279: Wussy RPG Girls

[Arizth]

Hold up.

Hold the fuck up.

Alice, from Shadow Hearts, as the banner image?

No way. No bloody way.

YOU fucking fight monstrosities that would give Lovecraft nightmares while holding nothing more then a bloody textbook, or if you've her ultimate weapon, a bloody textbook BOUND IN HUMAN FUCKING SKIN, and tell me that she's "Weak" or "Submissive".

Their chief purpose is just to make you feel sorry for them.Or, to put the problem in the words of Shadow Hearts' Alice: "I-I can't. No ... I ... I can't do anything. I ... KYAAAAAAAA!!"

Spoilers below.

Anyway, If memory serves, that scene popped up when you were fighting whashisface, the executioner mask within Yuri's graveyard. And, to put that one in perspective for anyone who has not had the pleasure of playing the game, it's after he hits you with each and everyone of Alice's internal demons and greatest nightmares.

She spent a year traveling Europe with Zhuzhen, the pervy old monk, working as an exorcist, and strangely not needing big ol' Yuri around to carry her through. When they finally find Yuri in Keith's spooky, monster infested castle, he's not only mentally locked in his childhood, but he's using the L3 Darkness spirit, a fucking terrifying guy in his own right, for the fight.

And THEN, she dives into HIS personal nightmares, and talks HIS demons into leaving him the fuck alone in exchange for HER soul.

So, no. I do not think she qualifies as weak nor timid.

And, while I'm still nerdraging, Yes I will admit that getting kidnapped the first time was and "Oh no save me" thing, but on the other hand, it wasn't one of those "Oh no I've been kidnapped to tempt the hero to fall into my trap" plots but rather a "This person contains a lot of power for my apocalypse machine so I will quickly grab her and slot her into the battery slot" sort of thing. The whole "Oh no save me" sorta doesn't stick when, during her torture scene, you can explicitly CHOOSE for her to be timid and meek, or insult the hell out of your captor. Doesn't change the scene, but the whole "This machine is so SEXY" dialogue tree is funny as hell.

And being cursed early on in the small fishing village was, I swear to god, just a case of wrong place, wrong time.

I mean, you showed up, saw some guy die of the curse in the inn, talk to the town elder, hear a scream outside, follow Alice out, and then have some mildly annoying boss curse her for having too pretty a voice. This all within half an hour of crashing your plane nearby.

I mean, come on. You can't hold that against her.

Instead, the villain kidnaps her, using her as a battery for some sort of nefarious plan, prompting the hero to rescue her yet again and take her back to a peaceful life in the village. Where's the heroism in that? Even when the lady becomes a goddess, she still can't save herself.

Discounting the fact that, ya kno', the battery slot of the evil plot generator is usually specifically designed to not allow the captive to escape, either by locking them in unbreakable plotium or by draining their magical/spiritual/whatever energy as soon as it is generated?

The sort of device you usually NEED someone to rescue you from?

Huh? Maybe?

Often the amount of trouble one girl can get herself into in a mere 40 hours hinges on the ludicrous. Colette, Tales of Symphonia's Wussy RPG Girl, systematically loses her ability to eat, feel, and speak; willingly dooms herself to die as a sacrifice for the world; has her soul and memories erased; comes down with a deadly illness that slowly turns her body into crystal; and is kidnapped for use as a dead goddess's vessel, threatening her soul a second time.

Because, you know, sacrificing yourself in order to save the world is not heroic at all, right?

Suffering through a disease that slowly robs you of all your sense (considered among psychologists to be the cruelest form of torture), then turns you to crystal, is sorta easy compared to slaying a few dragons and calling it a day, right?

I WILL yeild the point on Yulie and Atoli, though. Because GOD DMANIT YULIE IT'S NOT YOUR FUCKIN FAULT SHUT UP ABOUT IT ALREADY and GOD DAMNIT ATOLI YOUR SELF ESTEEM ISSUES JUST SPAWNED YET ANOTHER BOSS.

But on everything else, you REALLY need to get off your high horse. It's seems to be chafing your butt something fierce.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Good LORD! So many people jump on EVERY article that these writers write and go, "No, no no! You're WRONG! Here's example of 'X, Y, and Z.' See? You're WRONG!" I actually thought this article made a very good point. Japanese girls in video games tend to fit this Princess character type like a glove. Not all of them, but a majority.
Flip it on it's head and write about how male characters in JRPGs tend to fit character types, and I'm sure everyone would go crazy saying the same thing.

 

[ultimasupersaiyan]

To be honest and trying not to be sexist but I like the wussy RPG girl. I don't know why 100% but I think it's the whole rescuing a woman and showing off how cool I am thing. Now here's something a lot of people have probably forgotten about is the evolution of Yuna in Final Fantasy X and X-2. In FFX she was the wussy princess type but her character did get tougher near the end of FFX and in FFX-2 she became a more modern(although over sexualised)woman. She became an independant woman who with a few friends are having fun adventuring and helping people while trying to find clues on where Tidus is. Maybe JRPG writers should have the wussy females at the start of the game evolve into a normal woman of today thoughout the course of the game.

 

[tklivory]

Good LORD! So many people jump on EVERY article that these writers write and go, "No, no no! You're WRONG! Here's example of 'X, Y, and Z.' See? You're WRONG!" I actually thought this article made a very good point. Japanese girls in video games tend to fit this Princess character type like a glove. Not all of them, but a majority.
Flip it on it's head and write about how male characters in JRPGs tend to fit character types, and I'm sure everyone would go crazy saying the same thing.

Not even close to a majority. And it's not exclusive to Japanese games. The reason why we jump on this is 1) it enforces stereotypes while claiming to decry them and 2) we care about these topics. Giving an opinion isn't the issue - heck, i gave out a lot above - BUT: giving out bald-faced inaccuracies, couching it as fact, and then pigeonholing a specific culture while doing so? Nope, not gonna let it slide.

And yes, I do dislike stereotyping of male characters. (I hate modern marketing for this reason.) It's just that our society is so inured to that type of stereotyping it doesn't come up as forum subjects a lot.

 

[not dryad]

OP needs to stop playing bad RPGs and/or blatantly ignoring other females. Try playing Tales of the Abyss or Tales of Vesperia. Try playing a Final Fantasy from V to XII and you might see a good female character; in case you don't know, FFVI had a major female protagonist before XII did it. Go play Suikoden, Phantasy Star, Wild Arms, Mother 3, and other titles that escape me.

Good LORD! So many people jump on EVERY article that these writers write and go, "No, no no! You're WRONG! Here's example of 'X, Y, and Z.' See? You're WRONG!" I actually thought this article made a very good point. Japanese girls in video games tend to fit this Princess character type like a glove. Not all of them, but a majority.
Flip it on it's head and write about how male characters in JRPGs tend to fit character types, and I'm sure everyone would go crazy saying the same thing.

It's hard to take her seriously when she complains about bad characters when there are plenty of good female characters. If there were really THAT many wussy RPG girls, then she may be on to something, but, as people have pointed out, there ARE good characters. She just needs to play a good RPG for once.

 

[tklivory]

To be honest and trying not to be sexist but I like the wussy RPG girl. I don't know why 100% but I think it's the whole rescuing a woman and showing off how cool I am thing. Now here's something a lot of people have probably forgotten about is the evolution of Yuna in Final Fantasy X and X-2. In FFX she was the wussy princess type but her character did get tougher near the end of FFX and in FFX-2 she became a more modern(although over sexualised)woman. She became an independant woman who with a few friends are having fun adventuring and helping people while trying to find clues on where Tidus is. Maybe JRPG writers should have the wussy females at the start of the game evolve into a normal woman of today thoughout the course of the game.

I agree that Yuna's character development is an excellent example of, well, character development. However, to say it is an example of a 'Princess' type of character evolving into a 'modern woman' type of character completely misses the point that it is just character type "A" evolving into character type "B". This is simply solid writing, not a "oh, let's make sure to modernize our female lead". When you look at FFX, BOTH Tidus and Yuna go through exactly the same progression from weak character to strong character - not just Yuna. (If anything, Tidus was *more* of a 'Princess' character than Yuna in the beginning!)

I think it's kind of sad that so many RPGs have so little character development that standard good writing techniques are seen as creating stereotypical characters. (Stereotypes exist for a reason, etc, etc)

 

[darkdots]

Girlie-man. Go to the gym. Get pumped up.

 

[Xander_VJ]

The article is well written, but then again, severely misguided.

We don't have to go to the "it happens in the West too" territory. We don't even need to.

As they have already said, Stahl biggest (and inexcusable) mistake was to take for granted, or at least give the idea that she does, that most JRPG have weak, self-sacrificing female leads and strong, willful women are a scarce and relatively recent exception to the rule.

It's just not true. Not by a long shot.

She just picked some easy-target examples (some of them cruelly taken out of context, like Colette from "Tales of Symphonia") and ignored the TONS of strong female leads that exist.

Many examples have been said already: Tifa from FF VII, Celes & Terra from FF VI, Shion Uzuki & KOS-MOS from the "Xenosaga" trilogy, Elly van Houten from "Xenogears", Tear Grants from "Tales of the Abyss", the girls from "Chrono Trigger", etc... and there are more that are to be said, like Seth from "Lost Odyssey" or Lenneth & Silmeria from the "Valkyrie Profile" series.

And yes, many of those games are from before the 2000's. Would you look at that.

And if we include the female supporting characters (like Yuffie or Sheena), the list just goes out of the charts.

There are even examples of the "Kabuki princess" archetype which show clear strength and will. They have already mentioned Aerith, and we have also Estelle from "Tales of Vesperia", Dagger from FF IX and Yuna from FF X (and this last one would be stretching the archetype, since she's more towards the "Miko" archetype, which although similar, is not exactly the same)

And finally, the fact that they are in this archetype doesn't necessarily mean they are badly written (the examples from the paragraph above are "decent" at worst), nor that if they are not in the archetype they are automatically good characters (as well said about Lightning. Another example would be Reimi from "Star Ocean 4", though in a different way).

It's not like there isn't any truth in the article, and as I said, is well written. The root of the Japanese archetype in the Kabuki plays is an interesting thing to look into as well.

The problem is that it is extremely biased.


Look, I can see why some people can get pissed off by this kind of characters, specially women. Even though I might add that I DO know female gamers who, maybe don't like the archetype itself (at least consciously) but they like some to the characters attacked in the article.

However, we have to remember that liking a fictional character is, at the end of the day, like liking a real person. In other words, there are personality traits that we are more fond than others, and if a character have the kind of traits we dislike, not even the best writing in the world is going to prevent us from hating that character.

 

[Therumancer]

-way too long to be saying so little of relevance-

I think you managed to hit every note except her point.
Female RPG characters who are not heroines and thus have nothing to do with the article. Check.
Completely unrelated male anime archetypes with typical anti-feminist underpinning as if the guy from Love Hina has anything to do with the conversation or is comparable to the JRPG Princess archetype in any way. Check.
Western cartoons that have nothing to do with JRPGs, and even then have "Princesses" who are strong-willed and smart and who take control of their destiny, unlike JRPG Princesses. Check.

No, I hit her point head on. A lot of the things I mentioned were intended to counter the cultural comments being made. The point here being that any perceived cultural bias in Japanese productions nowadays comes from the viewer projecting what they want to see, rather than there actually being one. All of those points are intended to illustrate that JRPGs are not springing from a pop culture of feminine oppression. You do not have the creative media in Japan trying to force this kind of a gender role.

Also, a lot of it comes down to how we want to define "heroine". The writer of the article is extending that definition to major supporting characters. Thus my examples are quite valid, since I'm drawing from the same source. After all she's using characters like Rosa (from Final Fantasy IV) and Alice (From Shadow Hearts) as examples of heroines and quoting them. In Final Fantasy IV the protaganist was Cecil, in Shadow Hearts the protaganist was a shape shifer named Yuri.

The arguement she is trying to make pretty much comes down to saying that these characters shouldn't exist, while implying that this is all you see. My point is that it's actually pretty typical feminine behavior given how women are wired, and it's also NOT all that you see. Oh sure in "Shadow Hearts" we have the cloistered white magic girl who is naive and ultra-feminine, but in that same game we ALSO have a playable female superspy who is doing the aggressive hero thing.

The point here being is that it's neither an unfair or negative portrayal, and that to act like it's common to the point of being omni-present in JRPGs is ridiculous. This is why I am hoping this was intended as a Satire, because it's pretty ridiculous especially if you play many RPGs at all.

-

When it comes to the Disney Princess thing, I will say that it depends on the exact character your talking about, however your typical Disney princess is pretty much a damsel
in distress. Characters like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are pretty much rescued by their princes even if they are the protaganists. Belle in "Beauty and The Beast" is more or less a bystander to what turns into a giant fight over her between a cursed prince and the local studmuffin. Jasmine from "Aladdin" pretty much represents what the protaganist (Aladdin himself) wants and has to fight for.

Understand that while some women will scream "OMG, negative stereotypes", that's pretty much what a lot of girls want, and instinctively gravitate towards. The same basic themes are played out in movies and books, especially those written for women by women. Romance novels, chick flicks... nobody is forcing women to create or consume these things.

For the women that don't have those tendencies, and deal with the problem of being a minority attitude wise, I can see how this is very frustrating, and how the old days of sexism provide a "ready made" enemy in the form of some kind of organized male oppression. After all to the "tomboy" or just a woman with a more aggressive outlook, it seems kind of offensive that despite freedom this is the kind of thing that actually interests most girls and the kinds of roles and fantasies they create for themselves.

Again, the point I'm getting at is that any problem, conspiricy, or cultural bias in the media (even in Japanese pop culture nowadays) is simply the result of people projecting. Women who want specific things feel that all women should be like them, have the same values, and that by not doing so they must be being subverted. That isn't the case. It's just how most girls are wired.

I mean honestly, you don't see some of these women-oriented "chick flicks" making tons and tons of money, and all these romance novels (traditional, and paranormal romance) being churned out, because there is some massive conspiricy of men forcing women to want this stuff. Especially when you consider (again) that the majority of it is created by women for women.

 

[mireko]

While this is very true in a lot of cases, they're still pretty far ahead of WRPGs in this regard. In the last ten years, how many WRPGs do you remember with female leads or even female characters being important to the plot beyond being someone's girlfriend? BioWare is pretty good at this, but I can't think of anyone else.

Hell, if you broaden it to consider games from other genres there are somehow even fewer. It's really weird to see Americans discuss how incredibly sexist and racist other cultures are, then turn around and act SHOCKED that somebody would imply that western culture COULD POSSIBLY be either of those things, just less obvious about it.

Japanese games do sometimes pile on the wusses, fanservice, racism and weirdness (though I've always loved weirdness), but they're far more likely to have a strong female character in there somewhere. Like most of the women in Persona 3&4, Disgaea, Valkyria Chronicles, Yggdra Union and so on. Is it really a problem if the character archetype exists in a story with more nuanced characters that aren't subservient and boring?

And what's wrong with Lightning? I mean, she's not very well-written (nothing by Squeenix ever is), but she's still easily more likeable than the other protagonists. She only ever hits that hat-wearing douche, which really just makes her more fun. There are some complaints that it somehow makes her too masculine, but what the fuck do you want? I'll take an aggressive woman with a sword any day over another fucking gritty Space Marine with a dead wife.

Apologies for wall of text/restating things other people have said/being incoherent.

 

[tklivory]

The root of the Japanese archetype in the Kabuki plays is an interesting thing to look into as well.

As equally interesting as the link between Greek tragedy and modern Western game development. Inspired by, yes, but drawing the direct connection between Kabuki and modern video games that Stahl attempts to? No, no, no. Just - no.

However, we have to remember that liking a fictional character is, at the end of the day, like liking a real person. In other words, there are personality traits that we are more fond than others, and if a character have the kind of traits we dislike, not even the best writing in the world is going to prevent us from hating that character.

Exactly. Pointing at a character and saying 'Oh, she represents a horrible female stereotype' and ignoring the fact that she is in fact a fictional character designed to move the plot forward somehow just struck me as truly disingenuous.

 

[Postman667]

A very well written article. I totally agree with what was written about Lightning from FF13. She was such a bad character who stood out in a game full of bad characters. But they did have the helpless Princess character in that game. His name was Hope and I wanted him to die from the beginning.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who wanted Hope to die, which is ironic if you think about it (don't lose hope, lol). It's like his character was designed to bring out the worst in me. Snow wasn't any better at times, what a whiny #$%@#.

 

[Seneschal]

A most excellent article looking at Princess Characters (who were still all to prevalent in North American Fiction a decade or two ago).

As much as I like Lightning (I have a thing for ass kicking ladies >.>) she does fall pretty far on the reverse of the Princess Scale. I'd be curious to see how FFXII's Ashe rates in your books, I've always considered her to be one of the finest JRPG heroines.

The Suikoden Series is also packed with great female characters who don't fall into the whole "meek and mild" princess cliche but also aren't constant ball busters. Hell Suikoden 5 takes place in an honest to goodness Matriarchy where you play as the (in that nation) cliche'd useless Prince, not good for much other than marrying off for alliances.

I agree, the Suikoden series has some great female characters (e.g. Nanami, the protagonist's overprotective martial-artist older sister), but it was never especially rooted in fantasy JRPG tropes (the games are more historical/political epics in JRPG format).

Other than that series, the various Final Fantasies had a few subversions; for example, while praised for the gameplay, FFXII was generally dismissed by the fans for the detached story, regarding which everyone seems to agree that Asche or Balthier should have been the protagonists.

 

[Grand_Marquis]

This might be tolerable if she were also a dynamic character, but Wussy RPG Girls rarely have much going on in the personality department

Luckily, no JRPG characters have much going on in the personality department, so they're among equals! OH SNAP. Yeah I went there


.
Also, it's really true what she said about JRPGs being very popular among women. I remember in highschool - in a classic gender reversal of the 'humoring a boy's obsession to win their heart' - I pretended to like obscure JRPGs and anime in order to get with the geeky girls.

 

[TheAmazingHobo]

Luckily, no JRPG characters have much going on in the personality department, so they're among equals! OH SNAP. Yeah I went there

Yes, you did. And on the way to over "there" you apparently fell down a flight of stairs and hit your head quite hard....

As for the article, I did enjoy reading it, if nothing else simply because it was well written.
However, I always cringe somewhat when someone decides to label a certain type of stock character as "bad", no matter how articulate the labeling might be.

I do believe that most stock characters, as long as they are not used out of habit or without any reflection, CAN and DO serve a purpose. Some games DO require a figure that must be rescued. And what if you simply need a weak, feminine character to pull of certain stories or character relations ? Is it bad to use one ? Bad all the time ? Really ?

Then again, I do enjoy a good rescue romance and whatnot.
So I might simply be talking out of my ass.


Edit:

Exactly. Pointing at a character and saying 'Oh, she represents a horrible female stereotype' and ignoring the fact that she is in fact a fictional character designed to move the plot forward somehow just struck me as truly disingenuous.

Seems like I skipped your post for some weird reason.
Because this is exactly what I meant.

 

[Untitled-Dragon]

Nice to see that I wasn't the only one who notice how irritatingly incapable Japanese female "heroines" were/are. I fall in with the women who dislike the wussy girl. Japan so far in has yet to get the mix of toughness and girly-ness right.

I mean why do I have to save the girl with powers that should technically make her stronger than the hero for the 2nd time. Couldn't she have done it herself or something better than just sitting around and looking helpless. Like in baulder's gate the hero there admitting isn't exactly female but is up to the player to decide the gender. Still it was amusing to have the daughter of murder reply in comedic ways. But I agree with afrosan it's not really due to sexism and it more the fault of bad writing.

 

[The Random One]

Rinoa from FFVIII at least seems self capable. While she does end up in mortal danger at least once, she doesn't have a fit over her own usefulness. At least, not that I can remember.

Oh come on. You spend half the game literally carrying her on your back. She's the quintessential Oh What A Burden It Is To Be Female character, especially because she's exactly as useful as a pack of hay through almost all certain parts of the game. She's pretty much there only to serve as a tool to force feed ham-fisted character growth to Squall and we're supposed to empathize with him because he went from 'withdrawn emo kid that doesn't care about anything' to 'withdrawn emo kid that spends all his free time beating himself up over the loss of a girl he barely knew'. Who by the way is a princess.

Speaking of FF8, my pet peeve about it is how even though Selphie is portrayed as capable and even a bit psychotic, she's useless as a physical combat character. Even though you should be able to refine each character in it to your wishes in practice all female characters have low physical power and high magical power (or whatever the game called them) so it was dumb to use them as anything other than spellcasters, which is playing right into the 'women are weak but at least they're smuht!' trope. Wow, stats man. That was a well hidden one.

However, this:

I wish the blame on poor videogame heroines would be taken off of sexism and placed where it belongs: with bad writing.

Quite true. I mean, sexism is why they pick a female stereotype that's a poor fragile thing; but bad writing is why they pick a stereotype on the first place.

Then again, laying the blame on JRPGs is like blaming the guy who didn't shower for the bad smell at a pigsty. Bad female characters are all over gaming. Hell, it's all over every single piece of media ever [http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/flowchart.jpeg]. And while in the subjecive of diversity keep in mind that black people are essentially in the same bus as females (even getting the same 'it's okay if we put a token character if we make them really badass treatment). Characters of other ethnicities are barely a blip on the radar. It's changing, but videogames have so many bad things with their story that you can't possibly work everything out at once. Videogames have stereotypical characters. They have no understanding of subtlety. They glorify violence (which is OK in certain cases, but they do even when it's not). They don't have a concept of character growth. There are exceptions to all of these, of course, but pick a random game and chances are its story would be so bad that if it had been written for NaNoWriMo they'd change the rules only so you couldn't win.

Not to say it was a bad article - MovieBob's cool new show? makes a nice point this week about what you mean to say and what you actually mean, compare it to his complaint of the Twilight saga - but to expect change in the way women are portrayed in media to come from one of the countries in the world that has seen the least progress in women's rights without even having a religion-controlled government as an excuse, in the media that's the least well developed in terms of stor telling, in a genre that relies heavily on stereotypes, is kind of wanting too much.

Then again that's pretty much how Samus came along.

 

[Ashsaver]

One notable JRPG girl in the past is from Lufia (I forgot her name) why is she notable? While her friends fight cosmic horrors with swords,magic,staffs etc. She fight cosmic horrors...with FRYING PAN!

 

[Shadowsole]

I hoenstly ever understood the lightning hate, Fang Is Much manler than Lighting, really If fang was Male the only thing that would change would be the relationship between her and Vannile would be Romantic (Or if you think it was already romantic more obvious) the punching of snow wasn't a consistant thing and when it happened I Found it justifided by Lighting Chareter...

 

[Gralian]

I hoenstly ever understood the lightning hate, Fang Is Much manler than Lighting, really If fang was Male the only thing that would change would be the relationship between her and Vannile would be Romantic (Or if you think it was already romantic more obvious) the punching of snow wasn't a consistant thing and when it happened I Found it justifided by Lighting Chareter...

I'm fairly certain i read somewhere that Fang did in fact start out life as a male character, but they changed it to a female character to remove any and all sexualisation from Lightning and project it onto Fang. I think that's also why there's a psuedo-sexual arguably 'lesbian' relationship between Fang and Vanille; because Fang was initially a male, and so they would have been 'partners' in a very literal sense. Hence why Fang comes off as an extremely disjointed character; they should have started out with her as a woman or just kept her as a man.

My thoughts to come on this article when i'm less tired and it isn't half past two in the morning. It's always fascinating to read the comments on a controversial (but not one that encourages flaming) topic.