First up, a trigger warning. If you are sensitive to discussion of (fictional) sex offences, please leave now.
The context for this is the Free Play games conference in Melbourne, and a throwaway tweet that touched on something important.
Female characters in games. They don’t get much of a range of roles. They are the MacGuffins usually, the ostensible reason for the adventure but irrelevant and interchangeable. Leena tweets that she’s tired of female character motivations based on sexual victimisation. Shortly, this tweet appears
WRONG. “@grassisleena How can indies help? Rape Batman and kill Lara Croft’s parents. Mix it the fuck up. #Freeplay12”
Delicate topic, and Franzicus makes the point that making women into complete humans is not really aided by suggesting that horrible things are done to men. And Leena wound up apologising and backing away from the topic altogether.
I don’t pretend to be anything more than a human male who would like better and bigger stories, and I think Leena was attempting to articulate something that is deeply felt but not understood. It is perhaps part of the wish-fulfilment and narcissism of male-driven gaming culture.
Why is it so unthinkable that Batman could be raped? Why is it so thinkable that Lara Croft would be?
This is starting to play with the high voltage wires, of sexual politics and sexual desire and sexual power. An interesting article on the new Lara backstory
A sidestep
Years ago a friend wrote an article in the student newspaper about the logical inconsistency of laws against bestiality in a country that does not enforce vegetarianism.
Why is it acceptable, he asked, that an animal might be killed in a painful and distressing way, but not used for sexual gratification? Why is the gourmand who enjoys veal perfectly respectable company, but a zoophile with a non-deadly appetite for a baby cow would be shunned? Do you suppose the animal itself would choose a messy death and dismemberment over a non-consensual sexual encounter?
Bestiality laws are not actually about protecting animals. They are about defining normative boundaries on human sexuality. They draw a line that divides deviants from “normal” people and the desirable from the repugnant.
Gaming tropes, where the protagonist seeks bloody vengeance for the treatment of his daughter / wife / sister / mother – this isn’t about protecting women at all. It is about voyeuristic titillation, watching rape fantasies that can’t be expressed in order to disavow them.
The character motivation for the violence is that he is angry with the offenders and seeks revenge. The player motivation is to expunge the guilt around the voyeurism.
Another sidestep
A personal admission: I disliked Kill Bill. A lot. The violence against women upset me. Others seemed to think it was fine, because it was women beating up other women, but it did not sit well with me. Yet I have happily eaten popcorn while watching fictional men torture and kill each other. I can watch Pulp Fiction and not have the same visceral reaction to men being shot and killed. So I’m not logically consistent on this – there’s some inclination in me to see violence as only acceptable when it is male-on-male.
It is this inconsistency that is interesting, the crucial difference between what one feels and what one should think.
Imagine if Leena’s suggestion was taken up and we have a Batman who has been the victim of sexual violence, learning to cope, dealing with the emotions, struggling with suicide and identity crisis. Imagine Lara Croft, strong because she chooses to be instead of the product of victimisation, more Indiana Jones than Lorena Bobbit.
Then, we would have some stories that were genuine attempts to explain how to be a complete person, coping with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Maybe later…
I’m going to leave this here for now. When I can verbalise it better I want to come back to why I think they are linked – why an aesthetic that refuses to imagine sexual violence towards Batman will also refuse to imagine anything but sexual victimhood for Lara Croft.