I see what you did there.
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I agree about the general problems of misogyny, but I admit that I have a mild spider-woman hentai fetish. I love grotesque interpretations of the human form and would like to see more of them. But I see them as not “villainous”, which not a real thing for me. Why I see women being deceitful and manipulative as the norm is only because I see those as being defining characteristics of humanity rather than gendered qualities. But I am a complete xenophile.
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Saga can be lauded and excellent and still engage in a misogynist stereotype. Being praiseworthy doesn’t mean being flawless. Falling into tired old tropes doesn’t mean you can’t be awesome in other ways.
The critical flaw is this Purity Culture bullshit which tries to separate the world into Manichean categories of Good and Bad. Things are complex, son.
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An interesting topic. I’ll leave off the ‘seductress’ bit because I want to talk about the earlier bits right now, specifically the tying together of “fertility” and “body horror” that’s common to the designs in the first half of the game, and the “presenting sexy things as grotesque” stuff.
I think a lot of these presentations are incredible important to large swathes of effective horror, because pregnancy and birth are things that can be genuinely horrifying in many ways while also being a common experience shared by literally every person on earth. It’s fertile ground for good horror, but unfortunately it is something that is kind of inherently female associated. There’s just no male equivalent to the sheer variety and weight of issues birth brings to the table - parasitism, blood, painful eruptions, broods and swarms, sex and death and new life, all one one package.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t effective horror to be found in operating outside the traditional genders - the Alien movies played with all of those concepts and, in my opinion, did it remarkably well without reflecting negatively on how it treated women. Geiger is certainly an artist familiar with combining sex, titillation, birth and grotesquity, but I think he succeeded because he was willing to mix in plenty of male aspects as well. The victims were male and female, both, and the creature itself wasn’t just being used to represent birth (inherently female) but also the acts and symbolism of impregnation (inherently male).
There’s certainly plenty of horror that plays with the later, but its usually far less internalized, sexually. Ironically enough, the horror often ends up being pushed out from the monster onto the victims themselves.
I don’t want to sacrifice the birth themes, even if they will end up inherently feminine, because of how effectively they work for horror, but I am interested in how it can be done better - because, like in Alien, we know it can be done better than it usually is.
The focus on driders (the spider women) is interesting, because they are sort of built as an anti-centaur, and spiders (in addition to being inherently both frightening and compelling) are largely seen as a type of creature where females fill a role of power and dominance traditionally reserved for males, where there’s this viewpoint that males almost don’t matter. (Centaurs are traditionally exclusively masculine and monstrous, wild, uncontrollable and filled with lust)
Which has some disturbing implications when coupled with the fact that driders (and matriarchal cultures in general) are almost always evil. A lot of this goes back to D&D - the two most notable female-dominated cultures in the game, the Drow (with their Driders) and the Gnolls are also two of the most overtly and unreedemably evil at an inherent level, and at least for the drow that almost can’t be easily decoupled from their sexuality.
Anyway, like I said, super interesting topic and if anyone wants to actually talk more about it (and not Anita or her other videos) I would be up for that!
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Probably not a popular opinion, but I think that power and dominance are antithetical concepts. Dominance I perceive as not actual power (which is impersonal), but a fantasy about power. YMMV!
Yes and no… Female centaurs exist, but are called centaurides instead. They are certainly less prevalent.
I think that’s a lot of what Sarkesian was getting at here. My main problem with it is that I don’t believe that “evil” is really “a thing”. It seems like a naive outlook. Are actual spiders evil because they eat flies? Is it more evil than humans eating cows? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
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I’ve seen men play that role in fiction very, very effectively. Male and female Lilin (the original sinister seductress) were introduced at roughly the same time historically (as Incubi and Succubi, respectively) and which you see says a lot about who the designers expected their audience to be. Look at fantasy and science fiction that caters towards women, and you’ll see plenty of “sinister seducters”… and they can even appear as men in men-centered works no infequently, so long as the seduction is based around something other than sex.
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Something other than sex? Now you’re just being ridiculous! That only leaves nachos.
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Centaurides were introduced much, much later, well after centaurs had been generalized far beyond their original scope and weren’t really “monsters” anymore. In my understanding, it seems to be largely a side effect of the most popular Centaur story in early antiquity being the one about the single, notable centaur that wasn’t monstrous. Male drow (and even male driders) have become a lot more common since Drizzt was introduced as well, so I think their existence strengthens the analogy more than it harms it.
[quote]I think that’s a lot of what Sarkesian was getting at here. My main problem with it is that I don’t believe that “evil” is really “a thing”. It seems like a naive outlook. Are actual spiders evil because they eat flies? Is it more evil than humans eating cows? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
[/quote]
You might not, but their original designers did, and made that quite explicit. Driders (unlike spiders) are evil because the book says they are all evil. Actual spiders are not - in D&D it’s the specific combination of spider and woman that makes something evil, and it’s evil because rather than preying on flies they prey on men.
In regards to the source of that from nature, it’s probably the stories of female spiders eating their male counterparts after copulating. Which might not be inherently evil, but it probably introduces feelings of discomfort and insecurity in lots of men to think about it which are useful if you want to convey an entire race as evil somehow, even on top of the more common “spiders are creepy” stuff.
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I mean, kind of. Where does the horror of birth come from? Most women endure it at some point in their lives, and it happens on the reg in nature, so what’s horrific about it? Why isn’t it natural and good? Hard, rough, and necessary, but good? Why is the violence of birth so horrific, but, say, the violence of war is glorious and celebrated?
It’s not really a big leap to imagine that the reason birth is so horrific is because it’s men who are writing the horror tales - men who are already used to seeing women as inhuman and Other.
There’s also nuances with gender definitions. If the one clearly female thing in your shoot-em-ups is a sexy pregnant demon, you’re not playing with themes of pregnancy and horror, you’re just trying to be squicky and hey, what’s squickier than seeing a hot girl and realizing that she’s not really the same below the belt, if you know what I mean (there’s a heaping dose of transphobia in these depictions as well!).
Which isn’t to say it can’t be done well. You mention Gieger, and Alien is a movie that owns that horror, quite well. That’s not to say it still doesn’t play into certain stereotypes, but at least it thoughtfully engages those stereotypes, rather than just saying “oooh, it’s scary 'cuz it’s got spider legs instead of a vagina.” The flanderization that video games are often guilty of does the media ZERO favors.
Remember, D&D was created in the Midwest, in the 70’s, in an era seeing the beginnings of a great backlash against the Women’s Rights movement. The Drow were meant to play in to the fears of the player about a female-dominated culture (and also the titillation of that culture being BDSM-y). Gnolls had a bacchae thing going on, all terrified of the wildness of untamed femininity.
The role of the heroes was to eradicate these horrible blights on masculine domination, of course.
…well, then you get Ed Greenwood and things take a turn for the new age sexy in the '90’s, but D&D’s always sailed with the prevailing fantasy genre winds.
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Please, please, share some of my meal. Doesn’t it look amazing?
(ignore the power I’m sprinkling into the cheese, if you please)
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Do you know why Sarkeesian spends so much time and effort making these videos about games? Part of the reason is that she likes games. She’s a gamer. And she’s also a feminist, and she also notices the shitty and demeaning ways women and female characters are treated and handled in a lot of games.
She’s still a gamer though. Dollars to donuts Sarkeesian likes Saga as much as Doctorow.
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Or you realize you want to play with the themes of pregnancy and horror (and the squick associated with that) and this is the first time that you realize (if you’re a lazy designer) that you have to have a female character. I think that’s probably the bigger problem, and it’s good you point it out. You get to these grotesque, sexualized brood mother characters, and they’re the first and sometimes the only female you come across, they are the one “clearly female thing” as you point out, and I sometimes get the feeling that it happens that way because if not for the fact that all that stuff is inherently female the designers would probably just throw in another dude-monster to represent it. If anything, it feels like these female figures end up as part of an equation that goes “what’s next on the horror checklist… okay, birth! great. Huh, guess this one has to be a woman. What do I think of when I think of women? Hmm, I think of sexy women. Okay uh now how do I turn that into a monster?”
Which is obviously, well, there’s a shit ton of sexist stuff going into that, and coming out of it, but like a lot of sexism it seems to come from the laziness of not deviating from the “default assumption” unless you absolutely have to, and having the default assumption be male.
[quote]I mean, kind of. Where does the horror of birth come from? Most women endure it at some point in their lives, and it happens on the reg in nature, so what’s horrific about it? Why isn’t it natural and good? Hard, rough, and necessary, but good? Why is the violence of birth so horrific, but, say, the violence of war is glorious and celebrated?
It’s not really a big leap to imagine that the reason birth is so horrific is because it’s men who are writing the horror tales - men who are already used to seeing women as inhuman and Other.[/quote]
This part I have to just straight up disagree with though. Birth isn’t horrific because it’s written by men, it’s horrific because there’s so much that go wrong, and because there’s so much involved that would be seen as inherently horrific outside of birth. Yes, it’s natural, yes, it can definitely be non-horrific in the right context, but even then it’s full of parallels even when it doesn’t represent horrific things directly
There’s blood, fluids, shit, and sweat. There’s pain. There’s the fact that it involves another being literally living off your essence, where ejecting it can actually kill you. Historically, it actually kills lots of people. It’s also something you traditionally can’t do anything about - it puts the pregnant party into a position where they are almost helpless before the unrelenting forces of nature and their own bodily processes and this other organism. If you want it, it’s one thing, but if you don’t? I don’t think it is really all that hard to see where the horrors of birth might arise. There’s the human discomfort with swarms, as well, and the many species where giving birth means producing a great many children, so when you get into non-human associations of birth it can get even worse. Finally, there’s lots of horrifying things that are like birth without being birth - the many parasites that grow in your body until they mature and push their way out, like botflies, where you are again the unwilling carrier of someone else’s spawn.
Birth is not inherently horrific. But it is very easily horrific.
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There’s also a fairly large contingent that objects to the idea that a representation of a female character is a statement on women as a whole.
The only time I’ve strongly disagreed with Sarkeesian is her commentary on the Witcher 3 simply because I think the game should be lauded for allowing the player to walk a mile in a woman’s shoes in an overly sexist world, not scorned. I understand her perspective since she doesn’t need a game to know what that is like, but for men, I think it was a healthy experience.
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I’m about 1/2 way, and this is easily her best informative video in my opinion even if it’s not the most entertaining. I know people will rage about this, but there’s literally nothing here that should be taken the wrong way unless she goes on to target the nurses in Silent Hill 2 or something…
OK, finished. Yeah this is the most on-point of her videos; the topic is clearly defined and the real world and digital impact is evident, she provides detailed reasons about why staking a vampire woman through a sex-doll-esque blow up doll face is in bad taste, and she has a complete conclusion tying to whole video together. Really great stuff.
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I’ll see your
And raise you
.
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The hammer is my penis
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Did the makers of what I think must be Magnum Pi just cut the cord off of a Bell Princess model phone and have Tom pretend it was a cordless? phone or one of those radio phones that acted as a cell/car phone back in the day?
I
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