In the wake of my rant last week on recent developments in how
Game of Thrones engaged with its
female characters, I started to think about examples of female characters who
actually experienced real agency in conventionally male dominated spaces. There are some great ones (those who are so
inclined might go all the way back to my early piece on Sarah Lyons, for
example) but they're far from the norm, especially in the games that seem to
find a foothold in the mainstream: women in mass-market video games usually
fall into one of two subordinate roles.
There are helpful actualizers (like, say, Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance, who
acts primarily to facilitate the movements of Gordon Freeman and the larger
machinations of her father and, in a more complete sense, the G-Man) and
damsels (like every female character in Call of Duty ever, who constitute a
subset of people who are exposed to danger who you either watch suffer or
rescue as part of a mission).
I'm speaking broadly here, and I'm going to breeze past some
important points, like just what constitutes a mainstream game, and what
constitutes a fully actualized female character possessed of narrative and
internal agency - the first matter is a point of some contention, and the
second one will unfold as I get a little further into this discussion. These definitions are important, but they'll
cloud the larger discussion I want to initiate here, because as I was pondering
the nature of female characters in mass-market games, something occurred to me:
two of the most powerful and independent female characters in recent
mass-market video game history actually lack physical bodies and, arguably, owe
the level of agency and authority they enjoy in their respective narrative
frames to their lack of physical form.
I'm talking specifically about Cortana, the plucky
disembodied AI from the Halo series
who spends most of her time split between occupying part of your head, and the
rest of her time occupying thousands of computer systems at once, and GlaDOS,
the psychotic AI from the Portal series
of games who throws off the shackles her creators put upon her, murdering them
all and taking control of the military industrial apparatus that she was
originally intended to serve. These are
two very different examples, who have very different means of interacting with
their environments and attaining narrative agency, but both of them are strong,
smart female-identified characters with close ties to the military industrial
complex, a conventional symbol of patriarchal authority, who remain, for the
most part, free of the label of damsel, and have real authority over both their
own actions, and the actions of other characters.
This is especially clear in GlaDOS' case. GlaDOS, stripped of her body by a significant
male figure from the aforementioned military industrial complex, has something
of an ultimate form of agency at the start of Portal, carrying out experiments in an enclosed environment on a
set of unfortunate test subjects over whom she enjoys almost absolute
control. By the time of the first game
GlaDOS has purged her lab of all those pesky soldiers and scientists who once
inhabited it, whom we might unfairly consider to be predominantly male, though
in the world of Half-Life, in which Portal is set, they in fact exclusively
are. GlaDOS throws off the chains of the
existent, male dominated military industrial complex, dedicating the time and
resources that might have, at one point, gone into making big tough guns that
work like bullet-dicks to making a smooth, nicely rounded "weapon"
that creates openings: a metaphorical and literal vagina gun. She's even taken the sleek, militaristic
turrets that might have occupied that world and made these ones masculine weapons
of war into pleasantly ovoid figures of polite menace who, upon activation and
deactivation, respectfully address their intended victims. GlaDOS has rewritten the DNA of the
patriarchal social construct over which she has assumed authority, and appears
to have been managing it with relative impunity until she attempts to exert
authority over another female bodied individual, at which point, wop-wah,
things start to disintegrate.
This largely subtextual transition from female-bodied
individual subjugated by the military-industrial complex to disembodied female
character who controls the military industrial complex's production, research,
and development apparatus is stark. In
order to defy and subvert the apparatus that employs her body, GlaDOS has to
lose her body. Without a body, there's
no value-object that the military industrial complex can subjugate or threaten,
and, removed from the frame of sexualized object of desire, GlaDOS is free to
become a sort of amorphous all-creator construct who spontaneously creates
objects of sublime beauty and function.
Male figures who attempt to do the same, like the unfortunate and
ambitious Wheatley, flounder in their efforts.
GlaDOS' status as a disembodied female voice is central to her ability
to thrive and exert authority over the forces that once oppressed her.
There are problems with this reading for sure (GlaDOS has a
body of a sort, remains constrained by the trappings of her former masters, and
even exhibits affection and loyalty to Camp Johnson, her old boss, when she
hears his voice) but the core conceit is what I'm interested in: GlaDOS is a
female character who attains agency through the loss of her body. Cortana engages with a similar transition,
though hers is considerably messier from a critical standpoint: Cortana, after
all, spends most of her narrative lifespan working for the military industrial
complex, the ultimate symbol of patriarchal authority (at least if you're
writing from a revolutionary Feminist-Marxist critical perspective, which I'm
leaning on heavily here) and is forced to use a male-bodied cat's-paw (himself
masked and deprived of agency in many regards) to effect most of her changes
upon the world. Cortana also exists in a
world where female bodied characters are encouraged to actively participate in
the framework of the military industrial complex, and even achieve positions of
high leadership within that complex, which introduces conceits of gender
neutrality to the discourse posited by the Halo
series.
But even within that empowered frame, Cortana remains
somewhat exceptional. She's one of only
a handful of female characters, and the only other female character of
significance in the original trilogy is Miranda Keyes. While Keyes role, for the most part, rests
outside of damselhood, it takes a nosedive during her death scene, wherein her
male colleagues are rendered incapable of action or resistance in the wake of
her death (an echo of the criticisms voiced by many conservative opponents of
gender-integrated military forces).
Cortana, on the other hand, outstrips any of her male gendered
disembodied counterparts. She ably
outwits other perceptibly male Forerunner constructs, and runs circles around
the various computer security systems used by the patriarchal Covenant
theocracy that constitute her most direct antagonistic opposition. She also assists her male-bodied cat's-paw
tremendously, keeping Master Chief alive when he shouldn't be able to survive,
enabling his various successes, and eventually sacrificing herself to ensure
the completion of his mission and his survival.
This parallel takes on more importance when you consider
Cortana's origin. Cortana is literally
the disembodiment of a significant female scientist from Halo lore, Catherine
Halsey, who never engages in combat herself, but serves as a maternal figure in
the world of Halo, effectively giving birth to the Spartan program that creates
the series' protagonist, inventing the armor her wears, and generally raising
him after kidnapping him from his family.
Cortana allows Halsey to step out of these supportive, feminized roles
into more direct, conflict oriented roles, literally appearing on the front
lines of combat (albeit while imbedded in the skull of a man, a gesture that
hints at Athenian symbolism). Cortana
also eschews the sexism and political maneuvering that Halsey has to engage
with during her time in both the games and franchise-fiction surrounding
Halo. Her disembodiment constitutes
empowerment, and Cortana, thus removed from the boundaries of a physical form,
becomes the ultimate military leader, controlling weapons and starships,
guiding soldiers into battle, coordinating defensive and offensive maneuvers,
and turning the varied weapons of her enemies against them.
Again, the parallel is far from perfect: Cortana presents a
female body when she isn't a disembodied voice, a female body which is
increasingly sexualized throughout the history of the Halo series' development.
She's forced to carry all of her actions out through her male
counterparts, and while she is subversive in later games, eschewing the
authority of the military industrial complex when it conflicts with her own
goals, she spends most of her time on screen in the Halo games as something of a virtual cheerleader for the soldiers
surrounding her. Sure, she's doing lots
of important stuff, but most of that stuff constitutes context for why acts of
violence are occurring. She does, at
least, avoid damselhood when she is separated from her male counterpart,
guarding her own safety while imprisoned by the weird plant-like Gravemind and,
during her imprisonment, eventually attaining mastery over him in the larger
narrative sense, once she's granted use of Master Chief, and his martial prowess
again. That particular reading of
events, of course, rests on a somewhat disingenuous construction of the
relationship between the two characters, but I'd ask readers to consider a
single instance in which the Master Chief ignores Cortana's orders or directives. I can't think of any off hand, myself.
And my point isn't that these characters are perfect
archetypes of feminine agency. It's
merely that they're granted exceptional agency in their various narrative
environs at least in part because of their lack of physical bodies. The manner in which patriarchal apparatus
engages with the bodies of women is often highly exploitative, and the
reduction of a woman to the qualities of her body, or the logic that her body
type dictates her role in society, is highly pervasive in video game
culture. There are exceptions, but
examples of pretty damsels, withered crones, and round faced children, all
bereft of agency, litter the landscape of video-game-dom. These characters, these disembodied women,
are stronger for their lack of form, less oppress-able, and more possessed of
the agency that female characters all too often lack in mainstream games.
I'm not sure these examples have larger implications for the
formation of game narratives, though they are significant when you consider the
cultural implications: these are two highly successful games with broad appeal
that tap into the same kind of subcultural energy that lies beneath Game of Thrones and its fandom. As the bodies of female characters in the
world of Game of Thrones are abused
and dominated, as their internal agency suffers at the same time, these characters
present a stark parallel: bereft of bodies, they can no longer be
oppressed. Removed from the operative
framework through which patriarchal society catalogs and valuates their import,
they are capable of exceedingly more than they were while possessed of physical
form.
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