Violence and Tears: The Troubled Road to Progress

Last month, NewStatesman published an excellent article by Sophia McDougall about the inadequacy of the ubiquitous "Strong Female Character", whose sole trait is invulnerability. Central to its argument is the fact that while pop culture’s favourite male heroes are deeply flawed (Sherlock Holmes is an addict, Batman a lunatic and James Bond a psychopath, to name a few) their female counterparts are rarely allowed to be anything other than “strong” lest they are automatically rendered unheroic. This is not only boring but insulting, since it implies that while men are innately heroic enough to remain so despite having serious character flaws, women have to be bulletproof, otherwise they’re pathetic.

The Last of Us' Ellie does what needs to be done.

As if to prove McDougall’s point, Cracked.com published a half-baked piece of clickbait last week which contained a troubling analysis of a pivotal scene in Naughty Dog’s zombie road trip epic TheLast of Us. In the scene, 14-year old Ellie, cornered by a cannibalistic hebephile, violently stabs him to death with a machete before being pulled away by ageing smuggler Joel, whom she’s spent the last three months trying to save from starvation, infection and worse. Reunited with the man she thought she’d never see again as her attacker's mutilated corpse lies bleeding beside her, Ellie bursts into tears.

Under the heading “Daddy issues”, Cracked interprets Ellie’s reaction thus:

“Ellie from The Last of Us is immune to an apocalyptic virus, learns new weapons faster than Neo, and has stabbed more enemies to death than Wolverine. But as soon as the guy turns up, she dissolves into tears and nursing. She could be machetifying a rapist cannibal into sashimi, but if the hero arrives she'll instantly collapse into helpless tears, safe in his arms. Because that's exactly what happens.”

In the light of McDougall’s article, it’s interesting that Cracked compares her survival skills to those of a pair of superheroes, as though her ability to kill was empowering rather than grimly necessary. There are several points in the game in which Ellie displays clear symptoms of trauma, meaning that far from being an accomplishment, every life she takes only increases the emotional burden she must carry with her for the rest of her own. Cracked’s implication that her violence is somehow an act of strength rather than desperation is therefore disturbing.

The accusation levelled at Naughty Dog that her response to Joel’s return somehow infantilises her is similarly misjudged. One might ask how else she might otherwise react to seeing him again given that, as she explains in an earlier sequence, he’s the only person she’s ever cared about who has neither died nor left her. Not only that, but she’s spent an entire winter solely responsible for the survival of both of them as he lay helpless in the basement of an abandoned house with an infected wound. After such a prolonged period of having to remain impervious to emotion for the sake of survival, it’s hardly surprising that anyone (man, woman, adult, child) should collapse as soon as they are safe.

Joel and Ellie: a complicated relationship.

We should not have to wait for male characters to display their emotions before the women are allowed to. If there is a valid grievance about the fact that aside from a very few cases, they haven’t, it’s that there should be more complex males in gaming, not fewer such women.

Cracked was by no means the first outlet to decide that Tomb Raider’s crying protagonist meant that the game was sexist. A similarly flawed accusation was made around the time of the game’s release by The Telegraph’s Louisa Peacock, who claims:

“What the new Lara Croft Tomb Raider game has done is bring her gender back into the game. We are reminded every other minute, when playing Tomb Raider, that this is a vulnerable, unskilled, scared, cold and hungry girl, trying to get out of the godforsaken place she finds herself in.”

The fact that Peacock conflates being “vulnerable, unskilled, scared, cold and hungry” with being a “girl” says a lot more about her than it does about the game.

An extreme situation.

What the new Tomb Raider actually does is dare to make a female character react to an extreme situation realistically (as the game's writer Rhianna Pratchett explained in her response to Peacock’s article). While the kind of “Strong Female Character” who so rankles McDougall might not be bothered by being strung upside down alongside hundreds of corpses, cauterising her own wounds or shooting another human being in the head, young Lara Croft is bothered, and that makes her an altogether more interesting protagonist than Duke Nukem. Besides, experiencing terror and overcoming it makes for a far “stronger” character than simply feeling nothing.

So with all this is mind, why are the likes of Peacock and Cracked so offended by non-psychotic women in video games? There’s an element of trolling for hits, particularly in the Cracked article, but to dismiss all such arguments as such ignores more important demographic issues.

The sad fact of the matter is that for a long time, female fans of gaming and genre fiction have simply had to take what they can get. The games industry is still dominated by men, and consumers of sci-fi, fantasy and comics (which share an audience with gaming) have long been perceived to be male, regardless of the fact that a huge proportion are not. Consequently, female game characters who are anything other than a love interest or sex object were until recently few and far between. It’s for that reason that feminist critics are often quick to take umbrage at any character who seems retrogressive, an unwelcome return to the days when female games characters were just princesses to be rescued by a capable hero.

But we’ve moved past that now. We’ve had Jade and Chell, capable, trouser-wearing heroes who just happen to be women. We’ve had (1990s) Lara and Bayonetta, joyfully anarchic adrenaline junkies who couldn’t care less if you think they’re sexy. We’ve had FemShep and all the other optionally-female heroes of this generation’s epic RPGs, who inhabit worlds where gender is, at least for the sake of programmic simplicity, never an issue. Sure, we’ve also had the bouncy cast of Dead or Alive and David Cage’s kicker-wearing victims (who cast the player in the uncomfortable role of voyeur for no particular narrative purpose), but the road to progress never did run smooth.

Lara is strong in more ways than one.

It’s also worth saying that while they do not deserve the criticism Cracked and Peacock level at them, the portrayals of Ellie and 2013’s Lara Croft are not without their problems. Lara Croft’s transformation from grad student to killer is slightly too triumphant and The Last of Us effectively trivialises Ellie’s slaughter of about fifty men for the sake of good gameplay. And although the characters mentioned in the previous paragraph are all feminist from certain angles, all still attract valid criticism: 90s Lara and Bayonetta court the male gaze while Jade, Chell, FemShep and the rest may as well be men.

But if we focus solely on how far gaming has still got to go and heap unfair criticism upon braver attempts to create complex and interesting female characters, we will prevent it moving forward altogether as developers and publishers are deterred from taking risks. By all means call out misogyny or sexism when you see it, but do so thoughtfully and constructively, not aggressively and with an axe to grind.

If you really care about diversity in gaming and the richness of its narratives, you need to contribute to creating an environment in which people making games feel safe to experiment. Either let complex and emotional women in, or accept a grey future in which gaming is populated solely by humourless, shallow or just grimly perfect females.