Realitycrash said:
RJ 17 said:
Realitycrash said:
My point is "generic villainess is generic". Kerrigan might not be a damsel in distress, but if all it takes to be a strong female character is to not be a damsel in distress then there's plenty of strong female characters out there. Chell from Portal - who doesn't have a single line of dialogue and thus no character development at all - could be a "strong female character" just because she happens to have a vagina. As I said in my previous response, to me a strong female character DOES revolve partially around being a female and - despite being a female - going on to do "strong" things. Again I point to the fact that Last Of Us would be an entirely different type of story if it was a little boy going along with Joel rather than a little girl. So too would Bioshock Infinite be an entirely different kind of story if Booker was going to save a young man in Columbia rather than a young woman. In those stories, you can't change the gender without changing the entire feel of the story. With Kerrigan, it really doesn't matter what's between her thighs...she can't be a strong female character if you can completely cut the fact that she's a female out of the character and have the story be absolutely unchanged. Go ahead and do a gender swap, would you say that a male Kerrigan is a "strong MALE character" or just another generic bad-guy on a vengeance trip?
I would say that Male Kerrigan is a strong male-character, because I think the focus of percieved 'typical male attributes' and 'typical female attributes' is counter-productive and sometimes even harmful to any form of reasonable development.
Strong attributes are strong attributes. The fact that a generic villain has them does not make the villain any less strong of a character.
It's that simple for me. And that's why it continues to amuse me so much that we are apparently SO SCARED about just gender-swapping a few generic heroes/generic victims in order to create/promote some strong women in videogames.
In short: Attributes make a character, not its gender. Gender is a biological thing, and assuming that there is a certain quota of gender-specific things that need to be filled in order for a character to be a 'strong man' or 'strong woman' is wrong.
You're right but only to a certain extent. What you're describing are all the things necessary for a strong character in general. This discussion isn't about generalities though, it's about specifics. The question at hand isn't "What makes Ellie, Elizabeth, or even Kerrigan strong characters", the question is "What makes those ladies strong
female characters". By the very nature of the discussion at hand, gender is part of the focus. I'll give you that Kerrigan is a strong character in that she has a good story arc and character development that is interesting to follow, but a strong
female character is something entirely different than a strong character who happens to be female.
Again, the only real way I can describe the difference is that a strong character could be gender-swapped and not change the mood/theme of the story at all - their gender is indeed completely irrelevant - while a strong female character can't be gender swapped without changing the mood/theme of the story. The fact that they're a female actually IS part of the story.