Over the course of a project, sometimes a developer feels the need to discuss something with the intended audience that isn’t necessarily an appropriate topic for a development blog / journal. When this happens, the developer may go to his or her personal blog and write an aside. Since I only have one blog (though that may change in the future), the asides will simply have a different title (Developer Aside, instead of Developer Blog #27) and will not be ordered numerically.
Introduction
The subject I wish to discuss in this first aside is my portrayal of feminine character in An Aria of Light. Having chosen to present the story in a trilogy of 2D, top-down, 16-bit, turn-based RPGs, I’ve had to revisit some of the games that served as the inspiration for the project in the first place. I’ve had a chance to study what those games did right, and what they did very, very wrong. More specifically, I’ve had to come to grips with my own masculinity and internal dialogue as it relates to female characters in video games (and, truthfully, to women in general).
Though there are a great many games from which I can and will and do draw inspiration, I’m only going to list the Top 5 here, for brevity’s sake: Legend of Dragoon, Star Ocean: The Second Story, the Final Fantasy series, the Dragon Quest series, and the Mass Effect series. Sure, none of them are truly 2D, but that’s not the point. The point is that these are the games that have been the most story-driven, the most focused on character and the telling of a good, moving, worthwhile story. It’s not the specific medium, necessarily, that I’m copy-catting; what I’m taking as my influence is the almost total focus on creating a great story.
But looking back, I have to be honest—in a blog about the portrayal of female characters, I’m mortified to be listing most of those games as influences for my own project. Not embarrassed—embarrassment would imply that I’m uncomfortable with the subject, but not uncomfortable enough to change my own views, opinions, or actions regarding the subject. No, I mean fucking mortified. So deeply, intensely, painfully embarrassed by and apologetic for the portrayal of female characters in those games that I have to vow here and now to do everything in my power to do better in my own work.
There are going to be no few male readers (and likely a few female readers as well) who look at me with a blank expression on their faces at this point and say, “What are you talking about, Ry?” I’m talking about the sheer, unadulterated stereo-typing and objectification of women that is present in those games. It’s bad, guys. Real bad. So bad, in fact, that I almost didn’t write this blog. But what’s progress without a few bruised toes?
Let’s break it down.
The Four Stereotypes
I’ve noticed that most writing in games locks women into one of four categories (very rarely, you’ll see a character who might fit into more than one, but never a character who doesn’t fit any): the Girl Next Door, the Femme Fatale, the Cute Little Sister, and the Androgynous Mor (read: innkeeper). What frustrates me about these four… well, I refuse to call them archetypes, because that would be tantamount to espousing them as valid literary character forms, so let’s go with “stereotypes,” since it’s a nasty word and probably can’t get any nastier (and no, society, that was NOT a challenge). So, to get back on topic, what frustrates me about these four stereotypes is that no male writer to date has attempted to take a character deeper than the surface of what these four stereotypes represent.
The Girl Next Door is always wholesome, unintentionally flirty, and mild-mannered and meek, unconditionally accepting of the direction the male lead wishes to take. She’s generally the beloved princess who gets kidnapped by either the villain or the hero, depending on the writer’s fantasy, meekly refusing to fight to defend herself or physically too weak to do so. Sometimes, she’s the orphaned childhood sweetheart of the male lead, somehow still naive and innocent and sweet and pure, showing none of the physical or psychological marks of the developmentally traumatized life she’s lived. In both situations, she always meekly follows whatever direction the male lead wishes to take, often in spite of a previous history of idiocy, and is usually not all that intelligent beyond the unbelievably poetic articulation of her emotions where the male lead is concerned.
Examples: Rena Lanford (Star Ocean: The Second Story), Yuna (Final Fantasy X), Shana (Legend of Dragoon), Princess Garnet (Final Fantasy IX), Lufia (Lufia and the Fortress of Doom)
The Femme Fatale is always mature, ravishingly beautiful, outrageously mis-proportioned, and generally (but not always) a dry-humored, caustic bitch. She’s the spitting image of dark, hard-hitting, no-nonsense badassery and unbridled sexuality. She kicks ass and forgets the names, and is either the least talkative character or the most offensively crass (and there’s really no in between, with the exception of the Mass Effect femme fatales, who fall more closely within the Androgynous Mor category anyway).
Examples: Lulu (Final Fantasy X), Paine (Final Fantasy X-2), Ultimecia (Final Fantasy VIII), Freya (Final Fantasy IX), Rose (Legend of Dragoon)
The Cute Little Sister is always infuriatingly happy and optimistic, far too cute for her own good, the fantastical combination of innocence and sexuality. The Cute Little Sister is often portrayed as being rather exasperatingly peppy, annoying the other characters, immature and fun-loving, unwilling to get serious about anything. Like the Girl Next Door, the Cute Little Sister isn’t the brightest crayon in the box, and is usually afraid of nearly everything to round out the package.
Examples: Rikku (Final Fantasy X), Selphie (Final Fantasy VIII), Meru (Legend of Dragoon), Chisato Madison (Star Ocean: The Second Story)
The Androgynous Mor is very rarely a primary character. This stereotype is usually reserved for basically any woman NPC who the game designers feel doesn’t need an actual backstory or life (like, you guessed it, a mor—i. e. an innkeeper). Basically, the Androgynous Mor could be either male or female based on personality and dialogue (or, in the case of the Mass Effect games, share a common personality with every other female in the game, which might or might not actually be a feminine personality). A very few games (like Golden Sun, for example, a brilliant example of writing in an RPG, despite still following the stereotypes) will go so far as to name many androgynous NPCs, but this still isn’t quite reaching the level of believability I expect from writing (in any medium).
If you think I’m off my rocker with these stereotypes, feel free to post any exceptions you think you may have found in a comment (and I’ll happily rain proof after proof down upon your argument 
). While I can’t say for certain that these stereotypes hold true in Western RPGs or more mainstream games like Call of Duty and the like, I’m willing to bet a fairly large amount of money I don’t have that they do.
The Sole Exception
Off-hand, I can think of only one exception to the rule of stereotypes in a story-driven RPG: Rinoa Heartily from Final Fantasy VIII. Granted, there are numerous problems with her character, but most of the problems with her character are not, at least from my perspective, the fact that she’s not believable as a woman. If we’re looking at her character from the standpoint of believable femininity, Rinoa Heartily is likely the best-developed female character of them all. She’s a very realistic mix of insecure and confident, intelligent and oblivious, emotional and stern, optimistic and fatalist. She has a fairly decently written backstory and the way she interacts with Squall isn’t completely fucking ridiculous. More importantly, she actually grows as a character throughout the game, as does Squall. That, more than anything else, makes her believable in my book.
Of course, even the character of Rinoa has its problems—I said she was the most believable as a female character, not that she was, in fact, a well-written character—I have yet to play a video game that had even a single character worthy of that description. Video game writers seem to be a bit lacking in terms of ability to write a character, truth be told. But I digress. Rinoa, like every other female lead in a story-driven RPG, she goes blinding running after the male leads (Squall and Seifer). When she calls Squall out on his shit, it’s never to improve their relationship—it’s always to remind Squall that he’s failing as a man, which in this case means he’s doing a rather miserable job of saving her from the big bad sorceress. Also, in spite of the fact that she is trained in combat and is the leader of a guerrilla fighting organization, she remains almost entirely helpless without Squall’s protection for the entire game. The very basic premise of the Knight / Sorceress dichotomy dictates this kind of helplessness—the Knight (the masculine) is necessary for the physical protection and continued survival of the Sorceress (the feminine) because she’s helpless to defend herself, despite being able to set people on fire with a thought. Uh-huh.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that this type of stereotyping and masculine hyper-fantasizing has got to stop in video games. I want characters that are real, believable, that I might one day meet on the street in the real world. I want to get to know the characters of a story, their history, their nuances, idiosyncrasies, and neuroses, what makes them tick, their hopes and fears and dreams and desires. I don’t want the female lead to be beautiful because she’s drop-dead gorgeous—I want her to be beautiful because she’s an actual person, and not merely some carbon-copy of an ostracized male orgasm.
So the goal for Aria, then, is to write the most believable characters possible (both male and female), and to treat my characters equally, spending just as much time and paying just as much attention to detail with Kaylan and Kyla (her sister) and Lira (Ryne’s mother) and Elayne (Ryne’s late wife) and Lydia (Elayne’s late sister) and Carmen (Ryne’s daughter) as I do with all the men in the game.
I’m going to be working extensively with a group of women writers and artists of my personal acquaintance in order to get the dialogue and actions of the female characters just right. I mean, really, it’s always amazed me that it seems to be the case that male video game writers (read: video game writers) never seem to bother asking a woman what a woman might say or do or think in a certain situation.
I mean, really, bro? Really. Really?
