How To Write Empowering Female Characters

Nonsensical design, or empowering ideal?

A few months ago I posted an article called Project: Representation asking for people (primarily women and minorities) to provide descriptions of what they thought would be an idealized representation of their race, sex, or other status identifier. This was in response to two major things. The first was my own uncertainty about my already-established idea of "to write female characters well, just write them like men". This was the idea of characters being defined not by their sex or race, but instead by their personality, career, etc. The potential problem with this was that "have everyone be like white men" might not be the best option, and actual women and ethnic minorities might have some traits that they thought were important or central to their identity.

The second issue was one of idealization. It had been argued by some that a busty, beautiful female character was to women what a buff, handsome male character was to men - a tool for escapism, and a representation of the ideal figure or body type. I had heard this argument be challenged due to the underlying issues surrounding representations of men and women, especially in comics. Men are there to be "awesome", women are there to be ogled. The designs of female characters are not appealing to women, because their figures, appearances and personalities aren't actually their "ideal". Many women seemed to be uncomfortable with the representation of women in comics because it felt like they were there solely to be sexy, and they didn't have the agency or justified representation that most male characters were assumed to.

Empowering, or bland?

In Project: Representation I tried to get a sense of what attributes would define a good female character, or a good minority character, besides being a "good character" in a neutral sense. Each issue raised its own question that I wanted answered: firstly, "is it better or worse to make a minority character devoid of any cultural traits in the name of avoiding stereotyping", and secondly "what sort of character or traits would you find empowering?" Unfortunately I only had a few respondents, none of them female, so I wasn't really able to get a good sense of what people actually wanted. The few people I asked directly gave me the relatively common-sense answer of "it depends on how it's used in context".

This article by Vivienne Chan (click this link it is the basis of the rest of the article) answers a lot of my questions more directly, at least in terms of one person's perspective:

"Everyone – and I do mean EVERYONE, male or female – is going to have a different answer to “what makes a great female lead in a video game."

The things that Miss Chan describes as being her own ideal are things like:

"...shamelessly beautiful, almost to the extent that it can be offensive.  She would have long dark hair, she would be tall, and she would be athletic with slamming curves."

"...her ability to beat down enemies – women and men alike – without breaking a nail, and she would do so wearing whatever the hell she thought was the best thing to wear at the time, whether it be a skimpy catsuit unzipped to her navel or full body armor."

"She would be charming and intimidating at the same time, and will make no goddamn apologies for who she is or what she stands for."

"Screw the “muted” attractiveness that Jade from Beyond Good and Evil brought to the table – I want a lady who is unapologetically gorgeous and is comfortable in that skin."

What's funny about these examples, to me, is that it feels like if I saw this character in a game or a comic, I'd assume it was designed by a man, and ergo assume it was sexist. The classic idea of an ostensibly empowered female character who is drop-dead gorgeous and "kicks ass" and is charming and capable and powerful and self-motivated...well, that seems kind of cliche in a shallow quasi-feminist "Joss Whedon" way, doesn't it? But it's something that a woman wants in this case, very specifically in fact. It's her own terms for what would define a character that she would want to be like. There must be some element that separates her desire from the offensive cliche. Let's examine each element of what Miss Chan wants in order to come to an understanding of how their context and presentation can influence the end result.

Issue A: Character Agency And Self-Determination
One of the most easy-to-identify things in this description of an ideal character is that the character exists on her own terms. She is not subordinate to anyone, she is not weaker than anyone, she is not chained by anyone or anything. The things she does are under her own terms: she "wear(s) whatever the hell she wants", she "will make no goddamn apologies", she is "unapologetically gorgeous and is comfortable in that skin".

These are traits that exist in many sexist characters, but the problem with those characters is that it doesn't feel natural for them. It feels like a justification, because the actual issue is that they're like that because it's something that the author finds attractive. The influence of authorship creates a scenario where a character with such a design cannot be considered neutral, because there's so much obvious justification there for shallow, sexist desires. When Starfire talks about how great being nude is, it's difficult to address that as a legitimate character trait because it feels like an empty excuse for the artist to draw a nude character.

In such a scenario, the character's agency - even if it exists in-universe - is unpleasantly overtaken by the author's control. A female character who kicks ass and chews bubblegum and does a billion slow-mo kills in a slinky nightgown or catsuit (Aeon Flux, Resident Evil, Ultraviolet, etc) is not traditionally thought of as empowering because behind that concept is the lurking terror of a creepy, objectifying male writer or director. Even though "the writer" or "the director" don't exist in-universe, their presence is felt strongly enough that it's nearly impossible to think of such characters as being "a woman exhibiting agency". When a female character wears immodest clothing, or has large breasts, or is attractive, it's attributed to a male designer.

As a result of this, there's been a feminist cultural backlash against characters who possess those traits no matter what the conditions are. The real problem is why they're showing skin, or why they're attractive - something I've tried to illustrate in many of my previous articles. Alyx Vance is praised because she's somewhat plain and dresses modestly, which ostensibly makes her feel more "real" and "empowered", but in terms of her behavior she's still a sycophantic second fiddle to her silent protagonist companion. Saber from Fate/Stay Night is praised because she wears a modest dress and armor, but her design is still a very blatant "kawaii anime girl". The Last Psychiatrist wrote multiple articles on how Katniss from the Hunger Games is ostensibly empowering because she dresses modestly and has a bow and arrow, but in the actual narrative she does almost no "empowering" things. How characters dress or look isn't the problem - it's why they dress and look that way, and what it means in a meta-sense. Miss Chan identifies this fallacy by noting that she doesn't want to be someone who possesses "muted" attractiveness, she wants her ideal character to be legitimately attractive.

Miss Chan wants her ideal character to be attractive because "being attractive" is something that makes her feel more powerful and more capable. This reasoning is perfectly sound and accepted when discussing male characters. Nobody says that Snake or Dante or Batman are objectified because they're attractive, since the greater context of those characters is that they're attractive on their own terms. It gives them social power and influence, rather than making them objects of potentially undesired attention. Namor hangs around in a speedo because it makes him feel powerful and desirable, not because he feels obligated to do so by society. Nobody will ever accuse Namor of "asking for it" because of the way he dresses. Nobody will drug Namor's drink and call him a slut. Miss Chan's description of her ideal character's attractiveness has the kind of meaning to it that an empowering male character's attractiveness has: it gives them more power, more control, and more self-esteem. These are the things that define the difference between "sexy for one's own purposes" and "sexy because someone else forced me to be".

There is a very fine and indistinct line between "being sexy because I want to be" and "being sexy because you want me to be"; many women dress attractively and revealingly and find it to be perfectly empowered, while many others feel forced and uncomfortable with it. The issue is not what is worn, or how someone looks, but why they look or dress that way. When female comics characters are almost unilaterally made into gorgeous women with unrealistically large breasts, it doesn't feel like it's empowering them, it feels like "that's what the male artists want them to look like". When Miss Chan says she wants her ideal character to be drop-dead gorgeous, that's because it gives her character more control, more influence, and more power - the kind of things that make a character "escapist" to begin with. They are part of the central concept that a character who is empowering should have agency, should be in control of their own fate, and shouldn't be shackled by other people's desires or demands.

Issue B: Masculine and Feminism, and the role of Diversity
One of the issues that was present in Project: Representation is the fact that the standards used to determine a sensible character seem to be very masculine in nature. A character who is depicted as being capable of agency often does it in very masculine ways because the traits we think of as being "empowering" are traditionally associated with masculinity. What I wanted to get at with some of my questions was "how would you make a female character who exhibits agency while still possessing feminine traits that you think positively of?"

We get characters like Vasquez from Aliens who are "empowered" because they're total badasses. They're physically strong, they curse openly, they kill things and enjoy the hell out of it. They exhibit almost entirely masculine traits, but just happen to be women. That's great, because it breaks down gender lines: nobody's gonna say Vasquez can't do the job, look how tough she is. However, the inherent problem in this is that characters who are "awesome" or "badass" are basically masculine-by-design, whereas characters who are "weak" or "submissive" are showing largely feminine traits. The pre-existing roles show their influence by glorifying behaviors associated with masculinity and vilifying behaviors associated with femininity.

Now, if we were going to get truly gender-neutral, the traits we value aren't honestly that bad. It's the grouping that's potentially problematic. Masculinity includes power and strength and self-determination, but it also tends to include less desirable traits like aggression, denial of emotions, and abrasive personalities. Similarly, femininity in its classic definition implies submission and physical weakness, but also positive traits like empathy and care. It's easy to draw up lines based on assumptions of gender, but the actual issue is that the traits themselves need to be addressed individually as positive or negative traits.

Miss Chan attempts to balance these traits by taking the best of both - her ideal is "caring but ferocious", "charming but intimidating". While this might seem somewhat cliche for a "badass female character", I can think of male characters who've pulled it off without a problem - with Chris Redfield in RE5 being the most obvious example. Chris is not rough, abrasive, rude or crass. He's thoughtful, he's caring, he's empathic, he's emotionally available, and he's also a huge muscled-up badass who punches the hell out of boulders. Nobody (or nobody I know) thought less of Chris for not being an asshole, yet "be an asshole" is sort of implicit in the idea of a tough, manly, masculine soldier-man character - the gruff, power-armored anti-hero who takes no shit from anyone and is totally badass and does all the stuff you'd wish you could do if you were also a jerk.

I like characters, male or female, who take things seriously, and are taken seriously. I like characters who dress like they actually have a reason behind it, who are pragmatic and logical when it comes to decision-making, who behave professionally when the time comes. Part of why female characters like this are a big deal is because it feels like many "female badasses" ultimately aren't taken seriously, or aren't actually that capable. When a female character puts on utilitarian armor, it feels empowering because it's their choice. They have a reason to dress like that, and it's a professional one. The aspect of "the author wants them to look sexy" is removed, and it's replaced with "the character wants to protect themselves", which gives the character a greater sense of agency.

But at the same time we need to acknowledge that many women do, in fact, choose to dress attractively of their own volition (though separating them from women who feel forced to dress in such a manner is difficult). The issue is that when such characters show up in fiction, it could be either their own reasons or the author's reasons. Again, going back to Starfire, if you take her seriously she's pretty empowered - she doesn't care what other people think, she's extremely comfortable with her body - but at the same time she feels hollow because those things seem to be more like justifications for the artist rather than actual character traits.

When feminine traits are made part of a feminine character, the part that it's crucial to identify is: "is this what the author believes all women are like?" In many scenarios it seems like the answer is "yes", because there's not enough diversity to offset it. If you have a reasonable number of strong, capable women, then a female character who is weak and submissive feels more natural because it's her as an individual, not her as a representative of her gender. The same is true of all "feminine" traits - if you have enough diversity that such traits don't feel forced, the resulting product is more natural. It's part of treating women like "people", instead of some weird subset of humanity who all somehow behave the same even though there's over 3 billion of them.

Heck, you can even go back to the complaint with League of Legends that sparked my article regarding it. It wasn't that "sexy women" existed in the game, it was that nothing but sexy women existed in the game. While male characters were diverse in size, shape, and background, the accusation being made was that the female characters in the game had a much smaller design range, which strongly suggested an agenda. This idea was backed up by the artist's rebuttal: making a character too strong or muscular would make them "not like a chick", which is outright fallacious. Of course it would make them "like a chick" - the only thing that makes someone "like a chick" is whether they're of the female sex. Women range from skinny to fat, from undefined to super-muscular, from supermodels to bodybuilders. That diversity is shown for the male characters, but the problem is that the female characters don't have it, and that's bad design. It shows that the designers implicitly associate "female" with "sexy", and that's straight-up biased.

Case Study: Kharma
I would like to conclude by telling you about a female wrestler in the WWE named Kharma, because Kharma's design uses and illustrates a lot of the points I just discussed.. This is Kharma.

To explain to you why Kharma is great, here's the rest of the WWE women's division. Please keep in mind that while male wrestlers in the WWE are "superstars", female wrestlers in the WWE are "divas".

Divas are not taken seriously. They don't have to wrestle as well as their male counterparts because "wrestling ability" is not why they're hired. Kharma is the first female wrestler in a long time to be taken seriously. When Kharma's music hits, bad things happen. She is one of three female wrestlers in the history of the Royal Rumble to actually participate in the event, and one of the other wrestlers (Beth Phoenix, who is very capable in her own right) tricked The Great Khali into kissing her so she could pull him over the top rope. Wrestling is not normally great for women's rights, is what I'm saying.

Here's a clip that basically illustrates the difference between Kharma and every other diva:


So first there's the normal Divas match, and it's a mess. The wrestling is bad, the selling is bad, and all the announcers care to talk about is "lol look how hot they are". The crowd doesn't care, because the match is terrible, just like all Diva matches are terrible. Then Kharma's music hits, and the crowd is ecstatic. The announcers go out of their way to sell the audience on how powerful Kharma is, not how attractive she is or how cute she is. That's the kind of reaction that a male wrestler gets; hell, even her music is a man's music, because Divas tend to get peppy pop themes, not ominous, rumbling rock. The reaction she gets is "oh shit", not 'aww, how cute". She comes out with badass music, she cleans house, and she leaves, just like a badass male character would.

This is empowerment. She's a female wrestler, and she's taken seriously. She's powerful. She's in control. She doesn't feel like a person who got her job as a wrestler because of her irrelevant attractiveness, she feels like a person who got her job as a wrestler because she kicks ass. And the crowd loves her. The problem with the Divas division isn't just that it's shallow and sexist, it's that every Diva is like that, and so it turns into "if women are going to wrestle, this is what it has to be like". Kharma is different in every way and she's still positively received, and if there's ever been a sign that the WWE can expand their women's division to include actual serious competitors on the same level as their male counterparts, she's it.

And the thing is, it's not just a question of how people dress or act. The WWE Superstars are a diverse bunch, and their clothing (like superheroes) ranges from full-body suits to basically a speedo. So it's not a question of skin, it's a question of why the skin is there. There's not really a suggestion that Randy Orton wears a speedo because he's trying to appeal to the huge male fanbase, he wears it because he wants to wear it, just like Namor. The real problem with the Divas is not that they're sexy or that they're scantily clad, but that they're not taken seriously by anyone, and wrestlers like Kharma are a way to try to undo that. If the WWE wants to follow up on this they should hire a bunch of female MMA fighters and have them start doing clotheslines and dropkicks and other high-velocity, high-impact moves that can be sold well.

Conclusion
The key to writing a female character well is to make her make sense in-universe. The more diverse and multi-faceted your universe is, the more believable she will be as a character. The more believable she is as a character, the more easily she can be accepted as being an independent individual with some sense of agency and self-determination. There are no traits that specifically make for a good female character, because "good" is a manner of representation and context, not a manner of who or what they are.

The same is also true of writing good male characters.

Analysis: Berserk

One of the best-known "dark fantasy" series, and the progenitor of the realistic style that would find its way into Demon's Souls, Kentaro Miura's "Berserk" is a bit of a two-faced animal. It's one of the most realistically rendered and "gritty" manga series ever made - it's been overtaken in recent years, but at its time it essentially stood alone. It uses the aesthetics and concepts of 15th/16th century Europe (and later the Ottoman Empire) to make a very believable, very tangible world. It's well-known for its bleak setting, grim storytelling, and gory, over-the-top action sequences.

On the other hand, Berserk's strange obsession with out-of-place lightheartedness and "joke characters" changes the dynamic of its darker aspects. Out of the current protagonist lineup, half of the characters are, in essence, jokes - two pun-cracking, reference-making faeries and two children who inexplicably survive all the things that kill grown adults. When I say "jokes", I mean "jokes" - like, "Genie from Aladdin"-level "jokes", just taking things from pop culture and slamming them halfheartedly into the narrative. It's hard to get a sense of how serious the manga is meant to be because it keeps changing its stance. But let's start by looking at its good aspects.

Setting
Berserk takes place in a world largely akin to our own circa the 16th Century; like Warhammer Fantasy, each nation in the Berserk world is essentially meant to take the role of a real-world nation ("Midland", the primary nation in the series, was stated in an interview to be Denmark, while its enemy "Chuder" is designed around France). Berserk's world, in normal circumstances, is one of standard period intrigue - wars between nations, succession crises, arranged marriages, and so on. The technology and designs of the world seem to be largely conventional - plate armor, melee weapons, crossbows, and so on.

Berserk's "fantasy" element initially comes from the demonic Apostles, monstrous beings who are "created" when a human with powerful ambitions uses an artifact called a "Behelit" to abandon their humanity in exchange for greater power. The Behelit are the tools of another world, and the Apostles bend to the will of that world's rulers. Apostles are far stronger than normal humans, and many of them can destroy armies with ease; their rarity is what keeps them from wiping out the entire world. The Apostles provide the only real "unrealistic" element for much of the series, appearing even in the very first chapter. Later it is revealed that magic exists "normally" in the world, though it has been largely forgotten except by certain individuals. As the series progresses, the fabric of reality between the Apostle's world and the "normal" world weaken, leading to monsters like trolls, ogres, goblins and dragons appearing around the world.

Berserk's setup allows for a fairly grounded and justifiable "fantasy" setting. While most fantasy settings seem to be intrinsically at odds with themselves (i.e. "why is there medieval stuff when magic exists"), the fantasy elements in Berserk are outside the realm of normal human activity. The monsters in the series come from another plane of existence and are reasonably rare to boot, while "magic" in the Berserk world is practiced by a very small number of people. As such, Berserk is a setting with both monsters and magic, but it also explains why normal people behave realistically and have realistic levels of technology. The setting makes sense because Berserk's world is, for the most part, "real", and the fantasy aspects of the series act as intruders or exceptions.

However, part of the problem with this is that Berserk doesn't really exploit this to its fullest. Yes, the world is accurate to the period, but that doesn't reflect on its main cast. All the "accurate" stuff is there, but it's really just backdrop. There's a lot of throwaway panels with period-accurate costume and armor and designs but it's all just dressing because the main characters are essentially "immune to realism". The dramatic effect that realism could provide is negated by the fact that the protagonists essentially seem like something out of a Disney movie half the time, turning what could be a very useful narrative tool into basically just an aesthetic.

One chapter had a tagalong "normal" character, a knight in standard plate armor who had cause to ally himself with the group for reasons of self-defense. I invested myself more heavily in this knight than basically any other character because his life and death was of legitimate concern. The realism used in Berserk helped me understand that he was basically a normal man dealing with normal rules - how could he be expected to survive against demons and monsters? When he actually managed to at least hold them off, his victory felt earned because it stayed within the realm of believability. He used his environment and overcame his limitations, he didn't just get a free pass because he was a protagonist. That's the kind of benefit that realism could provide, but Berserk doesn't take advantage of it 95% of the time. The realism in this scenario would create tension for normal human characters, and Berserk keeps putting its camera on plot-armored protagonists.

Power & Contrast
A long time ago I wrote two articles about the concept of hardship in a narrative. The first dealt with the concept of "conflict" as a competition, the second had to do with authorial interference in a character's endeavor. Both of these are relevant to Berserk because on the one hand Berserk tries very hard to justify its main characters' power, and on the other hand it has a lot of scenes where victories feel hollow and pointless. The social hierarchy of characters' "power levels" says a lot about the series and how its different tones harm its overall concept.

The main character of Berserk is Guts, a man born into a mercenary unit who's fought essentially his entire life. His abusive adoptive father gave him an intentionally over-large sword and Guts chose to use it even after his death as a mark of character. His body is honed through decades of warfare and he bears countless scars and marks upon his body to show for it. Guts is established as sort of the apex predator of the Berserk world - the most capable and deadly man without any sort of magical aid or bonus, simply because he's spent his entire life killing. To improve his power beyond his human limits, he relies upon magical artifacts like the "Berserk armor" that allow him to do things physically impossible for normal humans. His sword can only be wielded by him because he's the only person with the sheer physique necessary to do it. All of Guts' abilities are the result of logical paths within the story: his lifestyle, his training, or his equipment.

While Guts has a lot of really over-the-top victories, for the most part they at least feel earned. Every victory wounds or scars him; he tires and becomes exhausted like a normal man. There's no sense that he actually would die, because he's a protagonist, but it definitely still feels like a challenge for him. It leaves its mark on him, and it's a big deal in-universe. Guts is the best warrior in the world, but it's not easy for him, it's just what he is.

In the same manner, the Apostles are established as being far more powerful than normal men, but they're justified too - they're not normal, they're empowered entities from another world. The fact that Guts is capable of standing up to them is a testament to his experience, skill, and willpower. Both Guts and the Apostles are justified in their power, and the clash between them feels more important because it's built up as two groups (or one group and one individual) whose power makes sense within the world. Furthermore, groups of "normal" humans can overcome an Apostle or even Guts, in certain circumstances, lending some vulnerability to them. Even the other members of Guts' group take a justified secondary role in comparison to Guts, and if (or when) they have abilities that can help in an indirect way, they use them. They're definitely not as powerful as guts, but there's justifications - often magical - for why they're strong enough to hang out with him and not die.

So then here comes these guys:

Oh, gracious.

Puck (the fairy) and Isidro (the kid) are both bad characters, but they're bad for very different reasons. They share the reason that they both break from the seriousness and immersion of the narrative, but they do it in very different ways.

Puck is the primary instigator of the series' annoying references. He makes puns and turns into Yoda or whatever, and that's just sort of...a thing that's there. Like I said earlier, it's basically the Genie from Aladdin: he just sort of does that stuff and it doesn't really fit into the narrative or the world at all. It's purely comic relief, with no real need for explanation. Puck has always been a light-hearted character, but early on he at least served as a foil for Guts when it was just the two of them. Puck was light-hearted and idealistic, while Guts was grim and ruthless. Puck's character turned into a pointless sideshow around the time the other characters (including another fairy) showed up; since they were all basically "lighthearted, innocent characters", Puck really had nothing to do. He's still technically there, but all that Miura can think of for him to do is make funny faces in the background while other people do actual things. He's a bad character because he's just there to make distracting, pointless jokes.

Isidro, on the other hand, is bad because he detracts from the sense of tension in the series. Isidro is a normal kid in very extraordinary situations, and that could easily be used to regain a sense of power balance ("look how weak this normal kid is in contrast to Guts and the Apostles") as well as providing a character who can grow and develop more naturally as the series progresses. However, the fact that he needs to survive every fight means that he ends up being sort of unjustifiably strong or, at least, lucky. He doesn't really receive training from Guts, and while he gets a few little pointers here and there, he mostly seems to be surviving battles because...he's already survived battles. There's no sense of grueling improvement even though there could be fairly easily. He's just plot-armored and that's the end of that. I don't need to see him die, but if you want me to connect to the character, I need to feel like at the very least he's in serious danger and he's got to push himself to his limits to survive.

The problem with the kid characters in Berserk, not just Isidro but the other four major child characters as well, is that they seem way too invulnerable. Like I said, I don't want to watch kids die or anything, but if you have children as characters in a narrative where adults are being torn apart at every opportunity, there has to be an explanation. It stops feeling like "wow these kids are really special", which is what they're ostensibly going for, and starts feeling like "ugh these kids have super-thick plot armor and it's boring". Berserk is a world that should have child soldiers, and yet it has young heroes. It should have Newt, but they gave us Vaan.

The advantage that Berserk has with its detailed system of realism and justified strength is that the conclusions feel natural and don't detract from the story. When you have all this goofy meta stuff, it takes that away. You can't generate tension while also being outlandishly goofy. Humor is fine; if it's done in character, gallows humor can be some of the funniest stuff in the world. "Irrelevant humor" is not. In the commentary for Aliens, which I'm sure I've mentioned at least five or six times in previous articles, James Cameron says that the humor works because they don't "break" from the scenario: they're making jokes in the face of a very real danger that they understand and fear, and that adds weight and drama to their humor. Berserk's humor simply serves as a reminder that it's fake, which is a really bad thing when the rest of the work is there to convince us it's not.

Conclusion
If there's one thing I can still appreciate about Berserk, it's splash panels and background art. Berserk has some really great artwork detailing entire battles, castles, or troop formations with detail on every soldier and civilian in the frame. The problem with it for me is that those things would make for an interesting story - grounding the narrative in the lives of normal people - and it's just a backdrop for a fairly standard fantasy story about a group of mostly-invulnerable wanderers out to save the world. The advantages that realism could provide are neglected, but the realism is there anyways - for looks, if nothing else.

Demon's Souls had a super-powered protagonist of sorts, but it built up to it - you start out normal, and you end up abnormal. Berserk does that with Guts, but then only with Guts. The other characters get minor explanations for their increased abilities, but they're so single-issue ("I have a magic sword now, this makes me the best swordsman ever") that it just feels like a plot convenience to let them continue to hang out with Guts. What I'd like out of Berserk is more characters who feel realistically expendable, even if they don't die. The whole setting is meant to establish what a crappy, grim, unpleasant world it is, and then they sort of wuss out on depicting it when it comes to protagonists. Something more akin to a group of semi-disposable individuals following Guts (who can still be invulnerable, because he's earned it) would help establish the danger present in the world, allowing for some level of attachment and loss within the narrative. It makes the action scenes worth paying attention to; as it is now, I basically skim them. Why wouldn't I? Nothing important's going to happen. What reason do I have to not skip the unimportant pages?

Oh, right, because they look amazing.

How do we take fantasy seriously?

I recently had a conversation with my friend William Gibbons about fantasy (@ashwara on Twitter, if you'd like to see the actual discussion). In that conversation, he said:

Graphic novels are getting more literary recognition but still the only ones accepted by The Academy are historical ones like Maus and Persepolis. But fantasy and adventure stories are never considered literary, even in terms of novels. Aside from the occasional reading of the hobbit or Lord of the Rings. Sci-Fi gets a bit more respect due to dystopias.


We developed this conversation a bit and came to a bit of a conclusion about it. The question here is this: "Why isn't fantasy taken seriously?" And yet the question, or its phrasing leads us to the general area of its answer. What isn't taken seriously? Fantasy and adventure stories - stories of escapism that lack consequence, where there's no sense of cause-and-effect and no way to really empathize with the characters as being real people. They're stories that are meant to feel good, not stories that are meant to remind us of real, depressing things. What is taken seriously, and why is it taken seriously? Stories like Maus and Persepolis (and I'd add Crecy to that list, too) look at real events, albeit through a somewhat aesthetically-distorted lens. Dystopian sci-fi ostensibly looks at plausible events, even if they're somewhat exaggerated. Even "Watchmen" was sort of a realistic look at the Superhero genre, and I'd say that it's the most well-regarded superhero comic for that very reason. Illogical things are not taken seriously, and logical things are. Things that apply to the real world are taken seriously, things that are there only to serve as an escape from reality are not.

Art, as it generally stands, is about evoking emotion and/or gaining a better understanding of the world we live in. The two examples of "acceptable graphic novels" provided were Maus and Persepolis; the former is an animal-centric retelling of a real-life holocasut experience, and the latter is an autobiographical story about life in Iran at the time of the Islamic Revolution. The value of these two examples are clear: by reading them, you are learning something about reality, something about other cultures, and something about people's experiences. While I'm sure they received a great deal of praise due to their aesthetic styles, I believe that such things are secondary concerns even in the eyes of the people who judge them. What makes them "art" is the experiences they convey, and how effectively they do so, more than the technical execution of the setup.

But surely works that are somewhat escapist or unrealistic can still teach us about the human condition, or about empathy, or about other real aspects of life? There is a term I am going to use here in response to that idea. That term is "chaff". Chaff refers to the parts of a story or setting that get in the way of its basic relevance to reality - the factors that prevent it from being applicable to our own lives or the lives of others. For example, if Avatar is a movie about the beauty and wonder of aboriginal cultures and how cruel it is to opress them for their land, then the conditions of the concept - the illogical planet, the nonsensical virtue, the ridiculous "internet hivemind" - are chaff. You cannot use Avatar to judge actual history, or actual aboriginal relations. It is so different, in so many distinct ways, that you cannot use it as a reflection of real history or real cultures. If your understanding of Native American relations and Manifest Destiny is founded on "Avatar" as anything but the most basic starting point to get you interested in real history, you might as well have not watched anything at all. If you wanted the lesson that the European colonial treatment of aboriginal races was cruel, you'd have been better off watching a movie about aborigines instead of a barely-related black-and-white sci-fi romp.

In many cases, the basic idea that a realistic story isn't enjoyable is itself founded in ignorance. "The Tuskegee Airmen" is "Red Tails" without all the chaff, and it's a much better (and more respected) movie because of it. They took away the black-and-white morality, the cliche dialogue, and the high-flying action...and replaced it with, you know, actual plausible things. Pilots whose discrimination isn't overcome in a single action, individuals who aren't either wholly good or wholly bad, actors whose characters resemble the lives they're supposed to be teaching us about and not some made up Hollywood protagonist. And that was what got the movie praise, because it depicted something in a way that actually taught us about it instead of fixing everything so that the racists and the nazis get what they deserve and the black pilots fly away happily in the end without a care in the world. You can learn something from Tuskegee Airmen; you can't learn anything from Red Tails apart from the general message that "racism is bad".

And how was Red Tails defended? It's "fun". It's "exciting". Perhaps. Is it relevant? Is it valuable? Maybe less so. "Fun" and "Serious", while not necessarily in conflict, often detract from each other. A sacrifice made in the name of "fun" takes its cut from "serious". Red Tails sacrificed its seriousness in the name of fun, and it suffered for it. For every character turned into a 2d cutout, for every battle made into a CG setpiece, for every event turned into a cliche story point, Red Tails' seriousness suffers - and, relatedly, so does the audience's opinion of it. Because Red Tails isn't Star Wars. It's a movie that's meant to be applied to real life, real people, and real history. You're telling a story about actual heroes, not fake ones, and you cannot do the same things and expect the same results.

The closer a story is to reality, the more effect it can have emotionally and culturally on its audience. A story that teaches us a lesson is doing so under the general pretext that the "lesson" is something we can carry with us in our real lives, or something that teaches us about a part of the world that we did not know about. Unrealistic stories are fun and escapist, but that's the point - they're supposed to reflect something else, not reality. You're not supposed to "learn" anything from Star Wars other than a very general "be a good person", and even that is mitigated by the fact that good and evil are solid, distinguishable concepts in the Star Wars universe. It's great fun to watch, and it makes you feel good about yourself, but you can't learn from it. If you try to learn from it, you will be tragically misinformed. Let's not even get into what most games consider to be a passable story - try to take a lesson from World of Warcraft or Fable and see how far that gets you.

And therein lies the "problem" with most fantasy: it's meant to be a fantasy. There's no logic or reason or real-world application behind it 99% of the time, it's just there to "look cool" and "be fun". That's great if you want to enjoy yourself in a world of your own creation, but can you really expect people to take it seriously? Most fantasy worlds would collapse if they made sense - the very existence of magic totally changes the rules of technological development in ways most fantasy authors wouldn't even dream of. It took hundreds of years to develop forges large enough to create plate armor (which is far easier to produce than mail), and "producing fire" is among the simplest tricks that most wizards, magicians, warlocks and sorcerers across fantasy can do. When you can reshape the laws of reality to your liking, what point is there in swords and shields? How am I supposed to care about this world when the people who live in it don't care?

There are (as far as I know) two major fantasy series that are taken seriously by critics and audiences. The first of these is the Lord of the Rings trilogy; the second is Game of Thrones. These are, tellingly, both very low fantasy - the magic is subtle and rare, if it's present at all, and it's really closer to "history" or "mythology" than what we generally term as "fantasy". Gandalf doesn't throw fireballs or lightning bolts, and most problems are overcome with grit and determination, not sorcery. The moral that Lord of the Rings teaches is about simple, normal folk overcoming obstacles through their courage and their own motivation, not through open power or sorcery. With a few exceptions, Game of Thrones is practically not fantasy at all. Despite being the foundation of "high fantasy" works, the most famous work of medieval-derived fantasy is in fact incredibly non-magical by comparison. It's very hard, in fact, to find any examples of "high fantasy" in movies; even more escapist films like Conan the Barbarian are relatively low on the "fantasy" scale. That's not even getting into countless historical-derived works, from Shakespeare to Kurosawa, from Kingdom of Heaven to Gladiator, from The Messenger to Excalibur. These things get by as "art" pretty much scot-free unless they go out of their way to be abjectly terrible. It's easy to see, therefore, that more historical or "realistic" works are more common and more respected in movies because it feels so much easier to take them seriously.

By contrast, low fantasy shows up very rarely in games; games prefer the razzle-dazzle of powerful spells and giant oversized swords and big plastic pauldrons bigger than your head. Could you take Dragon Age seriously if it was a movie? Could you take a look at the image on the right and really tell me, to my face, that yes, you could take that seriously? I'm going to assume your answer is no. I'm going to assume that your reaction to the plastic armor and the PVC knives and the pointlessly exposed skin is at best "well it's fun" and at worst open mockery. It's so intentionally ridiculous and impractical that the idea of the character wearing it being serious just seems impossible. If she was serious, why would she dress like that? Doesn't she want to, you know, not die? Are we in a medieval world here, and if so, where did she get those materials? Where did they come from? Oh, they're just sort of there?

And yet most fantasy looks exactly like that, and it's okay for what they are. Games are meant to be fun, aren't they? Let's not drag this down with serious stuff. That's fine and dandy when you're using games as escapism, but, you know, it does pretty handily explain why nobody takes it seriously. No matter how much overwrought lore you put into your game, no matter how many deep sidequests you attempt to make, no matter how hamfistedly you shove romance where it doesn't belong, the fact of the matter is that nobody takes fantasy seriously because the people who make fantasy don't take fantasy seriously.

You see, people don't necessarily know what "real" is, but they can tell what "fake" is. They may not know exactly how plate armor is made, but they can tell when it looks like it's plastic. They may not know how heavy a sword is, but they know when it's made of rubber. They may not know the exact mechanics of fencing, but they can pick out a generally fake-looking fight. They don't need absolute 100% adherence to the rules of reality, but they know what "metal" is. And fantasy designers actually don't care about that stuff. It's not their prerogative to be realistic; they're here to make fun things that look cool for enjoyable games. And that's fine. But it's not serious, and it's not going to be treated like it's serious.

There are, of course, the occasional bold attempts at serious materials or themes. Planescape: Torment treated fantasy like an actual alien world for once, and based its theme around the beliefs that make a person what they are. It did so with a lot of chaff, of course - "belief actually literally makes things change" being the biggest one - but the concepts it addressed about finding your own path in life can still resonate in reality despite that because it's largely philosophical, not magical. Final Fantasy Tactics based its plot around feudal politics, with a succession crisis being resolved through a bloody civil war, but that quickly and unpleasantly devolved into "there's a big scary evil bad guy, kill them to save the world!" What stayed with fans was not Altima but Delita - the low-born king who backstabbed his way to the top and yet, despite this, lost everything important because of how he'd gotten there. The chaff got in the way of a genuinely interesting, and potentially respectable, story. Games like The Witcher and Demon's Souls take stabs at the realistic aesthetic for dramatic effect, and can certainly be taken more seriously for it - but they alone simply aren't enough.

We don't need to talk about what "fantasy" needs. Fantasy has its guidelines set for it: people take Game of Thrones seriously, they take Lord of the Rings seriously, and they take historical material seriously. If you want fantasy to be taken seriously, start treating it like a logical world instead of an escapist fantasy. Draw from myth and legend if you want to include "fantasy" elements, because the key thing about myths and legends is that at some point, people thought they were real. People thought that dragons and monsters and gods and magic were real even as they tilled fields and mined ore and smithed metal; they didn't say "hey, there's magic in the world, I don't have to do anything!" When people throw around terms like "it doesn't have to make sense, it's fantasy", they're only helping to explain why nobody thinks of it as a mature form of expression. The answer is clear: stop saying that. Forever, if you can.

We do need to talk about how gaming needs to get involved in that, though. If gaming is going to mature as a medium - as some argue it should - then it needs to stop getting caught up in its over-the-top escapism and start addressing real problems and using real history as a guideline. If you want to say something about reality, use reality as a base to say it. I keep coming back to Dragon Age, but there's reasons - it wants to "say things", and it fails every time. It wants to talk about conflict and sacrifice and oppression and freedom, but it cannot do so because there's simply too much chaff between the concepts and the realities. Dragon Age is an escapist fantasy world where you can get in a million fights and quip about it while you casually brush the blood off your armor, but then it's also a serious world where mages are oppressed by religious fanatics and I'm supposed to care. It's a world where people dress like real humans never would, do things real people never would, and then try to tell me about kings and successions and what am I supposed to make of it?


What we need more of in games is "low magic". Games where people dress like they're actually wearing materials that make sense. Games where the rules of reality don't turn on when cutscenes show up and off where they're done (I'm looking at you, Magic Death Knife). Games where the plots are actually grounded, and not just quasi-grounded like DA:O or FFT did where the politics are just a backdrop for "oh no a huge monster that's threatening the world". We need actual politics, the kind of human-interest conflict that defined so many of Shakespeare's greatest plays and appeal to something more believable than a classic "big evil" antagonist. There are threats to civilization that you can display without conjuring up false boogeymen (the Mongols, for example), and even in cases where there aren't "absolute threats", you can use that as an opportunity for actual depth and moral ambiguity. The brilliance of Henry V, especially given its most famous scene, is that it's simultaneously very noble and very petty. Despite Henry's charismatic speech, the battle is ultimately one of an inheritance dispute between nobles. Henry speaks not of survival or necessity, but of honor and brotherhood - things that would hold men together no matter the cause for their conflict. That's human interest, with conflicting motives and goals and not just a simplified "here's how to fix everything" mindset.

I think the most telling issue is that games, to an extent, acknowledge the value of realism even if they don't care about it in the game itself. As mentioned, "realism" seems to turn on whenever cutscenes happen: a gunshot or stab in a cutscene is fatal no matter how many you've shrugged off in gameplay. Would they do that if realism wasn't important for taking a story seriously? Would a gun to the head matter if they treated it like they treat it in cutscenes? Then there's the ads for Halo: ODST or Mass Effect 3 or Skyrim that use live-action footage because, guess what, it feels more immersive and more real to us because it is more real. It draws people in by presenting a more tangible vision, because reality is where we actually live, and it's easier to draw upon our real-life senses than to try and abstract them through a thousand layers of falsehood. The more realistic things look, and the more realistic things behave, the easier it is for us to connect our own senses and experiences to it. Yet despite this "immersion" is basically treated like a buzzword, a demand made by whining grognards who don't actually care about having fun.

You know what game is really easy to take seriously? What game produces narratives that, in structure, strongly resemble actual historical stories and the works derived from them? What game has given me stronger emotional reactions through gameplay than most games give me through cutscenes? What game creates a narrative entirely THROUGH gameplay, while most games struggle to connect the two in a matter more meaningful than an irrelevant stapling?

I'm not going to stop until you understand.

Crusader Kings 2 is a game where "the rules of the game" are nearly inseparable from "the laws and customs of the period". Crusader Kings 2 is a game where, in the first ten minutes, my brother was conspiring to kill my daughter, and after an hour of playing that no longer seemed unusual. Crusader Kings 2 is a game where I murdered my own son so my daughter, the most gifted individual in the world at that point, could take the throne and lead the country to an era of prosperity. Crusader Kings 2 is a game where my rule collapsed under unfair circumstances and I died alone and despised as my own son deposed me - all because I'd been invaded and excommunicated by another ruler and didn't have the resources to fight him off. Crusader Kings 2 is a game where I stuck by my liege through civil wars and invasions and collapse because I felt that's what my character would do. Crusader Kings 2 is a game where every choice I made affected the overarching layout of the narrative, not just some throwaway dialogue with binary decisions. Crusader Kings 2 is a game where every time I play the game, I am creating a story - not experiencing, but creating.

It's frustratingly telling that, as Erik Kain described, the Game of Thrones video game is an irrelevant "role-playing game" instead of what I just described (i.e. something that fits its political concepts perfectly). It showcases exactly how people think about video games, especially licensed games: you have your gameplay over here, and you have your cutscenes over here, and they can vaguely interact I guess if you want to get technical about it. No borders pushed, no advancements made. Just make "game parts" and then make "story parts" and find some thematic concept to tie them together.

If you want fantasy to be taken seriously, I think we've found a place to start.

Oh COME ON

http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/28/assassins-creed-iiis-setting-a-bit-of-a-pain-for-female-characters/

Really? Really? I JUST went over this, guy, and you're giving me a reason to do it again?

People will believe "assassin in identifiable hood jumps off buildings and lands in hay carts", but they wouldn't believe "woman does things". That's what they're telling me. The white-clad, hooded, weapon-shrouded super-assassin is MORE BELIEVABLE than a woman in the same position.

I'm done. I'm done with everything.

Realism as a tool for agendas: a discussion of hypocrisy.

100% accurate depiction of actual real events (this is actual period art by the way).

As you know if you've been following this blog for any length of time, I'm a fan of realism. Not only do I find it more aesthetically pleasing than less grounded graphical representations, I also know that it provides psychological benefits in terms of connecting to sensory experience and unconscious reactions. Realism helps people get into a work and suspend their disbelief more easily; it helps them bridge the gap between "this isn't real" and "what if this was real" more easily. Realism has many benefits and in most cases I cannot fault a product or work for attempting to adhere to it.

Today I'd like to talk about realism as a tool for agendas. I'd like to talk about "half-realism", where something isn't done because "that's not realistic" when in other cases unrealism is allowed to slide cleanly. I'd like to talk about cases where objectionable opinions are defended by value of "realism" when "realism" isn't brought up anywhere else in the work.

Let's talk about Team Ico's "The Last Guardian", for example.

"Crazy fun fact: The Last Guardian was originally supposed to have a small female lead, however Ueda felt the little girl wouldn't have as good of a grip as a boy to climb the massive Trico. He also mentioned that girls wear skirts..."

Team Ico is one of the most respected "artgame" names in the game industry. Its works are emotionally evocative and aesthetically challenging while still remaining conceptually very simple. It pains me, therefore, to have to raise criticism against them, and yet I absolutely feel obligated to do so: this is ridiculous. The idea that a girl having less stamina because "that's realistic" in a game like The Last Guardian is just so irrelevant to anything that the idea of it being considered as an actual reason for grown adults making a decision just boggles my mind. These people, who ostensibly take the game industry very seriously and take their games very seriously, came to the conclusion that "we can't have a female characters because girls are weak and puny and it would break the audience's suspension of disbelief to say otherwise".

I liked Shadow of the Colossus because, among other things, it was realistic in certain fields. The way your character moved, the way you had limited stamina with which to climb the titular creatures, and even the way your horse handled created a believable atmosphere and added more weight to the basic concept of "climb up creature, stab it in weak spot". If the climb had been effortless, there wouldn't be any real sense of struggling or tension, it would just be a puzzle game. Those realistic elements helped convey how difficult the battle was meant to be for the protagonist while still being a detached, electronic medium. But SotC wasn't totally realistic by any stretch of the imagination. There's no explanation for, say, why the protagonist is so durable: he can get smashed by a club fifty times his size or fall off a giant the size of a skyscraper and, in many cases, shrug it off. He's got also got infinite arrows, if we're going to nitpick. So SotC is realistic in some fields, and unrealistic in others. That's fine.

The problem with Ueda's explanation regarding The Last Guardian is that while realism has benefits, you can't justify it's usage out of thin air. You either have to have it all the time, and thus make it totally consistent as a package, or you have to connect it to some benefit that its use provides. In SotC "realism" exists to make the climb more exhilarating, more emotionally charged and more difficult for the player. It's not absolutely realistic by any means, but the ways in which is is realistic exist for a reason. Games like Demon's Souls are the same way - the realistic parts are there for a reason, and the reason is a combination of aesthetic value and fantasy scaling (grounded base elements make outlandish fantasy elements feel more important). Realism is rarely put into place for its own sake, it's there to do something. It's a tool used by artists to create an effect.

It's difficult to assess this based on the short response Ueda gave, but I can see two potential reasons for what he means when he says that "the little girl wouldn't have had as good of a grip as a boy" in regards to The Last Guardian. The first possibility is that he thinks the audience wouldn't accept it: their suspension of disbelief would break if this little girl was able to climb onto an animal, but wouldn't if it was a little boy. Personally, I don't think people care; I mean, maybe that's just me, but when I'm watching a giant cat griffin or whatever with a little girl on its back, I'm not going to focus on the little girl.

The second possibility is...well, it's sexism, to put it bluntly. I can't even say that it's simply adherence to realism, because there are other things inherent in the gameplay construct that aren't realistic. And I don't mean "there's magic" or "there's a giant animal" or "it's a fantasy world", because those are things that can behave "realistically", or at least "consistently", based on the rules established by the setting. No, I mean things like health, resilience, and so on, which are intentionally kept unrealistic. I haven't really seen enough of the game to make this judgment, because it's not out yet, but going by previous Team Ico games "absolute realism" is not their concern.

STOP CLIMBING NAUSICAA DON'T YOU KNOW YOU'RE A GIRL

I think the reason Ueda says he cares about realism regarding this particular case is because some people will accept realism as an end in and of itself. The benefits provided by realism are fairly well established (albeit often misunderstood) so when realism is offered as an explanation, sometimes that's enough. It's why Harry Plinkett's analysis of the Star Wars prequels is founded largely in things being unrealistic: they feel floaty, fake, and artificial. Those are things that turn people off. When a person says they're doing something to be "realistic", it's assumed they're trying to engage the parts of your brain that respond well to realistic content. Realism, by itself, is generally a good thing.

This, unfortunately, means that realism can be a good cover for misogyny. Nature, as it happens, is unfair: it's an objective fact that men build muscle easier than women, and there's no getting around it (though it's actually not as big a gap as many people assume). Women can be muscular, yes, but it takes more work than it takes for men. Nature did not build us equally. The choice to represent that in a game is almost always unnecessary unless you're playing an incredibly detailed and incredibly realistic game that also takes every other facet of reality into account. Again, realism is a tool, and it is applied to areas where it can provide a benefit. When games like FATAL throw out exaggerated versions of this inequality by giving huge penalties in strength to female characters, it's quite obvious a cover for misogyny, not an attempt to evoke the benefits that realism provides. It's so selective, and so surrounded by non-realism, that it cannot be a legitimate adherence to reality.

I don't know Ueda. I can't judge him based on a two-sentence answer. Hell, maybe it's not even him alone, maybe it's an entire committee or design team that's the problem. But it basically sounds like he's a misogynist, even if it's on a very minor level. His belief that "girls don't have enough stamina to be effective" overrides the other things that he's willing to let slide in realism terms, and that's not okay. He could just say "well, just like health or damage, let's just say we don't care about realism in this case", but he didn't. Why didn't he? Because he didn't want to. He had his own reason for not wanting a female character, and I'm not privy to that reason is. The reason, let me assure you, is not "realism" or its benefits.

There's nothing wrong with unrealistic stuff - you're not going to get the benefits of realism, but it allows for greater artistic expression sometimes. Divergence from realism, however, puts control in the artist's hands, and thus lays the blame at the artist's feet. When you can't count on "realism" as an answer (i.e. "it's the premade system's fault, it's not like I made reality or anything!"), all you're left with is "it's that way because the creator wanted it that way". There isn't a female protagonist in The Last Guardian because the developers didn't want a female protagonist. End of sentence. In fact, if they'd never considered it at all, it wouldn't have been that bad. It would have just been assumed that the role was designed for a male character and it would have been justified by artistic choice. Bringing the possibility up in an interview specifically to provide bad reasons for why you didn't do it is basically the worst way this could have been handled, because it's hypocritical. You don't care about realism most of the time, but now you do. That's not okay.

Go Real or Go Home

Now me, I love realism. I'd like things to be realistic all the time. But realism can be abused, because it's a tool. People who don't care about realism can invoke it to give their subjective opinion greater appeal; take a character like Saber and you'll find people citing realism both to attack her ("she's wearing a dress on the battlefield and she's not wearing a helmet") and defend her ("she's wearing armor, armor doesn't have to be totally covering all the time"). Ultimately what it turns into is an attempt to back up opinions you'd hold anyways: "I like/don't like x, but let me cite realism to give my opinion some extra support".

Realism, though, is the means by which we represent utility. There is no utility without realism, or at least consistency, because "utility" by its very nature is a response to conditions. It's cold, you put on a warm coat, that's utility. You're in danger, you put on armor, that's utility. It's an attempt to accomplish something based on a consistent system, and "the system" that we use most often for reference is reality. If you don't care about reality most of the time, why do you start caring when a character wears a chainmail bikini or high heels? Because it bothers you for another reason - it offends your sensibilities, or it makes you feel objectified, or you dislike the aesthetic, or maybe you just dislike women wearing revealing clothing. It's not "realism", it's whatever other reason you have for disliking it. Realism is just there because people accept that as a reason. It has its benefits, but if you want to use "realism" or even "believability" as an argument, you have to understand what those benefits are.

Intent is offensive, not content. "Why", not "How", they're dressed.

Character Agency

One of the most basic and fundamental aspects of writing a character is making them feel like a person, and not simply a collection of traits. The most direct way to accomplish this is to get into their mindset and have them make decisions that make sense for their personalities. Their values, ego, and understanding of the world and its rules should all come together to form a coherent decision-making process, and the various aspects of their character should reflect that process. Characters should possess a sense of agency and ego, which is to say that they should be making decisions "themselves" based on their own desires and ideas. This concept forms the foundation of my objections to artificial character designs and to overly-orchestrated events. Now I'm going to direct it towards character writing and actions as part of constructing a logical world - to create a setting where things make sense, rather than being the most convenient or appealing for the audience.

Childrens' brains respond to pain in others.

We, the audience, connect with characters based on things like empathy, sympathy, and pathos. We respond to their pain and agony as well as their happiness and success. When a work has successfully engaged us, we laud the heroic and gregarious, despise the wretched and wicked, cheer victories and mourn defeats. The things that we use to judge and interact with people in real life are used by fiction writers to evoke those strong emotions and thus create a connection or bond between the audience and the work. The most well-written characters have depth and logic to them, allowing us to understand their perspective even if we disagree with it. The complex web of cause-and-effect  helps us, the audience, stop thinking of them as "characters" and start thinking of them as "people". To truly connect with them, to evoke that empathy, we need to be able to let ourselves fall into the intentional delusion that these are real people who are worthy of an emotional response, and to make that happen characters need to behave, act, and display emotions like real people do.

The problem with a poorly written character is that the reasons we like characters are based on those emotional responses, which rely on the suspension of disbelief with regards to them being not real. The value of those emotional responses comes from our social instincts and mechanisms. Praise feels good in real life not just because you've received praise, but because someone has praised you. It adds to your self-worth because your character and your life have been supported by someone else, and while not everyone cares about that, it's a pretty general part of societal interaction. The idea of other people having a consciousness of their own is central to things like empathy; it feels good to help someone because there is "someone" to help. You can't just go through the motions and expect the same reaction when you haven't actually done anything, can you?

Part of the reason that this is accepted is because of a willing, even forced, suspension of disbelief. People want the outcome of a shallow, sycophantic relationship because it feels good even though it doesn't actually mean anything. "Romance" in video games is nothing like romance in real life because you're almost always choosing 1 of 3 preset answers and you know one of them is the right one. There's no real potential for failure or even incompatibility because they have to make it easy for the player to "win" the "game" of romantic dialogue. Yet some people enjoy them anyways because it's "easier". There's no fear of rejection or potential loss of self-esteem; if a character is marked as being a romance option, there is a guaranteed way to make him or her fall in love with you, and all you have to do is find the right things to say to make it happen. In real life, this would be an abhorrent mindset to propagate because it reduces other human beings into, essentially, "goals" to achieve. Oh wait, that's already a thing and it is totally awful. The idea of romance being "choose the right options and get guaranteed results" is so ridiculous that its appeal is questionable at best and offensive at worst. Game romances try to mask their shallowness with prose, but it's obvious that the characters are all so easy to impress that their only useful purpose as part of a narrative is to indulge and tittilate  the player.

While it's easy to pick on romances for being cliche and hackneyed and over-simplified, the truth is that there's a lot of bad characters out there who basically give their protagonists a free pass for everything they do. This, too, is part of indulgence: why would the player hang out with anyone but yes-men who make them feel good about anything? Why would they brook discontent or disagreement when they could far more easily find characters who are willing to tell them how great they are, how smart they are, how capable they are, how important they are, etc.? Sometimes it's just out of programming convenience, but fantasies are fantasies, after all - you can't honestly say that most of these characters aren't just there to make the player feel good with empty praise.

What I'd like to do with this article is examine the ways in which characters are written to either be subservient or independent - to kowtow to the player-character, or to express their own egos and their own agency. I'm also going to look at why the former is generally bad for a work and the latter is generally good.

Alyx Vance: "Everything You Do Is Right"
The video blog Errant Signal did a great job with its Half-Life 2 analysis in showing how Alyx Vance, largely lauded as being a progressive female character for a video game, has basically no real sense of agency or character on her own. She's there to support the player, and that's almost her entire role. Yes, she has little bits of character development here and there, but compared to what she should be given her circumstances, she's basically an empty husk. Her decisions never waver, her resolve never sways, her values and ego never get in the way of "do what Gordon says". She is not a person, she is a follower. She exists to tell the player character how great he is, to riff off him, and to do everything he says. The little things they changed - her visual design, her personality - don't affect the overall issue that Alyx Vance exists as an empty puppet to laud the player without regard for their actions or their capabilities.

Half the problem with the setup is that Gordon is a silent protagonist. This is a concept that works well in Half-Life's scenario, where "survival" is the only goal and your actions speak louder than your words. There's no assumptions made about your character or your values; even the scientists who ask you to go to Xen acknowledge that you have no reason to do this except securing your own safety. The scenario becomes an utterly embarrassing one in HL2 where everyone's talking at Gordon, making assumptions about his personality, and responding to him like he's an actual person - and he doesn't say anything back. Despite the praise for his at-the-time unorthodox background, Gordon is a non-character; in the initial release of HL1, it was pretty difficult to even find out what he looked like (later releases put him right on the cover). Yet despite this, Alyx has to fall in love with him, because that's what the developers think (or know) the player wants to happen. How can this be the product of believable decision-making? How can this ostensibly empowered female character fall in love with a person based on nothing more than "he kills a bunch of combine" and have that be okay? She doesn't act like a person any more than a cliche two-dimensional love interest does; she's there to support Gordon. She has no agency, or at least no justifiable/explainable agency.

The funny thing about Alyx is that she's sort of treated as this icon of feminist empowerment - she's not "slutty" or "loose" or whatever other terms people use when they want to express disgust at scantily-clad or libidinous women. She's spunky, tomboyish, modestly-dressed and modestly-endowed. However, as I've made clear in the past, the actual problem with sexist characters isn't what they are, it's why they are. Sexy female characters aren't bad because they're "unrealistic", they're bad because the reason they're sexy is because the author and audience want to objectify them (unless you're trying to say that women who dress sexily are evil, in which case you're pretty awful yourself). The reasoning behind Alyx's design is easily identified as "player gratification", which is the same reason that people hate sexy, sycophantic sidekicks to begin with. People hate those types of characters because they (and by extension, other women) are painted as only existing to praise and support a man, without any ego or values of their own. These characters don't feel or act like people, which becomes reprehensible when you connect it to the idea that that's what women should be, or even are.

Yet Alyx changes a few minor details, and suddenly she's okay, even praiseworthy. The core formula remains intact, but instead of a busty airhead, it's a smart, cute, attainable young woman who dresses nicely and makes awkwardly adorable little comments like "zombine lol'. It appeals to a different audience by assuaging their guilt about whether or not such a character is sexist: "no, it's okay, even though she praises everything you do she doesn't dress like a whore!" The dressing is different, but the concept is the same. I could even draw a comparison to Gordon's status as a character - he's a supposed scientist who does everything that standard cliche space marines do and never has to do anything related to science, but people love him because he's "so different" than the generic military protagonist. The standards are so low for new content that he gets away with it, even though you could put a marine in his place and have the game remain exactly the same.

And they did.

Fenris: "I Don't Mind If You Represent Everything That I Hate"
Here's another solid example of a character who feels less like a person and more like a thrall: Dragon Age 2's Fenris. DA2 didn't have deep characters, but it had reliable characters (in terms of adhering to their single gimmick trait). Fenris is an elf who hates mages. That's it, that's his character, that's everything important about him and his decision-making process. Whenever he opens his mouth he's reminding you that he hates mages. When it's time for the player to make a choice, Fenris pipes up to remind you that he hates mages, and he supports a course of action that would see mages dead. His entire character and story are based around him hating mages, just hating them so much that his otherwise generic design is essentially held together by that single aspect of his personality.

You know who else you can have in your party? Mages. You can even have a blood mage in your party, who other mages think are too dangerous to be around. You can BE a mage yourself. Bizarrely, Fenris doesn't care about those mages. Oh, sure, he'll whine a bit, but a character who's meant to be a dangerous mage-hating vigilante seems content to throw out sarcastic quips and bellyache. Though that's not totally fair because there is a scene at the end where Fenris can turn on you if your trust with him isn't high enough - but that's one scene. That's one whole scene in this entire game where he'll be like "Hey wait, I hate mages, and you're siding with the mages! I should probably murder you to death instead of tolerating our totally opposed agendas."

It's never really made clear why he's willing to put his mage-killing death spree on hold for the player-character. Yeah, the PC vaguely helps him, but that's not really enough to justify what's basically servitude. I mean, do you see what's happening here? Fenris is recognizing his role as "Not The PC". He's saying "well, I have my own agenda, but you're the PC, and thus (for no reason) you're the boss." He doesn't owe a blood-debt to Hawke, he doesn't have some implicit reason to trust Hawke, and he doesn't really have any justification for not pursuing his own agenda. Hawke's just a guy or gal who did a job for him and now they're palling around, and that's enough for this blood-crazed mage-hating murderer to be like "eh maybe I don't feel like murdering mages today".

Contrast this with games that acknowledge that the PC is basically "just a regular person" and in which party members have their own agendas. These characters possess agency and opinions beyond "worship player-character, kill all their enemies", and they join up with you because they think you'll help advance their cause or their agenda. When the player is obviously taking actions that are counter-productive to what they want to accomplish, they do something about it. Here's some examples:

In Baldur's Gate, Dynaheir and Edwin were diametrically opposed, and would attack each other unless you specifically arranged a scenario in which it was too difficult for them to do so. Their hatred of each other was almost always more important than their trust for you, because they knew each other better than they knew you. Why would you not try to kill your mortal enemy just because some guy you met half an hour ago was like "hold on I think we should all be friends"? Similar setups occur with Viconia & Keldorn in BG2 and with Alistair and Loghain in Dragon Age: Origins. They're so unwilling to tolerate each other that they do the logical thing and either leave or attack.

In Fallout: New Vegas, Boone will not support or accept the Legion, ever. If you support the Legion, or act against the NCR, he will leave, or he will attack you. Since his defining backstory-related character traits are his hatred of the Legion for taking away his wife and unborn child, this makes perfect sense for him. He's willing to trust your judgment with certain other affairs that he's less invested in, but his hatred of the Legion is so important to him that the idea of him being okay with helping them just doesn't make sense - so it's not allowed in the game. FO3 had similar concepts, but it was based around the karma system and not at all about factional loyalty (which didn't really exist in FO3).

In Jagged Alliance 2, every mercenary had characters that they liked and disliked. While they were all fairly professional about it (after all, it's their jobs), they still obviously had their differences with their fellow soldiers. If you treated mercenaries poorly (getting a lot of them killed and not recovering their bodies), mercenaries would abandon you or refuse to work for you. In Jagged Alliance - Back In Action, relationship issues were escalated to outright refusal to work with hated characters.

Now, obviously, even these characters are kind of limited. Programming and dialogue restrictions mean that they're not totally perfect or flawless, but the idea of them actually making decisions based on their own values first and protagonist-centric loyalty second (if at all) is simultaneously incredibly basic and yet at the same time impressive for video-game writing. Something that I brought up during my analysis of Final Fantasy XI was the idea that the different races in the game's setting banded together into two distinct groups because of shared principles, yet they had internal conflict and strife that helped to separate them and maintain that they were their own sovereign entities. Character conflicts do the same thing: they remind you that this is a person who has voluntarily agreed to accompany you, not a servant or a slave or a thrall.

Binary Domain: Justifying Leadership & Collaboration
When I picked up Sega's third-person-shooter Binary Domain, one of the first things I noticed was the concept of "trust levels". You're playing an American operative who's part of a multi-national strike force aiming to arrest a Japanese roboticist who represents a threat to the world at large. It's stated early and often that the different groups involved have different stakes and different goals, and your relationship with the other characters starts off somewhat abrasive. While you're the de-facto leader (because you're the PC, of course), other characters are quick to reassert their own authority and decision-making, and constantly trying to establish dominance is likely to displease or anger them, which leads to them being less willing to follow your decisions. Instead, you have to focus on your shared goal, try to bond with them as people, and generally impress them with sound strategic thinking in order to get them to trust you enough to take your suggestions and accept you as a leader. While this doesn't pan out as much as it feels like it ought to, there are parts in the game where characters will do things differently depending on whether or not you've proven yourself to be a trustworthy individual, or even just proven to be a good friend.

What this does for me, as a player, is remind me that these characters are meant to be people. They're not mindless subordinates who'll do whatever I say, they're supposed to be characters with their own values, agendas, and most importantly their own egos. They aren't just going to accept everything I say as the gospel and act on it immediately, they're going to have their own priorities and viewpoints about what they do. If I build up their trust, that affects their judgment: "What do I think is best" versus "Well, this guy has proven that he's intelligent and capable, maybe I should listen to him". They weigh their options and, if you've  proven yourself, they decide that you're the best. It's not a pre-made statement, and it's not totally ironclad either - if you start acting like a jerk, making mistakes, and shooting them in the back, their opinions will drop back down.

A crucial part of this is that Binary Domain's story is based a shared goal: every operative wants to accomplish the mission for the safety of the world (or their own nation, at least). Issues of ego or trust come from individual issues, but their goal is ultimately the same even if they disagree in their methods and perspectives. The game has provided a target for you to work towards together. Mass Effect 2 was the same way - you were recruiting the best of the best to take down the Collectors, and your shared motivation was "survival as a race" even though the mission in question was most likely suicide. In games like Baldur's Gate, where you're really on your own personal quest and nobody else has a reason to care about it, there has to be some indication that your party members recognize this. They have their own reasons to help you, but it's because you're a friend or an employer, not necessarily because they care about what you're doing.

Reminder: that's my brother plotting to kill my baby daughter.

Crusader Kings 2: A Wrench In The Works
So far I've talked about agency from a storytelling perspective, with a focus on making characters who feel like real people, who can be empathized with, etc. But what about from a gameplay perspective? What about the concept that managing people with their own desires makes for a much more complex game than one in which everyone absolutely obeys every order you give?

One of the things I loved about Crusader Kings 2 in comparison to many other games is that every vassal has their own opinion of you and of each other. There's very little absolute obedience: your authority as a ruler is held in place by your legal bindings and by your relationship with the people you rule over. If your vassals hate you enough, they'll rebel - and you draw most of your troops from their lands, so for each one that rebels your ability to fight them is reduced. Different politics, cultures, and goals all come into play to form a network of interpersonal relationships, from the simplest personality traits ("I'm brave, and I despise you for being a coward") to the loftiest ambitions ("I could be next in line for the throne, but you're in my way"). In some cases, past friendship will be enough to keep things smooth even when troubles arise; in others, a lord will decide that his own ambitions are too important to let your relationship stand in the way. There are no guarantees that people will behave one way or another, only influences.

What I love about this concept is that it makes the game feel more alive. It's not just me and a few other computer players, it's a world full of people each exerting their own political force upon the world. Every character's actions change the game, and while many characters' actions are going to be inconsequential in the long run, their tiny ripples can still have effects much later on. Diplomacy and social interaction turn from a largely irrelevant sideshow, providing entertaining diversion from the main game, to an actual tangible part of the game mechanics. Whether you attempt to make everyone happy, accomplish a specific goal, or try to roleplay your character is going to have an effect on the game world and on your overall success.

Let's set up a hypothetical game concept. You're playing as a character leading a party of adventurers on a quest. Each character has their own reason for being on the quest; you're the de-facto leader, but by no means are you guaranteed to hold that spot. Every action you take on this quest, and every decision you make, is going to have ramifications in the eyes of your companions. Their differing priorities will guarantee that you can't make them all happy all of the time, and in addition your actions will have effects on the world.  Do you burn down a village just to ensure that there are no witnesses to an event? Do you go out of your way to rescue a convoy even though it could compromise your mission? Do you abandon a party member to ensure the success of the operation? Even if a party member seems to be on your side, can you really trust them? Suddenly what you do in gameplay affects the narrative, and at the same time the choices you make as part of the narrative make the game easier or harder.

This concept requires a necessary level of difficulty, as well, because there need to be actual stakes. Games like Mass Effect seem afraid to have "wrong choices": you can just shoot your way past any enemy because nobody wants the game to stop after 30+ hours because they messed up. In order to make the gameplay and narrative connect, the stakes need to be equal in both. There's no point making a "hard decision" when you can come out of either one just as easily - failure needs to be a very real possibility to turn decision-making from an abstract "pick your movie" concept to an actual element of gameplay.

With Crusader Kings 2, that was part of the game. A rebellion at the wrong time could totally lose the game for you - your weakness would be exploited by your neighbors if you had bad relations with them, and your country would be forcibly taken from you through invasion. Every decision mattered because every one could be a game-loser. With linear or semi-linear narratives, the game has an end-point, and you (as the player) are almost financially obliged to reach it if you want to: I paid the money, I deserve to see all the movies. CK2, on the other hand, is "see how far you can get": each playthrough of the game is a short, self-contained story, and you're not guaranteed to succeed by any means. The always-present option of total failure tempers and influences your decisions because now those decisions can actually mean something.

Conclusion
This is the same thing I've said a thousand times before: write characters like they're people. Make them take actions that people would take, make them dress like people would dress, make them respond like people would respond. "People" covers such a wide and broad spectrum of possibilities that it's a cheap, shallow excuse to say that the results of those decisions are "boring" or "uninteresting". People are great. Real life, as it turns out, is full of people. People are interesting to interact with, and that interaction produces all sorts of emotions - positive and negative. The unreliability of that interaction is what makes it interesting, and you know that when you've legitimately earned someone's respect, that's something to be proud of.

There's no point talking to a doll. Dolls aren't people. If you pull a doll's string and the doll says you're great, that doesn't mean anything. Of course, even a well-written fictional character is still a "doll" in some respect, but there's a huge difference between a believable character offering a personality-justified opinion in response to your actions and a barely-developed character praising you for some generic action that you had to take anyways. The more like a "person" a character is, the more legitimate their words should feel.