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Framing, Agency, and AAA Female Protagonists | Semi-Ramblomatic (Patreon)

Published:
2024-06-20 15:04:06
Imported:
2026-06

Content

This week's episode of Semi-Ramblomatic is now available!

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Framing, Agency, and AAA Female Protagonists | Semi-Ramblomatic

AAA games have a weird tendency to treat female protagonists differently when it comes to agency and framing of violence. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch Store: https://sharkrobot.com/collections/second-wind

Comments

Michael Taylor

2013 was the Year of the Bow. It was also the year we got new Lara, Ellie, and Clementine. They are all strong female characters who nevertheless are presented as needing to be protected. Seems that hasn't changed.

Swift Justice

Recently had a friend talking enthusiastically about the LISA games, and while having not played them the description ended up bringing to mind for me that they sound like possibly accidental scathing counerpoints to how AAA female protagonists are portrayed and treated, especially with the gratuitous suffering and the idea of 'protecting' them.

William Alexander

Great, insightful essay. Though at least weve moved past the 2010s when designers would regularly throw in "villains threaten to sexually assault female protagonist/side character because she exists" (Gears of War 3, Arkham City, others) to raise tension and have the main male character appear to be good by declining or stopping that threat.

darkest hour

still damn good games though

darkest hour

I think you're dead wrong about reboot Lara Croft, she's a damn good character and it feels like you missed the point of Hellblade 2 honestly as well as Last of Us 2.

Shogeton

I think the thing of 'you want to desire to protect her' is something that tells us the idea. This is a female protagonist for a male audience. You're not supposed to identify with her. She's a waifu to protect. (oops, commented before finishing, he made the point)

Swaggy

Male. Gaze. That’s what it’s still about. Everything is designed for how the male gaze has evolved due to societal pressures. It’s so fucking BORING.

Fox Doucette

What jumps out at me about AAA game characters, with very rare exceptions, is that regardless of gender, they're still so thin that "paper-thin" is more credit than they deserve. Stack a couple hundred pieces of paper into a book and it'll be a good 5cm (2 inches) thick. Stack a couple hundred AAA RPG protagonists on top of each other and they won't span the thickness of a piece of gold foil.

Maytree

I wonder if it would be possible to compare the character punishment/agency aspect of the protagonist's story from one of these AAA games, where the character you play is predetermined to be female, with the same element in games where the protagonist's gender is chosen by the player, such as Mass Effect, any of the Fallout games, or Baldur's Gate 3. How, if at all, do the design team's plans for the protagonist change when that character could be any gender? Also, I haven't played the Horizon games -- is Aloy subject to the same kind of "woobification" (to use the TV Tropes term for a character written to suffer in order to evoke protective feelings in the viewer/reader)? Or is she a triple-A exception to the rule? About a decade ago Ann Leckie wrote an excellent SF trilogy (the Imperial Radch books) in which the characters' genders are concealed from the reader in all but a few cases. The viewpoint character is an AI that has very little interest in human gender and just defaults to speaking of most other characters as "she". It's a very interesting narrative trick because as a reader you tend to mentally assign characters to a M/F gender binary, and it made me ponder why I assigned which gender to which characters based on their actions and dialog in the story.

Collin DeNoya

I could’ve sworn I subbed monthly the moment this patreon went live. I rarely check patreon and I’ve just now noticed that this is not in fact what I did. I’m very sorry, and I have corrected it. Thank you so much for your hard work, I’m extremely happy to contribute

Triad

There's an extreme and deliberate example of this in Voltaire's "Candide", where not a single character can be said to really have any sort of agency as they're hurdled through every indignity under the sun. That's also how it works with novels by the Marquis de Sade, and it worries me that modern mainstream media is returning to these patterns with such relish

Mikey

It's even more sinister because, if you think about it, this focus on hurting women could be seen as a form of misogyny aimed at those who seek equality with men. Essentially, for a female character in an AAA game to be on the same level as a male character, she often has to endure some form of hazing. A good counterpoint to this is "Horizon Zero Dawn," where Aloy proves to be a strong protagonist without needing to be tortured.

Lakana

The only positive example was Celeste (I've avoided that because I'm not good at platformers, but I've heard that it's well written.) Some more positive examples would have fleshed the video out some more, AAA or Indie (and been good for helping to identify and sell more games that do this well). I'm surprised, and a bit disappointed, that Yahtzee didn't address Aloy, in one way or another (for or against) as she's in a significant AAA series. (Being a Dutch based studio might play in to how she fits into the premise of the video.)

Tim Wilson

I found that in toward the end of both Game of Thrones and The Last of Us Part 2, I developed the uncanny knack to predict the future by asking the following question every 5-10 minutes: “What is the worst possible thing that could happen in this situation?” Lo and behold, it was time for another bolt of misfortune from behind the black. At least when Multi-versal Bayonetta gets murdered in a cutscene they’ve kicked a large degree of ass beforehand and are taken out by a divine cheap shot. Easier to accept somehow.