"What makes a great female character?"

[pretzelcoatl]

So one of my friends linked me to this, and I figured at the very least it would make a good discussion in this community. (More of their videos are here in case you're interested.)



Thoughts?

Comments

[riotlounge]

It breezes over the notion that a man is not really going to understand or be able to write the societal pressures for a woman a lot of times, and that's why we need more female developers and storytellers in an already swamped game industry full of men.

I also don't like how it is set up to be fairly binary gendered.

It's an okay video but I find it funny that it's constantly a male avatar going to discuss concepts that female authors and experts in the field/subject have written about but still written and produced by a dude.

[pretzelcoatl]

I didn't think about the first point, but I did think about the last two and I agree. (At least one of the writers/collaboraters is a woman, but I was still bracing myself.)

[riotlounge]

Yeah, it's a troubling concept - can a dude write about a woman, I think they can. But I think it takes a lot more to step out of the box that he occupies to give realistic pressures to a female character in order to make a good female character believable. Which might contribute to why there aren't as many.

Yeah, there's a female collaborator, just an amusing choice of narrator. It feels very "This dude is telling me how to write believable good female character." I also hate the idea of "true" or "pure" female characters.

[pretzelcoatl]

Yeah, and even some of the ones which people point to aren't perfect. I love Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, but she's still pretty bland and cliche in many regards (although in a weird way I wonder if this isn't a bad thing per se since she's a lot like other MALE characters who can be the same way).

They did a better one on Sexual Identity that I might post on my journal, although it pretty much just deals with Persona 4's handling on the topic.

[invisiblemoose]

With the shoe on the other foot though, would it really be better that the only way you could talk about this issue was to have THE GIRL show up and talk about it, when the male narrator has already been established as being the voice of this group and talks on behalf of the trio for every other issue?

[riotlounge]

No, it was mostly just amusing to consistently have the narrator tackling topics like how to involve females in gaming and creating strong female characters with a male narrator.