Tropes vs Women

[Yeppoh]

To answer your question, I think people project their own ideas about what she is saying based on knowing beforehand that she's a feminist and she's critiquing their one true love (gaming and gaming culture). It was very obvious to me this was the case when watching LimpingFish's video. There were a lot of points in which Thunderf00t's arguments boiled down to "some feminists say this, so this is what Sarkeesian thinks and says. She is so stupid".

Well. That surely explains it about the dectrators' side. Though I also saw the other type of misinterpretation where there are people who interpreted it has a true sign that video games using the Damsel in Distress trope are the cause why women are downgraded, the cause of domestic violence or all the ugly things that are done to women.
Or I also saw that some people are considering that any game using that trope is automatically lazy and/or bad.
And this despite the fact that Miss Sarkeesian never said such things. But I guess the psychology behind this kind of misinterpretation is the same.

While these types of games are a refreshing departure from the standard formula, and something I'd generally like to see more of, the focus is still squarely on the male characters and so at their core these games are really deconstructing the player's assumptions about the traditional hero archetype. A true subversion of the trope would need to star the damsel as the main playable character. It would have to be her story. Sadly, there are very few games that really explore this idea.

I will be a bit pedantic about some details on that part. It won't dismiss her point, but there are some little mistakes that are mostly semantic. The first part of that quote isn't really a deconstruction ('Shadow of the Colossus' is more of a deconstruction than the situation with Elaine); it is mostly accepted as a true subversion. What she calls a "true subversion" is actually an inversion and, depending on how it's written, it can jump into a different trope that isn't contained by the Damsel In Distress one. More details on this page about how to play with that trope.
But again, the point stands.

[LimpingFish]

Do you agree with this video, LimpingFish? Or are you playing devil's advocate?

Sorry, I over-looked your post earlier.

As to your question, no I don't, and yes I was, in so much as I was offering an alternative point of view. I don't subscribe to either argument, as they stand. I do however think that Sarkessian may have an agenda, perhaps even a self-serving one, which may result in her over-egging the sexism pudding, and lead to her painting a slighty misleading portrait of the game industry and of game players.

And that's...just not cricket.

[dactylopus]

Great post, Nefasto, and thanks for the link to the TV Tropes page.

It seems that there are many ways in which this trope can actually work, and some in which I feel its use is completely justified, but I think you'll find that Sarkeesian would only like to see the inverted trope.  This makes sense, since her real goal is to see more strong female characters in the main protagonist role of video games.

[waheela]

I do however think that Sarkessian may have an agenda, perhaps even a self-serving one, which may result in her over-egging the sexism pudding, and lead to her painting a slighty misleading portrait of the game industry and of game players.

And that's...just not cricket.

Interesting. Could you explain in more detail? I'm not sure I follow you completely.

[dactylopus]

I believe that what he's getting at is this:

Anita's agenda is to see more games with positive female protagonists, and possibly also to see less games that victimize women.  To pursue this agenda, she has made this series of videos to illustrate how women are negatively portrayed in video games.  His argument is that she has perhaps stretched these claims as far as she can in the pursuit of these goals, and that this has somewhat misrepresented the severity of the situation.

That's not to say that she doesn't have points, but that she's taking these points to the extreme in hopes of achieving her goals.

I'm not sure I would completely disagree, because while I support most of her arguments, I do think that sometimes she seems to be finding problems where the issue may be somewhat negligible.  She also seems dismissive of (or unwilling to discuss) any games that treat the trope fairly without providing a strong female player character, which is her agenda.

[Babar]

Apologies for resurrecting a thread statistically older than your child, but I was searching for something, and it popped up, and I just read through it again .

Has your opinion on anything you said here changed in the intervening years? What are your thoughts on all of this in retrospect?

Personally, I'm kinda disappointed at how the whole youtube series fizzled out, so much so that while neither are really mentioned in regular discourse these days, I feel the effects of the pushback (a la Gamergate) had a far more lasting effect on the culture than the video series itself did.

[TheFrighter]

I can't afford a lecture in english, I'll just try a consideration:

avoiding intentionally tropes is not really better that using unintentionally. I saw same "anti-tropes" comics and I find it too autoreferentials. I suppose it is the same with videogames.

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[Blondbraid]

Apologies for resurrecting a thread statistically older than your child, but I was searching for something, and it popped up, and I just read through it again .

Has your opinion on anything you said here changed in the intervening years? What are your thoughts on all of this in retrospect?

Personally, I'm kinda disappointed at how the whole youtube series fizzled out, so much so that while neither are really mentioned in regular discourse these days, I feel the effects of the pushback (a la Gamergate) had a far more lasting effect on the culture than the video series itself did.

I think most arguments have already been said here years ago, before I even joined the forums, but I'll give my two cents regarding cultural shifts in the decade since.

I definitely think the pushback was an early symptom of a much more general right-wing turn in broader society, and it also revealed a great deal of hypocrisy of right-wing people who consider anything they like or agree with to be apolitical, but anything they disagree with, or just poor quality, to be a result of left-wing politics and DEI.

Having grown up in the late 90s and early 2000s, it also worries me how many things that weren't considered political back then, has now become a symbol of "bad progressive politics" in large circles online; just off the top of my head, showing nazis and facists as irredeemably evil enemies were not treated as any more political than showing the hero fighting zombies or aliens, and having a female lead openly and explicitly say that she wasn't going to wait for a man to save the day wasn't considered fringe feminist extremism;

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And these heroines were not dragged for being too extreme or being man-haters when their respective movies came out, despite literraly making fun of the men for not getting with the times. I can't imagine something like that happening in today's pop culture.

There is such blatant irony that the very same people who cite the examples above as female characters from "the good ole days" will post massive rants about modern female movie heroines saying and doing things that look downright dainty in comparison. Remember the guy complaining that Aloy had a "beard" just because she had normal peach fuzz?

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[TheFrighter]

There is such blatant irony that the very same people who cite the examples above as female characters from "the good ole days" will post massive rants about modern female movie heroines saying and doing things that look downright dainty in comparison. Remember the guy complaining that Aloy had a "beard" just because she had normal peach fuzz?

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Uh! I miss that! 

_

[Galen]

d in regular discourse these days, I feel the effects of the pushback (a la Gamergate) had a far more lasting effect on the culture than the video series itself did.

I don't know if it's entirely accurate to place Gamergate as pushback on Sarkeesian so much as one jilted ex's weird-ass smear campaign somehow accepted as legitimate discourse on journalistic ethics because one writer (who notably was never the target of any meaningful hostility) mentioned in passing a freeware title made by an ex. She just got absorbed into that as a matter of course, by people who still swear blind mass targeted misogyny wasn't the goal (while their friends continued to send death threats exclusively to women).

But you can still draw a straight line through all of that to the likes of Project 2025/The Trump Administration. I'm not trying to claim that a video about Princess Peach being sexist was the first domino in a line that when toppled leads to someone popping Charlie Kirk's jugular like a balloon full of paint, but the same underlying cultural rot that has lead to the modern alt-right is the throughline for the past 10 years of western political degradation. Gamergate was effectively a signal fire that something was deeply, fundementally wrong with the next generation of young men and their relationship with the world around them. And now we're at a point where kids in highschool are quoting sex traffickers (Tate) or neo-nazi memes (the whole 'sigma male' thing), because that's how much control has been taken over pop culture.

I don't think you can really disentangle this kind of incel-ish hostility towards women and other minority groups and 'return to tradition' conservative fiction from both the disproportionate responses back then and then the cultural climate of "maybe it's fine to fire all women pilots and strip all official mention of black soldiers from official records" happening mostly in the states (and Russia)... so far.

Sarkeesian's videos have been forgotten (and honestly, the one I saw just didn't seem to be very good - though I did go in with a completely open mind at the time), but the responses to her and Quinn almost seem to exist as a template for shitheads to weaponise complete non-issues into some grand culture war as if some grand 'they' were out to corrupt the soul of glorious western society. Which would sound completely insane rambling on my part a decade ago, but now you just have to spend three minutes on the internet to see people trying to 'transvestigate' the Kirk shooter, or decrying the attack on western society from the new Superman facing mild peril as part of the plot of the film, or even a fictional space-alien in Star Wars having a purple rinse (a hair trend in older women about a century old).

It was this nonsense culture wars then, it's nonsense culture wars now. But we've gone from it being weirdos on the internet, to the president of the USA rallying the troops against Cracker Barrel changing its logo. Different illness, but the same disease, allowed to fester for a decade.