Chessrook44 said:
cyvaris said:
I wish to god we had more non-sexy, single (?), female protagonists in the vein of Ripley or Samus just because it would add something different to the endless amounts of "Dude-bro" protagonists.
Would Samus really count outside of her armor?
I mean I don't know sexy so I can't really comment, but it really seems that's what they were going for when they put her in a ponytail and the skintight blue bodysuit.
Outside of her armor, no, she wouldn't (and the same goes for Ripley). The important thing, however, is that the attractiveness of both characters is basically irrelevant to the way they're presented. When you think of Samus, the first image that pops into your head is one where she's wearing her Power Suit, and that's because that image and what it represents is reinforced by the games (and their marketing, for that matter). It's fortuitous the Ripley was brought up, because she illustrates the point extremely well; she's an attractive female, but the films never use that in lieu of characterization even in the rare instances where it's addressed in the first place. Because the series refuses to treat Ripley as an object rather than a person, people respond to her as a person instead of an object. Just as you'd never see an
Alien poster showing off a scantily-clad Ripley, you'd never see a suitless Samus taking up the space on a
Metroid game's box art (unlike a [http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/1/14030/625440-tomb.jpg] certain [http://cdn1.spong.com/pack/l/a/laracroftt71361/_-Lara-Croft-Tomb-Raider-The-Angel-of-Darkness-PC-_.jpg] other [http://www.freakygaming.com/gallery/game_art/tomb_raider:_anniversary/box_art.jpg] series [http://cdn4.spong.com/pack/t/o/tombraider287119l/_-Tomb-Raider-Underworld-PS3-_.jpg]) when the developers have an image of the Power Suit that they know will resonate much more widely. (The one exception -
Other M and maybe
Super Smash Bros. Brawl aside - is the inclusion of multiple endings based solely on how revealing Samus's attire is, which I honestly could do without at this point.)
Krantos said:
I has to be said that a lot of games with female protagonists don't sell well simply because they're not that good.
Lets take a look at the big games in recent years featuring female protagonists:
-Metroid: Other M
-Mirrors Edge
-Hydrophobia
-Tomb Raider
-Amy
-Final Fantasy XIII
...I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones off the top of my head. Notice anything about them? Aside from Tomb Raider, they panned by critics and audiences alike. Not because they had a female lead, but because the games themselves were of questionable quality at best.
If publishers and developers want female protagonists to sell well, for gods sake put them in good games.
True enough, though that observation raises the question of whether games with female leads are immediately placed on a lower priority level than those with male leads, and the seemingly greater-than-average number of poor-quality titles is a result of less money, time, and manpower being devoted toward these games.
On the other hand, the inclusion of
Metroid: Other M on that list raises what I regard as a far more significant issue, which is the way female characters in video games as well as other forms of popular media are so often written. That is to say, abysmally. In the original
Metroid, the ending reveal that Samus was a woman worked so well because it made the point that a female is capable of being every bit the hero that a man in the same situation could. By the third game, Samus's gender was being established in the intro, and
Metroid Prime peppered visual and audio reminders of it throughout the game's whole length. The best thing about the
Metroid games' gender representation was that Samus's femininity was present, but totally incidental to her character. By treating the subject of her gender as no big deal, the series resoundingly demonstrated that nobody
should be making a big deal about a woman being able to fill a role traditionally done by a man, and in doing so communicated a message of female empowerment via gender equality.
Come
Other M, the concept of "equality" was thrown out the window, and the story chose to define Samus first and foremost not as a person, but as a female - or, rather, the warped caricature that is Yoshio Sakamoto's concept of femininity. And lo and behold, suddenly the galaxy's greatest bounty hunter became cowardly, obsessed with babies and motherhood, and irrationally fixated on the nearest male authority figure in the face of all reason. If, say,
Half-Life 3 suddenly decided to give Gordon Freeman a voice and personality, no one would even think to pile those traits onto him and call it characterization. But when it comes to female characters, a depressing number of writers seem to think that "being a woman" not only counts as a personality trait in and of itself, but is the only personality trait any female character could conceivably possess. I'm not saying that gender can't be an important aspect of characterization, but only in stories where it's a relevant issue, and not crowbarred in out of a perception that femininity is somehow abnormal - a perception that people, both inside and outside of the video games industry, desperately need to get past.
