Greg Rucka's Post 9/11 Pin-ups.

In the opening gambit to Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, Tara Chace sits poised for her first hit. Freezing and exhausted, her target; a Russian General the American's want dead, slides out of a car. Tara fires a single bullet straight into his skull and thrusts her frozen bones into the shadows. Moments later she is spotted and makes a break for it, cue chase sequence, bullet to the leg, then eventual escape. The cold seductive killer, watches, destroys, then slips away into shadow.  That should be the end of it.. but upon return to London the mission, which was simply a favour for the CIA, has lost any shimmer of glamour. Her first kill was meaningless when it should have been for Queen and Country.

Batwoman: Elegy tells the story of a disgraced twenty-something dismissed from the military academy that had promised vengeance. Kate Kane is a vigilante super-heroine. In the opening glossy two page spread Batwoman has her sensible red boot pressed against a young man's throat. "You know what I want Rush" Her shocking red lips against her grey-white skin are a wound and a threat. "I want your secrets, I want where and I want when, I want her name. And you ... really... want to give it to me."  This emphasis bristles with sexual tension, she is the potential dominatrix, ready to punctuate her questions with the brutal work of her fists.

 But the cliched questions and the overblown dialectic suggests that she is new to the role... This is outlined beautifully in an article by Q Magazine's Colin Smith.  Referencing the moment she meets Batman, He writes: 

It's a lack of substance on Kate's part that's emphasised as she stumbles backwards with the shock of The Batman's appearance, faced with a character that's as solid and unmoving as a fundamental moral principle. Kate, we're surely being told, is a cartoon of herself, but this man in a mask is profoundly real. 

For Smith, Batman's assured competence (READ: white, wealthy hetero-normative power) sits in stark contrast to Kane's approach to vigilantism which is fueled above all by anger. When Kate's father discovers a cache of weapons she has stolen from his barracks he informs her:

 "I was actually relieved when I realized what you were doing with all this stuff. But here's a little biscuit for you to chew on, Kate. You're not a soldier anymore, and you're not a cop. Just because you survived beast at the point and you were senior elite in gymnastics doesn't mean you're a damn crimefighter and its going to stop now."

His anxiety is gendered. Jake Kane highlights his daughter's feminine achievements: the moment she survived the attack of "beast" referencing a potential rape, and her talents in gymnastics. In so doing, he airbrushes over his daughter's successes in military school. Only once Kate informs him "I've found my way to serve", proposing that the work will bring direction and discipline to her life, does Jake Kane accept her decision. His attempts to undermine her plans give her a platform to explain the decision. Rucka filters her personality through several layers, purposely weaving a narrative that shows more how others respond to Kate, rather than asserting and reasserting her core values. The following double page spread, stunningly produced by artist J.H. Williams, reiterates the reference to gymnastics.

Also she's a keen trainspotter.

 Five images of her fulfilling masculine mocked-up missions in army gear is overlaid by her contorted body as she retrains on gym beam. It is this flexibility to deny and reclaim gender stereotyping that makes Kate Kane so powerful.


In contrast, Tara Chace is unbending, determined, masculine and, as a result, brittle. Running on empty, Chace freezes, gets into fixes, gets shot, and above all is driven almost mad by the bureaucrats in London and undermine her decisions and treat her as a commodity. Following being attacked and electing to CHARGE at him like bloody lunatic  Chase is chastised by Mister Kinney; a higher up. "You! Chace! I want an answer by God! You stupid Bitch! Your orders were to draw them out, not to engage!" She is visibly exhausted, fag in mouth, the adrenaline having ripped through her. In a rage, she passes him "You have a problem with my performance, you're free to take it up with D-Ops.... at which point I'll be delighted to tell the home office about how you arrived just after the nick of time." The next time they meet, Chace is given a chance to explain her decision. [left] She smiles. "Next time you find someone shooting at you... and you're unarmed, try running towards the shooter" Then scowls "And pray the shooter isn't me."

Colin Smith, in his review of batwoman opens :

It's impossible to say whether "Batwoman: Elegy" is an angry comic book that's been written by an angry man.

But I strongly suspect that it is.

Not only is Rucka angry, but Kate Kane is furious and Chace, livid. In both series this anger is given meaning by the discrimination it responds to. Chase crumbles under the pressure of fulfilling the masculine role of spy, whilst being undermined by her female body; which gives scumbags like Kinney the opportunity to call her anything they want, undermine her decisions and insinuate that she is unable to cope with war. The female body takes the brunt; Chace self-medicates alcohol, cigarettes; whilst the brutal work of the active spy, and the stress and the strain of London politics additionally take their toll. The final panel of her time in the series shows her body dealing the final blow to active service as she sits holding a positive test for pregnancy. The battleground of Queen and Country is located not in Afganistan, Iraq, or in London, but in Chace's body which is devastated by active service. Despite this, Rucka does not suggest that Chace is unsuitable for active service, but rather that her female body impacts how the men around her respond to her work. It is society's perception of the woman at war which eventually destroys her career.

Kane on the other hand is removed from the army when she admits she is a lesbian.She removes herself from the institution that would seek to undermine her by choosing vigilantism. This choice allows her to experiment sexually and lose control of the stark and austere persona she had pursued in military school.

Another torn apart female body. 

 The choices she makes in her own appearance, sexual preferences, and the feats she performs are not politicised. Unlike Chace, she has less responsibility, and her body is not the battleground. Rucka's Post 9/11 pin-ups attack the institution. Not the military or MI6; but the institution of gender which expects women to perform like men, but continues to undermine them for the gender they attempt to conceal. Kate Kane's desire to serve her government has been squashed. Time and again that the insults of others; that she is too sexual, too feminine, too gay, too much, only feed an overarching desire to serve herself. Only by rejecting the constraints of  "institutionalised" gender roles and by living through their decisions, can Rucka's heroines coherently construct identities that are strong and female.

I've just been TO THE MOON

Just completed freebird games' "To the moon" an atmospheric point and click narrative adventure (Not so much a game, as an interactive book). It was really confusing, because time leapt about, so no real post today, just a quick note to say: This game is really really interesting and I think you should probably play it because it is creepy and quirky and a little pretentious, and made me cry real tears.

Trailer posted so you can enjoy the fab music. *sigh* OK Fan girl gushing over!

Post script: This game contains another crazy woman! I'm really gonna have to make a bingo card for video game characterisation of women. This one handles it as subtley as The blackwell conspiracy, and its a really key plot device. I feel another post coming on: for another night.

No Girls Please: Gender Stereotyping in Indie Games.

 In Critter Crunch, an extremely polished puzzle game from publisher Capybara Games, there are three characters. First the game is introduced by a nature documentary presenter slash explorer. Having discovered the unique eco system of the island, he delights on explaining the critters habitats and behaviour. He then goes on to introduce the puzzling central protagonist; a rotund and furry critter called Biggs, and the progeny of that creature called smalls. Each of these critters could have been genderless, but the writers make it clear that this hunter gatherer creature is a father looking out for his son. So within the first two minutes of the gameplay; the exposition has been carried out, and two squashy main characters have all been represented as arbitrarily male. This may seem like a moot point as it doesn't affect gameplay directly; it could even be a nice twist on how we perceive caring for children, but as the developer makes no explicit attempt to explain the gender choice for any of the main characters it comes across as lazy or sexist design.

Wait where are the balls in this diagram?

From the excitable, and parachuting adventurer, to the father-son combo, the game glibly assumes the only possible audience for this otherwise interesting, colourful and appealing puzzler will be male. Added to that it seems to share the assumption that boys will only associate with male characters, which has long been held by producers of children's television programming.  In recent years however with the break-out hits of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a show that has developed an enormous fanbase amongst young men (aged 16-25) and with the newest season of the Avatar kids television franchise: The Legend of Korra. The latter show was only given a ten episode run as the network was extremely anxious that young boys would be unable to connect with it's eponymous female protagonist. The show was an enormous hit and now has 40 episodes in the pipeline. Boys and girls connected with the Korra and this hopefully made bosses sit up and listen to the idea that boys will watch girls if the story is good enough.

omnomnomnomnom

The male characterisation seems decision that boys play video games and therefore they will want to be the protagonists in this adventure. Furthermore, the central mechanic of the parent - child relationship is that the father gathers food, and when there is a long combo, you get the option to “barf rainbows” into your waiting child's mouth. Perhaps it was deemed inappropriate for women to regurgitate food, it's not as if children take liquid from women's bodies both in the womb and from the breast after. Sticky fluid is certainly not something we want to associate with the female form: that would be indiscreet. Intention, is of course a dangerous thing to write about, and though I was tempted to email the publisher, I felt aware that I might come off as blinkered, when really I want to improve video game story telling. If the producers of the game had explained the decision, I think I'd be able to swallow it. But I felt disappointed that this puzzle game could have shown an interesting series of relationships, instead chose to build a game that would appeal predominantly to little boys.

Indie game developers obviously still have to find a market for their games, but they do not have to pander to scared, sexist and outdated publishing practices. Capybara games are not alone in their particular decision perpetuate arbitrary gender characterisation. For the most part developers choose a male protagonist and this is not always problematic, but the decision becomes particularly noticeable when the player character is in fact an object. In the platformer Nimbus, you play as a bullet shaped space-ship that has no means of internal propulsion but floats using gravity and air streams. The little spaceship is not manned, apparently, but a sentient creature with, you will be surprised to hear... a pink girlfriend space ship. In the opening cut-scene, the two little space ships are having a moment of fun, when an evil eye plucks the helpless pink robot out of the sky and laughs maniacally. The perfect expression of lazy design, the developers hark back to retro platformers without considering how problematic this stereotype is.

Nimbus could have used it's beautiful air mechanics to show objects falling space and showcased what makes this platformer unique. Puzzle games have every right to pare down on narrative through cut scenes, if they don't have the resources to carry them out. But when effort and time has been put into recreating the tired princess-kidnap trope, I am left wondering how that time might have been better spent. When developers cut narrative corners they inevitably rearticulate dominant paradigms, they fall into mediocrity and innovation is tainted. It's a shame, because interesting mechanics and concepts deserve polished stories that say SOMETHING, rather than repeating the small nothings of every slip-shod game that has preceded it.