Basically a list of what I’d like to avoid, although this is more
how the character is written and used in a plot rather than a design.
But i still want to make note of these kinds of characters.
This isn't just the role of
girlfriend/mother/daughter/love interest. These are pure negative roles for
women and just a character in general.
Smurfette Principle
I think it's pretty obvious how this isn't
all too great for women's representation is games,
there barley any woman let alone the diversity of women!
This is getting better in games, although
in the main cast there's still a lot of smurfettes such as the Mario and Zelda
franchises. Which is odd considering half the population is female and there is
a growing amount of female characters in games.
Woman in refrigerators
This trope is more of a comic book one concerning super heroes.
When a super heroin is de-powered it's
usually in a brutish way. and the female stays dead.
Whereas if a male super heroes dies it's
likely they'll come back EVEN STRONGER.
A good example is in batman, a female
named Oracle has her back broken and is paralyzed and to spend her
life in a wheel chair.
Whereas when batman's back break he's
fine! he'll bounce back.
Femme Fatale
Usually the villain, they're the kind of
female that knows she's hot and uses it to tempt and confuse the males.
This style of character does
give a fairly bad reputation to women, putting out the message that woman are
manipulative
Manic pixie dream girl
These kind of females go hand in hand with
the brooding male protagonist these females have only one goal. To
make that male OPEN THERE HEART and be happy with themselves and there life.
Aww.
The character tend to come with the traits
of 'bubbly' 'quirky' oh and let's not forget attractive!
But why is this character type usually a
bad type?
Well this sort of females only goal is to
make another character (usually male) open up. They are only there to support
the male, they tend to have little development themselves or talk about their
problems.
An example in a Video game would be
Catherine from the game Catherine. A blonde pretty girl who is only there to be
peppy and happy and give the male protagonist a good time. (Also the sex appeal
of the game)
Image of Catherine
here:
Straw feminist
This kind of character is used to very
poorly portray what feminism is. They are over the top and the kind
of man-hating female character.
A group of straw feminists are often used
as rivals or villains.
I'll use a power puff girl episode as an
example.
In the beginning of the episode it was
explained how gender-neutral and equal there world was.
Then there was a female villain whose
outfit was covered in the female symbol sign.
She has some legitimate complaints such as
the lack of super heroines. But then manipulated the 3 power puff's into
thinking men didn't do any work and just simply used woman.
The 3 power puff's ended up yelling at men
and hating them.
Ironically the power puff girls were
already quite a good symbol of a strong independent and well-rounded
female characters.
It's as though writers think feminism mean
a woman think's women have MORE rights than men. Giving a bad reputation of
what it actually means. Feminism = EQUAL rights.
Thankfully this has not been abused very
much in video games.
