The first Portal was a game about a round, gently shaped gun that fired vaginas into walls. These vaginas allowed you to subvert the structure of levels, non-violently isolate and neutralize threats and generally avoid conflicts. Occasionally they’d redirect objects of violence, phallic and intrusive destructive objects of violence, back on their users. Through your efforts with this vagina gun you removed a series of orbs from a giant phallic robot, reducing its strength with each partial castration. When you’ve finished castrating the giant phallic robot you’re rewarded with your freedom. At least, briefly. Until retconning set in and you were dragged back to your testing chamber by some indubitably inefficient robot arm.
Basically, it was the girliest game ever. Girlier than Barbie Horse Adventures, because Portal wasn’t content to just portray a concept of womanhood and ask us to go along with it. It wanted us to think about how phallic first person shooters were and think about how their shooter rejected all of the concepts that made these other games so phallic and homosocial. It forced players to unwittingly forward the end goal of girl-power, and it did it subversively, smartly and effectively. Portal made other games seem silly, violent and irrational by comparison. It was a game that introduced us to the idea of uniquely feminine game play and heroes, portrayed and conveyed with the same consistency and authority normally reserved for masculine gaming archetypes.
Portal 2 is far, far girlie-er. If Portal 2 was a women’s support group Portal would be a group of anti-abortion protesters chanting outside of a Planned Parenthood, screaming at young women as they attempt to enter. So how can this be?
Portal 2 builds on all of the themes that Portal originally laid: ideas about subverting authority, evading enemies and using a vagina gun to solve all of your problems. But unlike the first Portal game, which pitted woman against woman, or at least against disembodied female robot, which is pretty good for a non-exploitative portrayal of a woman by video game standards, Portal 2 is all about subverting male authority and restoring a feminine authority structure.
Portal 2 begins in the ruins that have come from Chell’s previous efforts. Clearly people have moved through these ruins since her insurrection, but without GlaDOS’ supervision the facility has fallen into disrepair. A bumbling male caretaker ejects Chell into this brave new world with the best of intentions, intending to use the portal device, the embodiment of feminine power in the world of Portal, to exert authority over the world and find a way to escape the crumbling ruins around them. In the process, entirely due to the efforts of the bumbling male figure, they resurrect GlaDOS, overthrow her and then set the facility on a path to self-destruction under its new male leadership. But don’t despair! GlaDOS is nicer, and has been moved into a potato, so you’ll spend a great deal of time getting to know her and solving puzzles by her side so that you can restore girl-power to the facility and restore order.
Oh, also, the moon is in there. Like, all over the place in art and design. It fits into the back story, even. As a symbol of feminine power and energy, the moon really can’t be beat, and in time it becomes a pretty significant character in the world of Portal 2.
Portal 2 is basically all about girl power again. And not the girl power that Portal the First exerted against an abstract, faceless female authority figure who was carrying out the will of a faceless masculine group of scientists against one hapless test subject. Portal 2 is about re-awakening a feminine authority structure, restoring women to their bodies, their history and their freedom.
At the forefront of this battle is GlaDOS. GlaDOS begins Portal 2 stripped of her power, in the same state that you left her in at the end of the original Portal. But before long (after destroying both her ability to produce new robot-life within the facility and her ability to remove unwanted life from its walls, gee thanks for the subtlety Valve) she’s removed from her seat of power, replaced by an inept and violent male replacement. And then she’s inserted into a potato. Her body is subjugated and she’s forced into a shapeless mass, where even her mind is constrained by her surroundings.
But in this shell parts of her, long dormant, awaken. Through adversity GlaDOS learns of her past, who she was and where she came from. She learns of other male authority figures less adept than herself at maintaining the science factory that is Aperture Labs. And we learn of how she came to control Aperture and make it into something truly great. Or at least quite clean and filled with very efficient science.
GlaDOS and Chell embark on a journey together. They bond, they discover things about their womanhood they’d long since forgotten. They paint stuff, granted with various gels that fuck up physics in all sorts of interesting ways. And then they expose the facile nature of the new male authority figure, subvert him and then dismantle his ill-conceived and self-destructive empire on the eve of its collapse, only to replace it with a new, cooperative and functional world order, one where women reign once again.
If I was writing an academic paper, I’d wax on the specifics. But I don’t think video games are well suited to academia. That’s part of what makes them such an interesting art form: they resist traditional analysis. So much of the meaning of a game comes out in the experience of playing it, and so much of what a player gets out of a game comes out of the small, subtle choices that they make during the course of play, right down to where they look at a given moment.
Portal 2 is all about that specific moment, the moment where you interrupt Wheatley with a solution to a puzzle or burn down literal barriers in order to create portals. It’s all about how you feel when GlaDOS prattles on to you about how amazing Cave Johnson is during his lemon speech or how you feel when you see her in that final scene, trying to decide what to do with you. It’s all about making your own decisions with the tools provided to you, even if those decisions are all too often constrained (especially when compared with the original Portal). It is fundamentally a game about using the moon, the symbol of womanhood and the connection between women and the planet, to castrate a male robot bent on destroying your home not through malice but through blind ambition and ineptitude.
The first Portal was a game about subverting authority and exploring how much women could do in games. It did a great job with that and it made us laugh while it made us think, just like Professor Frink. Portal 2 is just as funny a game, just a subtle a narrative about gender and authority. But where Portal was all about women fighting women and establishing an hierarchy, rejecting the idea of authority in general, Portal 2 is all about establishing an hierarchy where a woman is king.
Because in the end of Portal 2, GlaDOS is back. Even if she’s not exerting authority over you anymore, having learned her lesson about girl power in the past, she’s still a female authority figure subjugating a pair of male robots for her own personal pleasure and entertainment. And there’s no way you can convince me that that isn’t an endorsement of the power of woman and a statement on the importance of re-evaluating the manner in which women interact socially, so that we enter a society where women support one another rather than tearing one another down. Portal 2 is about more than just girl power. It’s about creating a female society. It’s about lady-on-lady love.
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