel the world, kill bad guys with impunity, have consequence-free sex with beautiful women, and you’re somehow simultaneously famous and a secret agent. And save the world. A lot. If you removed the sex it would still be complete tosh, and would still portray MI6 in an overly-positive light. I prefer media which portrays the ethically questionable work of the naughty agencies without glamorisation.
@ moggie
Then you might enjoy Sandbaggers.
But you see, that was a choice that the (male) game developer made. He didn’t have to make that choice. Bayonetta doesn’t really exist. Her characterization is entirely up to the designers, and they decided, consciously, to make an oversexualized female character who “openly shoves her sexuality down the throat of anyone close to her” as you say. She’s not a female fantasy. She’s a male fantasy, almost definitionally, because it was a male game developer who decided on her traits.
@Alan:
Thanks. The series whose creator disappeared under mysterious circumstances?
@occasional reader
Yes I did! My faves these days are ToME 2 and Poscheng/Compos/Frogcomposband, but yes I’m a long time roguelike fan (especially of the open world types). Unfortunately the Angband variant community such as I’ve seen it has coddled a lot of misogyny, plus some transphobia and antisemitism and general grossness, so I’m not that comfortable taking part in it anymore. But I’m still a fan, and still sometimes submit patches and stuff when I find a particularly irksome bug.