I'm sure that, by now, y'all have heard of or actually seen Damsel in Distress which deals with the trope of, well, female video game characters becoming quest targets
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I shoulda been a bit clearer on that, since "Rinoa needs to be saved incessantly" is why I never finished Final Fantasy 8, as you know. ^^ So, it would be fair to say that I agree with the video's premise, that having fewer Rinoas would be better. (Along with fewer Celeses and OtherM!Samusclones, but that's another matter
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I guess to me it seems like a lot of the problems people are having with the video are related to how it's presenting the problem, rather than actually dealing with the problem itself. Which seems kinda beside the point, you know? Focusing on Krystal not being a good example doesn't erase the countless other examples of the trope, or prove that it doesn't exist or isn't harmful. It just seems a bit like missing the forest for the trees to me.
I agree with you on this, and thanks for getting me to rethink it. ^.^
I suppose the trap I got into was not finding a reasonable answer to "why is this happening" (it's implied that it's because Shigeru Miyamoto is a pig, which at best explains a tiny bit of it, definitely not the whole thing.) Then opposing bad facts.
I did another entry that takes a bit of a different angle, sorta reworking the video's content to poke at why things happened the way they did in the cultural context... and with an aim toward a solution.
(The very short form: "write what you know" plus being a man = disadvantage when writing women. Solution: Teach more gender-neutral writing styles like how James Cameron does it, and also get more women as writers. It's not perfect, it could even be wrong, but it's an idea. ^^ )
It's always kinda hard to figure out why sexism exists because a lot of the time, it's not perpetrated maliciously, you know? People don't wake up and think "man how can i flip off women today" (unless you're David Hopkins). But when you live in a society that has tons of tiny messages supporting and furthering sexist thinking, you start to internalize that and it manifests itself in ways you might not intend or plan. That doesn't mean that people doing sexist things or making sexist media are necessarily bad people, but it can mean that they aren't considering some of the ramifications of their decisions for their female characters might have. If you're used to seeing women as sex objects, considering that's how 90% of media portrays them in advertising and the like, then you're not going to think very hard about portraying a woman as a sex object in whatever it is that you're making. That doesn't necessarily make the person doing sexist things a bad person, but that also doesn't mean that what they're doing isn't sexist and/or
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I suppose the trap I got into was not finding a reasonable answer to "why is this happening" (it's implied that it's because Shigeru Miyamoto is a pig, which at best explains a tiny bit of it, definitely not the whole thing.) Then opposing bad facts.
I did another entry that takes a bit of a different angle, sorta reworking the video's content to poke at why things happened the way they did in the cultural context... and with an aim toward a solution.
(The very short form: "write what you know" plus being a man = disadvantage when writing women. Solution: Teach more gender-neutral writing styles like how James Cameron does it, and also get more women as writers. It's not perfect, it could even be wrong, but it's an idea. ^^ )
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