'Cause what we tend to do
Is act on what they say
And then it is that way"
Is act on what they say
And then it is that way"
Jem - They
A few chapters ago, the webcomic Wilde Life featured a siren who unwittingly mesmerizes the male lead, invading his dreams and tormenting him with nightmarish visions. The writer repeatedly drives home the point that this is not her fault, that she regrets it and sets out to right her wrong by skipping town to cut the magic link.
The latest chapter of Wilde Life features a story about a girl who fell in love with a (male) supernatural raven. They merge into one entity. In the present day, another teenage male character is accosted by the raven-man, who sinisterly gets grabby with him, invading his dreams and tormenting him with nightmarish visions. Then suddenly the raven breaks character, shies away mumbling "no no no no no no no I don't want to hurt you" - and is revealed to be currently embodying the female half of their pair. Because of course. Man bad, woman good.
Two years ago, the remake of Ghostbusters came out with an all-female cast, pushed by an ad campaign costing more than the movie itself, and anyone who complained was shouted down as anti-female. Its fanatical adherents failed to grasp the problem that a movie entirely predicated on anti-male bigotry, on a sweeping replacement of men by women, was not likely to have anything else going for it. By all accounts, the result was a slog of a script peppered with a few half-assed, awkward action scenes. If the flick's remembered at all now, it's as a flop, and the critical reviews praising it make endless transparent excuses for its failings, obligated to applaud a feminist propaganda piece.
That same year, Siege of Dragonspear came out, which again earned a reputation as a social justice warrior mangling of a classic cRPG. More level-headed players also noted that aside from proselytizing, it lacked any of the positive qualities of the games whose name it took in vain.
Earlier this year, I played a badly written sequel to a good game. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is not terrible, all told. Its gameplay mechanics, while not outstanding, brought minor improvements or at least managed not to wreck the first installment's take on old-school isometric RPGs. Its sound and visuals were well enough executed, though the figures and landscapes they portray fall short of the original. Unfortunately, Obsidian Entertainment's leadership decided to hand over the writing job to a cabal of propagandists whose storytelling ability and incapacity for nuanced thought would best fit children's books, self-insert fan fics or cheesy inspirational posters. Characters, places, monsters, political factions, roleplaying choices, all fall flat. Even the background reincarnation-themed cosmology seems to be getting replaced (for no particular reason) by a standard "Hel" complete with standard red-skinned imps. That they actually thought "oh my Gaun" would stay funny through more than one repetition makes one wonder what qualifications, if any, Deadfire's writing team boasted to land their jobs.
It was also hard to miss Deadfire's dedication to feminism. The gravelly-voiced male narrator (a direct throwback to the old Infinity Engine games) is replaced by a female one, and the newly breathy, over-emotive narration expanded to nuisance levels. Male deities are degraded to boogeymen and thrown a line or two while female ones take up endless interludes with their (supposedly grandiose) bickering. So on my second playthrough I took the time to tally up its rather extensive supporting cast and see how many men or women were portrayed in a positive or negative light. I had originally planned to do so for this last post as well, rounding it out with end-game encounters, but honestly I lost my remaining interest in the game and the few remaining examples just reiterated more of the same:
Nemnok the Devourer (m) - a jumped-up imp masquerading as a stereotypical volcano god for an island's worth of primitive dwarves. Like all imps, which seem to be all male, he's disgusting, obnoxious, cruel, despicable in every way.
or
Lucia Rivan (f) - "she is the epitome of Grand Vailia. Of magnificence, honor, and duty. Living or undead, she strives still to serve her charge."
She's an honorable zombie too, and well-mannered to boot!
"What the goddess of death has marked, I will leave untouched." She nods solemnly, once, then with a tilt of her skull, steers the ship away.
or
Menzzago (m) - Lucia Rivan's former second, now leading an island full of flesh-eating undead abominations, hypnotized into submission. Evil, evil, evil down to his villainous lair's black and red color scheme.
And so on and on. What Deadfire's script lacks in quality it makes up for in droning repetition. This is, in fact, what has rendered it such a good case study for this sort of chauvinism. "Boys stink, girls rule!" makes a shaky foundation for a rather expansive game like Deadfire, but our stalwart auteurs stuck to their guns, yielding a noticeable, endlessly repeating pattern of juxtaposing negative male characters with positive female ones in order to emphasize female superiority. It only jumped out at me after having written my first post on the topic, at the start of my second playthrough. Once I had all the characters written down, the contrast of Governor Clario's moral failings against the virtuous women with whom he interacts (Benessa and Ikawha) became impossible to ignore. Not that it was subtle to begin with, given their overt badmouthing of him.
Three such patterns emerged.
1) Bad man, good woman.
For example, faction leadership for all four major factions is composed of a leader and second in command, one male and the other female. Regardless of who's actually in charge, the negative aspects of that faction are voiced and embodied by the male. Especially glaring in the case of the pirates, where the entirety of the pro-slavery faction is cast as male and the entirety of the anti-slavery faction is female.
It can also be much simpler, like the female shipwreck survivor on the beach in the tutorial jeering at her male counterpart and asking if he'd cried when he almost died.
Repeated at least 15 times by my estimate.
2) Bad man, good women.
Two or more women want to cooperate for some noble purpose, but wouldn't you know it, there just happens to be an obstacle in the way of their cooperation and that obstacle just happens to be male. Or, several idealized women are somehow all linked by their connection with a single bumbling, stupid, evil male.
Examples: Clario, Oswald, Hati, the nameless "a man" who created Modwyr, etc.
3) Bad men, good woman
A competent, well-intentioned female is somehow surrounded or being actively held back by the machinations or bumbling of two or more stupid, evil men.
Many more examples: Savia, Syri, Nairi, Wehata, Fassina, Bekarna, Elette, etc. - the archipelago's just stuffed with over-competent, saintly women beset on all sides by male evil and stupidity. Just the same old heroine indeed.
The scant positive male characters in Deadfire are a couple of female fan servicers lifted straight out of romance novels or a couple of conveniently wrinkled old daddy-figures with a disturbingly high chance to have been physically maimed somehow. The only negative female characters... well, shit, try to find one. Whenever any woman does something wrong, it's somehow toward a greater good, usually in service to her tribal unit or justified by the greater evil of the nearest male next to her. They managed only one true villainness, Malnaj, and even she was permitted more dignity than most of the male cast. Then you've got the monster races, which acquire gender-specific attributes in the sequel like the Spindle "Man" or "Mother" Sharp-Rock, with predictable demonization and sanctification.
So, class, what have we learned?
1) Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. Social justice tracts, much like the religious morality plays they so naively emulate, tend to weigh down the low end of the intellectual and artistic bell curve. Stepping back from social issues, there emerges a pattern of unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig.
2) Propaganda is not art. It's psychological conditioning. I may bitch about the endless repetition in Deadfire, but repetition is the whole point. Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra. Man bad, woman good. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repeat it on the news and in movies and especially repeat it in university literature departments, so that it carries forth into every publication, so that everyone can recite the feminist gospel truth. Deadfire, more blatant than most, is merely a reiteration of the conditioning we've endured all our lives. We have all grown up with this presumption of male debt and duty, of male "patriarchal" original sin to be expiated only by constant service toward women and children.
And it's an easy sell. It meshes perfectly with our instinctive view of men as competent, unfeeling instruments, the active, utilitarian branch of the family/tribal unit. It fits with men's instinctive eagerness to beat each other down as sexual competitors and with women's instinctive need for psychological leverage over men. Good or bad, it's hard to find any creator not kow-towing to female purity and moral superiority, from folklore to modern media. I'd count Wilde Life a great deal more clever and captivating a work in its own right than the others I've mentioned here. But still, of course the mentally invasive siren in Wilde Life must be presumed well-intentioned while the mentally invasive raven must be presumed creepy and evil... until he turns female. We know it, we expect it, we demand it, we hunger for it with the same pre-sentient, fanatical, impulsive, salivating reflex as Pavlov's dog knew the sound of the bell.
Man? Bad!
Woman? Good!
Repeat the mantra.
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