I take your point, but what does any of that have to do with the rancor and breathless bluster of the article above?
I’m not familiar with Ms. Sarkisian’s work, but anyone who criticizes tropes in and of themselves is misguided. Tropes = Bad is not a battle plan for good storytelling. I doubt anyone who says such a thing, though again I’m not sure of her specific views, has ever written a story worth repeating.
Subject matter and tropes are not the enemy, they are a means to an end, or at their very best, a set up to ultimately surprise the audience. You have to have an expectation in there audience in order to play off of it.
Great storytellers sometimes play off of stale tropes. Boy Meets Girl. Revenge Plot. Loss of Power. Rise to Power. Loss of Identity. Return from the Ashes.
Let’s take you example of “Family Member Schism” revenge plot. Surely no one could bring life into such a turd as that!
Oh, but wait a minute. Hamlet is based on that trope. As is Carnage. As is Kill Bill. As is Point Blank. As is Oldboy. As is As is How I Learned to Drive, one of the best plays written by a female playwright, and is based on the idea that revenge is a long game.
I’m not sure how you can disconnect the context of girls and women’s lives from the culture that surrounds them, including personal politics and social forces.
If you feel your ability to create female characters is fine - do they pass the Bechdel test ? If you substitute male characters in your female characters roles, how does the story and dialogue hold up ? Hint: if you are rolling on the floor laughing, or thinking that character sounds like an idiot then there is a problem with how you write female roles.
Look - I think any story that places politics front and center is going to get pretty boring and dogmatic and can easily become propaganda (ie “This is the story of a young man named George Bush, and how his thoughts about god and the American way made the white house a great place for Republican Christians.”) This is also an issue about lazy, uncreative writing.
Did you think Persepolis was a dull, uncreative story/book/film ? There are many complex characters - many of them female - in a context that is deeply political - on a level that ranges from personal politics to the deadly politics of a newly oppressive Iran. It is an autobiography - was the voice of the narrator unrelatable to anyone who was not a young woman, born in Iran ?
Citation needed for this statement:
“Some of my best friends are sex workers”
Oh please. Abusers don’t abuse because they are such wounded people. Abusers abuse because it works for them. Controlling a situation through fear, intimidation and threats is far more intoxicating and less effort than say, cooperation and kindness.
I think the solution to this problem is that we need to illustrate how oppression of identity groups is connected to the larger issues of the economy. Because they are. The identity fight is not illegitimate, but we need to understand how it all operates systemically, and how chipping away at racial and patriarchal norms doesn’t change them, only mutates them. But we also need to understand how individuals are oppressed and talk about that, too. it really isn’t an either/or here. It can be holistic.
I personally considered Leigh Alexander’s article to be offensive. I just want to see a stronger dialogue between so-called “gamers” (call them consumers, if you will, but they play games) and the games press. Inflammatory articles, from either side, don’t help anyone.
Oh, but he’s not talking about good women who listen to their men, but about those evil feminists who all hate men… /S
I love video games, and I play a lot of them, but I usually don’t play them for story. It’s just so, blatently boring and lazy with overused devices that are played with a straight face.
From the post:
FORGIVE THE FOLLOWING NON-MOVIE DIGRESSION, BUT NOTHING SHOWCASES BACKWARD THINKING QUITE LIKE THE OBLIVIOUS WRITING OF VIDEO GAMES (MORE IMPORTANTLY, THIS SHIT WILL GET FUCKING HILARIOUS).
FIRST OFF, PLEASE KNOW THAT HULK LOVES HULK SOME VIDEO GAMES. THEY’RE FUN, UNIQUE, AND IMMERSIVE. BUT THE STORYTELLING CRAFT IS USUALLY NOT FIT FOR EVEN THE WORST HOLLYWOOD MOVIES. EVEN THE COMPANIES THAT SUPPOSEDLY DO IT WELL, LIKE BIOWARE, ARE REALLY TELLING THE SAME EXACT STORIES WITH THE SAME EXACT CHARACTERS IN THE MOST NON-INTERESTING WAY AS POSSIBLE. AGAIN, IT’S NOT A MATTER OF THINGS MERELY BEING SIMILAR, BUT THAT THEY ARE ALL SO SIMILAR IN THE MOST ROTE, SOUL-CRUSHING WAY POSSIBLE. THEY NAKEDLY USE THE MONOMYTH MODELS AS HOW-TO GUIDES.(3)
Well “empathy” conflates three very different things.
One is caring about other people. One is knowing what other people are feeling. One is other people knowing what you are feeling.
And this conflation gets used to portray autistic people as inhuman monsters.
So “empathy” belongs in the same “what does that mean this time?” category as “cultural Marxism” or for that matter “radical feminism” [which afaik used to have a coherent meaning]…
…
That is unrealistic. Better to go after their masters and enablers in media and the business world. You can never go wrong by figuratively punching The Man. Even if, in the case of someone like Whitman or Fiorina, The Man is a woman, or in the case of someone like Mitch McConnell, an adorable cartoon turtle.
I’m not familiar with Ms. Sarkisian’s work, but anyone who criticizes tropes in and of themselves is misguided. Tropes = Bad is not a battle plan for good storytelling. I doubt anyone who says such a thing, though again I’m not sure of her specific views, has ever written a story worth repeating.
Critical analysis doesn’t equal “criticism” in the colloquial sense. Look at TV Tropes, which analyses tropes, celebrates AND pokes fun at them. Sarkesian’s work is a pretty bog standard Feminist Critical Analysis that’s been applied to all other forms of art for the last century or so. She takes great pains to point out that she’s not saying tropes or games are bad, but she does frequently point out that the use of them (cliched tropes) are lazy.
I’ve been watching this nonsense playing out in several of the communities that I’m either directly or peripherally involved in (Elevatorgate, Fake Geek Girls, brogrammers, and on and ON AND ON…). It’s disheartening and infuriating for me to see one more of the areas of my interests blow right the hell up with frothing anger at women who are trying to participate on their terms. I remember the endless discussions in fan circles, the Skeptics, comic fans along the lines of “How do we get more women involved in our club?”. It seems now what they really meant was “How do we get more women involved in our group without having to change anything about our club, or have to talk about things that we don’t talk about now?”. It really seems like some of these guys don’t understand that if you invite new people to a potluck, there’s going to be new dishes on the table.
A lot of game design is lazy.
The problem here is the miserable effects on the women who wind up being some misogynistic man-child’s “learning process.”
I’m a video game designer. Every single game maker I know, without exception, falls on the SJW side of this issue. The more heat this topic generates, the more it comes to mind in the moments in which we make meaningful decisions about gameplay and characters, resulting in greater equality in games.
They most certainly do though. A quick Google for “teacher fired Facebook” will get you a whole slew of stories in which people, largely women (and some gay men) lose their jobs because they dared to have sex or drink alcohol at some point in their lives.
This is because the culture wars of identity politics are a perfect
distraction from the more relevant issues: wealth distribution and wars
of imperialism. Therefore, identity politics are the “safe and
acceptable” form of progressive politics, which are vetted by the
mainstream media and politicians.
Aw, look, it’s a variation on the Libertarian Dismount! “Some other thing is more important so you shouldn’t even be doing this anyway.” “Identity politics” are only a “distraction” if you’re not the one who gets the short end of the stick because of them.
The trick may be starting way before they become misogynistic.
It’s an old trope in some communist movements too.
“Comrade, we don’t need to distract ourselves with feminism/LGBTQ rights, after The Revolution things will be better”
It’s usually accompanied with sexism, homophobia and transphobia in that movement.
Empathy is often confused with sympathy
I think it’s more of the “we’re getting distracted from the real issue”, which is a pretty Marxist argument… they’ve been saying that race and gender, and identity politics more broadly, are cultural constructs that act as distractions from the “real issues” that plague society, that we live in a exploitative, capitalist society. (edited to add) @anon73430903 beat me to it.
