Being Female Skyrim Le

[Beverly Zielonko]

Ifeel like I have to defend Skyrim here. The lack of memorable and well-written female characters in games has always been a problem, and progress on this front was extremely slow until recently. Even now, the amount of great women in games is far outweighed by the men. I find it extremely annoying, to be honest, and this is coming from a man (albeit a feminist man, but still).

Okay so a few points need to be adressed, because while yes there are more men then women some of your sticking points are skewed and need to be addressed.

On the issue of Dragons, dragons are GENDERLESS their the OLD GODS, who humanity dethroned, (one of which i must point out is a woman, yes of the 3 people who Banished Alduin one is a woman, one of the first HEROES of skyrim is a woman.) As for the voice actors have you ever looked into the actual data files of skyrim? There are about 7 voices total that are recycled for EVERY NPC, each of those voice actors does about 14,000 lines but its hardly fair to say shyrim has some sort of massive cast of voice actors and most of male.

Hulda the innkeepr and Yosolda often talk, Hulda of couse talks to Sadia, Sybl Stendor the COURT WIZARD in Solitude advises Elisif the Fair. Most of the mage College is female, and the person who handles day to day affairs is not the male Archmage but the female Mirabele.

Watching various movies and TV shows over the last several years, I've noticed that there are some odd things with how female characters are often written compared to male characters. They're frequently less developed, or constantly shoved into the same pigeonholes. I strongly suspect that many of these issues are a large part of the reason that the many female fans I've spoken to over the years end up preferring the male characters while not caring much for the female ones - they don't really relate to these characters that much, let alone see anyone they want to emulate; rather, they see themselves better-reflected in the male characters and usually find what they do to be more enticing. When the female characters actually do have fans, their fans often don't even like them for the traits that they actually have or show, but rather for the ones that fans project onto them or imagine that they have offscreen. (For example, MCU!Black Widow's alleged ability to scare people never actually appears in the films, at least not as of October 2018.)

In the interest of doing better and making female characters that are genuinely just as complex and engaging, here's a list of the odd things I've noticed in female characters over the last while. Of course there are exceptions (particularly in children's entertainment), but by and large these traits seem to be really common in mainstream movies and shows aimed at general audiences.

Many male characters are motivated by idealism or compassion. If they see people being hurt or wronged, their conscience compels them to do something about it. Captain America/Steve Rogers, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the Tenth Doctor, Newt Scamander, and Superman are all good examples of this. These men all act from the heart. They are powerfully principled people who see serving the greater good as a worthy goal unto itself.

Furthermore, pain and trauma is used to motivate male and female characters differently. For men, it doesn't motivate their actions as much as it informs their moral choices. Peter Parker doesn't become Spider-Man to avenge his uncle's death; he becomes Spider-Man because losing his uncle made him realize that actions (or a lack thereof) have consequences. Steve Rogers wants to protect those who can't protect themselves because he spent so many years being weak and knows first-hand how that feels. But for women, their pain doesn't help them decide who they want to be, nor does it help them evaluate the morality of their choices.

It's her job/duty. She's simply here because it's her job or duty, nothing more. She has no emotional stake in this, nor any personal principles that led her to choose this job or path over any other. An example of this is Maria Hill from The Avengers.

She wants to find what's missing. She might be looking for her missing family, trying to fill in the details of her mysterious past, or trying to figure out her purpose in life. Rey from the new Star Wars trilogy is an example of this.

She has no other real option. The world will be destroyed if she doesn't do something, or someone close to her will die, or something like that. She's essentially faced with a Hobson's choice, which isn't really a choice at all. An example of this is Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

Considering how many people these days genuinely believe that women are only motivated by self-interest or self-preservation, or just mindlessly follow the crowd, this seems like a genuinely bad way to keep on characterizing female characters all the time. While none of these characters are necessarily bad in and of themselves, we rarely get anything else, and that is a problem.

Let's take a look at male scientists versus female scientists in fiction. Male scientists are often allowed to use their discoveries and research for fun. For example, Tony Stark gets to build adorable robots and use his flying suit for recreational purposes. Female scientists, on the other hand, usually only collect data for some vague unspecified purpose until it turns out it's useful for solving something. The only thing Jane Foster actually does with her discoveries is use them to stop the bad guy in Thor: The Dark World. She doesn't make space art. She doesn't figure out how to build a personal teleporter and use it to make late-night beer runs. She doesn't post space jokes on Twitter.

And speaking of jokes, fiction frequently treats them as anathema to femalekind. How many female characters can you think of who genuinely like to make people laugh? How many of them actually laugh at their boyfriends' jokes outside of a romcom? Despite both of these things being positive and healthy, you rarely see it. Instead, female characters often don't make jokes that aren't at someone else's expense, and jokes that their love interests or partners make will be met with stone-faced disapproval. (Realistically, this is a surefire sign of an unhealthy relationship.)

The female characters who are shown to be silly, wacky, or foolish are typically ones that we aren't supposed to take very seriously, even if we are supposed to care about them. Such characters tend to be limited to the roles of quirky, ditzy sidekicks who never accomplish much beyond annoying and occasionally assisting the main character. This is where Darcy Lewis stands in relation to Jane Foster. Meanwhile, Tony Stark is allowed to be silly, wacky, and foolish, and be the main protagonist of three movies.

Many male protagonists have a wide variety of realistic flaws and weaknesses. They might be arrogant or rude, they might accidentally say the wrong thing, or they might exhibit some of the the more bothersome symptoms of some mental condition or other. They might struggle with physical disability, or short tempers, or noxious mental programming that rears up when they're stressed out.

This makes them all the more relatable to those of us who share these flaws, no matter our gender. We feel sympathy for them, we feel our personal struggles acknowledged, and we become all the more invested in their stories because if they can make it, maybe so can we.

Female characters, on the other hand, rarely have problems like these. If they do have these problems, they rarely cause the kind of complications that we have to deal with in real life, which makes them less relatable.

Sometimes their flaws are framed as virtues. For example, if she's an honest-to-God control freak, it's not a "flaw" because the alleged "manchild" in her life (typically an ADHD-coded man who hasn't yet had his sense of fun and wonder crushed out of him) supposedly "needs" her to keep him reined in. This kind of thing certainly can't be helping anyone's perception of women as fun-crushing killjoys, and nobody should believe that anyone who makes a hobby out of crushing someone's happiness is a good romantic partner. (If anything, that kind of behavior tends to be found in predators.)

Likewise, female characters who gleefully cause others emotional distress by stomping all over their boundaries are often framed as "strong and empowered." In reality, boundary-stomping is abusive behavior, and is often a sign of a predatory personality.

So not only do nonexistent or unacknowledged flaws make female characters harder to relate to, but they also help create a false impression that women are just naturally flawless and that there's something profoundly wrong with them (or you!) if they aren't. This is the kind of nonsense that leads to women being held to higher standards of behavior than men and erases the reality of women sometimes being perpetrators of abuse. Lose/lose, nobody wins!

Many female characters have an extremely limited or blunted range of emotions. One example of this is what I call the Moffat Method of Writing "Strong" Characters. It's a simple formula: you take away a character's capacity to feel things like fear, guilt, sadness, and sympathy, and then you fill the void with nonstop quipping, button-pushing, and boundary-stomping. (Sometimes they're allowed to feel these things under rare circumstances; such as when the fate of a male protagonist is uncertain, or to try and show that that these characters really are girls/women despite their "tough" exteriors, as if emotions like these are uniquely female.)

So what's the problem? Well, as stated before, trying to frame abusive and predatory behavior as a sign of strength is really messed up. Nobody should be led to believe that engaging in abusive/predatory behavior is just what "strong" people do. (If you're not sure how to establish that a character is strong, On Writing Empowered & Empowering Characters has information.)

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