“-isms” Abounding
So I’ve been playing the game “Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich” a bit lately, and it was a pretty addicting and fun game to play. One thing that ruined it a bit for me was how absolutely stereotypical each character in the game was, despite some pretense of diversity in the cast.
You start off the game as the female character Alchemiss (“Nice!” you might think, “a female chemist superhero? Go, science!” No, she’s given powers by a voodoo-esque goddess. Ah well, moving on.). Within two lines of dialogue your rather confused character is told to “quit with [her] girlish fantasies” and get on with the mission by the Minuteman. Well, despite the fact this guy is a relatively useful character, I can’t say I used him in the game after this unless I had to.
Trivial? Not enough, you say? Why is the only Muslim superhero in the game depicted only in a burqa or as a gauzily-clad genie? Ah, right, I forgot these were the two options for women, especially Muslim women. Why is the only black women character (Blackbird) a shrieking ex-criminal? Why are the two other black characters only charge-and-smash creations? Why is one of the female teen sidekick’s (the Sea Urchin) canned lines, “Pretty good, for a girl!” Why do we hear the line “Looks like this is one lass that’s _gone power crazy_ that we’re now going to have to put back in her place” from the superhero she works with, when a superhero turns evil? (This was Man O’War – I really liked him before this line, too.) What is this game trying to tell me?
I’m not sure yet where to draw the line as to whether a game is actually worth supporting (with my money) or playing when it has these issues – especially when the issues are so glaring. To some extent, I understand that it’s a Silver Age evocation – how the characters behave is in line with this. But that doesn’t mean that the characters themselves need to be so insultingly two-dimensional. How much extra time would it have taken to create slightly less stereotypical characters? Would it have been hard to change the small snippets of dialogue and backstory so that all the characters seemed real, instead of just the main ones? Or maybe they just shouldn’t have played with these stereotypes in the first place, and thus saved even more time.
Perhaps the game aimed to be campy and clever with their play on these concepts, but “jokes” that prop up prevailing negative stereotypes almost by definition can’t be original or clever (or, I’d challenge, even actually funny). When I’m waiting on a guy friend to go out to dinner, and complain that we’re always waiting on the guys because they spend hours getting ready, that has the potential to be funny, because it’s subverting a stereotype. When the same friend tut-tuts about “Girls” and their proclivities when I stop at a window to look at clothes or shoes, this isn’t funny (except to him) and actually can get mildly insulting, especially given his aversion to anything with even slight female connotations (Yikes! A “girl” book! Put that shit down, you’ll lose your hardware for sure if you adopt that foreign emotional software!). Of course, that’s a completely separate post.
Anyway, now I’ve moved on to the Elder Scrolls game Morrowind, which I’ve heard is awesome just for the complete lack of gender roles that it contains. I originally considered getting the newer game, Oblivion, but my computer spent the half hour following my first attempt to play it curled up in a corner, keening, so I figured it’d be best to go easy on the poor guy and find it something slightly more manageable.
I’m going to disagree a little bit. For me at least, it’s not so much that the game features objectionable stereotypes – which, like you said, are in keeping with the general style – but that those stereotypes are never challenged. If after being called a silly woman, Alchemiss were to respond with a witty and disarming rejoinder, then the initial insult would be tolerable. Since the developers would, in essence, be telling us that the stereotypes are objectionable.
It’s the reason why the Chappelle’s Show isn’t racist, despite trafficing in many racist stereotypes. The entire thing is done with a wink and nod, letting the audience know that the writers believe the stereotypes to be ridiculous.
Chappelle’s Show makes that practically its mission, though; if we were going to devote a similar amount of time to each bald-faced stereotype presented to us in FF, I don’t think we’d have any time left to play the actual game. Seriously, of the two solutions, simply leaving out the sexist/racist tropes and giving the characters a bit of depth would be much easier.
How would responding “disarmingly” abate the previous sexism? And how would this work without severely derailing the plot? In my head, I keep seeing a conversation between two teens, one who doesn’t want to drink, but doesn’t want to admit it: “You want a beer?” “No, thanks, I am not thirsty.” Completely lame, fools nobody, and hardly ever accomplishes the purpose. A disarming, ‘submission smile’-like comment won’t convince anyone the first comment was inappropriate, and anyways this type of comment would not fit with Alchemiss’s character (at least as I saw it). But really, I can’t even envision an appropriate response to having my concerns dismissed as “girlish fantasies” that wouldn’t derail the conversation completely from the concerns to why that isn’t an appropriate thing to say.
Ok, the game is in the style of a more sexist, racist time. This is the time period and media the developers chose to work with (and it’s fun to look at and play in). But just because we’re hearkening back to this time period doesn’t mean we need to adopt the bad along with the good. When people hearken back to the idyllic time when real men fought real wars, they hardly ever remember that most of these real men mostly died real deaths from dysentery, tb, typhoid, you name it. When people wish they were in a time before people came in and messed everything up (however they did it this time), they usually forget that it’d be pretty hard to find a good burger and a beer then, let alone cell phone, ipod, and tv screen. But that’s just the point – we’re recalling the ideal of that time period, not necessarily the real. When we’re recalling the Silver Age of comics, when superheroes were real superheroes, do we really want to recall the realities of the –isms in that time and then not dismiss them? Is this an appropriate forum in which to bring them up or dismiss them? And if we bring them up without shooting them down, are we saying that they were really part of what was ideal about that age?
I never considered that, and thinking about it, you’re right. If we are trying to harken back to an ideal, there’s no reason to bring with us the negatives. The developers of Freedom Force could have made a game just as fun and nostalgic, without bringing in the stereotypes and prejudices of the 1950s and 1960s.
By the way, this is a great post, and it’s given me something to chew on for awhile.