On The Sketchy Woman Character

[Synigma]

You can't tell the player how to feel; Only good story-telling is going to lead to an actual emotional response from the player. A side-kick though can be written to feel whatever the story needs and if handled competently will help convey the situation to the player.

Related: there is a perception that men should be more stoic with their emotions so it's easier to convey those emotions if the side-kick is a female character. Conversely it's easier to write a male lead for that exact same reason (the less actual character the character has the easier it is for the player to imagine themselves in their position)

And sometimes you don't want your boring male protagonist to bump uglies with the emotional ball of exposition that is your side-kick.

Stereotypes lead to tropes, and tropes lead to stereotypes. What came first, the stereotypes or the tropes?

 

[sageoftruth]

It sounds like the key here is to leave no room for the viewers to suspect that there's a hidden lust lurking within both of them.

I suppose you could have one be the other's gay friend and have them both compete for the same love interest.

Also, while I'd never recommend this, create two characters who are so bland and unconvincing that the audience cannot see them as people no matter how hard they try, thus killing any sense that feelings exist beneath their exteriors.

 

[CaitSeith]

Blur effects in games suck! They're just an unnecessary gimmick to make games more movie-like; but they end up getting in the way of the gameplay, while wasting GPU in the process.

OT: Brother & sister. No matter how much they care for each other, people usually doesn't expect romance between them.

 

[Ark of the Covetor]

Ellie herself feels specifically written to be as inoffensive to male audiences as possible. Like one of the guys, but not one of the guys.

See that's interesting, because "stop writing women as special-snowflake-goddess-trophies and just write them as people with a personality and interests of their own, whatever those may be, and remember that female doesn't necessarily mean feminine(because sex and gender are distinct)" is a fairly accurate summation of the sentiment expressed by several different female authors who gave talks at a creative writing course I once attended, yet I often see people attribute that "they're making her blokish to avoid threatening men" motivation when writers try and take aforementioned advice.

I'm not saying you're wrong in this specific instance, but if the outcome is a solid character who avoids or even subverts some annoying tropes do we really need to be second-guessing the intentions of the writers? It's not as if such "one of the guys..." women are vanishingly rare - they may be somewhat more concentrated in certain subcultures than others, but almost everyone will have known a few people like that.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Ellie herself feels specifically written to be as inoffensive to male audiences as possible. Like one of the guys, but not one of the guys.

See that's interesting, because "stop writing women as special-snowflake-goddess-trophies and just write them as people with a personality and interests of their own, whatever those may be, and remember that female doesn't necessarily mean feminine(because sex and gender are distinct)" is a fairly accurate summation of the sentiment expressed by several different female authors who gave talks at a creative writing course I once attended, yet I often see people attribute that "they're making her blokish to avoid threatening men" motivation when writers try and take aforementioned advice.

I'm not saying you're wrong in this specific instance, but if the outcome is a solid character who avoids or even subverts some annoying tropes do we really need to be second-guessing the intentions of the writers? It's not as if such "one of the guys..." women are vanishingly rare - they may be somewhat more concentrated in certain subcultures than others, but almost everyone will have known a few people like that.

It's more than that. Ellie is just a bit too perfect. I know the term is getting thrown around a lot recently, but yes, I would call her a bit of a Mary Sue. She's just never (morally) wrong or weak, as opposed to the other characters, both male and female. She's still a solid character, and by the end of the game I like her a lot, it's just a shame the writers were seemingly too afraid to expose her faults. This is probably due to the developers fearing that (male) audiences might get annoyed with her if she had moments were she'd be bitchy, or nagging, or crying etc. There's only one time we see Ellie being truly selfish and it's in the DLC, which isn't any good apart from that one moment.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Thank you for years of content Shamus. This column and, when it was up, Stolen Pixels were favorites of mine. Good luck with your future endeavors!

 

[RedRockRun]

Per Shamus' challenge at the end:

-A man and elderly woman.
-A cross between Fight Club and Tiresias of Greek mythology in which the main character routinely changes gender while still interacting with the opposite version of him/herself through hallucinations.
-A gay man and his female friend.
-A man and his lesbian friend.
-Either of the above two who aren't friends at all but coworkers, professional partners, or uneasy allies.

 

[StatusNil]

Thanks for the good reads, Mr. Young. I should have commented more, but it's always that thing where you read something that DOESN'T have something egregiously wrong in it, and you move on to complain about something that does. Definitely one of my favorite columns on the site, though.

All the best in what is to follow.

 

[PunkRex]

So gay male lead? It fits the requirements and is far less restrictive on on the kinds of women you can include.

True that, but that's a can of worms that can blow up even more epically than any of the gender based land-mines.

One of my fave friendships in media at the mo is Black Widow and Hawk Eye for the precise reason that their best buds. It's such a freaking rarity for opposite sex, platonic couples in ANYTHING! Yet, peeps still flipped out when Hawk Eye's family showed up.

 

[teamcharlie]

I feel like 'making the female lead somebody it would be socially inappropriate for the male lead to screw' doesn't really solve the problem so much as make it simultaneously more subaltern and way grosser.

Let people fuck. It's okay. But maybe give it a little more screen time than kissing for two seconds at the end 'because they're supposed to.' Relationships are cool. Dating is interesting. Relationships gone south can make for fantastic fiction.

But if you want to keep a relationship believably 'Platonic' (scare quotes because the term is itself a way Renaissance people used to pretend that the ancient Greeks weren't super gay), give the protagonist a significant other (no worries, they can stay largely offscreen if you suffer from Chris Avellone disease and are absolutely frightened of depicting video game relationships). Then, unless they're the sort of guy/gal who does that sort of thing, they'll stay 'just friends' with pretty much whoever else because cheating on people is shitty. Problem solved!