Lady Saviours

In an earlier blog post, Emma Hughes asked the question, ‘I was wondering if they have games where the girl is the hero who has to save the man’. Over the past few days, I’ve been looking for games that show examples of this, the implications of it, and delving into the reactions people’ve had to games where this is the case. Look under the cut for discussion of Resident Evil Code: Veronica, Bayonetta, Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, and Silent Hill 3.

Claire Redfield and Steve Burnside (Resident Evil Code: Veronica (2000))

In Code: Veronica, you spend the first two thirds of the game as Claire Redfield, a woman who’s been imprisoned on a remote island while trying to find her brother, Chris. Shortly after arriving there, zombies swarm the prison, and Claire is one of only three people left alive—the other two being Alfred Ashford, the antagonist of this section of the game, and Steve Burnside, a teenage boy. Steve is immediately set up as an impulsive character that cannot be left to his own devices, so Claire begins exploring with him to keep him safe. As you finish Claire’s section of the game, both characters are stranded in Antarctica, where Steve is captured. After a short stint following her brother Chris, control returns to Claire, and you are tasked with trying to rescue Steve. Steve's rescue fails as he is turned into a monster, and then killed by the final boss, Alexia. Claire, while understandably upset over this, takes Steve’s death as motivation to team up with her brother and fight her way to freedom, the game closing with the siblings reunited and on their way back to society.

In this plot, not only is Claire a very proactive female protagonist, Steve is prescribed feminine plot significance—he is unhelpful in combat, he is kidnapped, and he ultimately dies to provide Claire with motivation to succeed (more on that death bit later). This choice to make Steve—the male lead for much of the game—into a traditionally feminine support character was met with much derision, gamers decrying him for being ‘useless’ and ‘annoying’—leading to Code: Veronica’s remake, The Darkside Chronicles, overhauling his personality and making him a permanent playable character. In this version of the story, he is still less combative than Claire, but he makes up for this by knowing the layout of the island and being less nervous around the monsters they meet. As a result of having control returned to him, and his altered personality, gamers began to appreciate him more, with many players saying he was now likeable—perhaps proof of players being reluctant to accept the ‘hero with unreliable support’ dynamic with reversed genders.

Bayonetta and Luka Redgrave (Bayonetta (2009))

Bayonetta’s story follows the titular witch as she explores an Italian city, trying to regain her lost childhood memories. On her way, she routinely crosses paths with Luka, a journalist hunting her under the belief that she killed his father. Each time she meets Luka, Bayonetta rescues him from danger—being attacked numerous times by the angels that act as the antagonists of the game, and saving him from a helicopter crash. Despite this role-reversal, a female action hero repeatedly swooping out of nowhere to rescue a man, Bayonetta and Luka have been widely accepted by the gaming community—perhaps because, unlike Steve, Luka is still given a purpose and a traditionally masculine personality.

Throughout the game, Luka may need to be rescued from harm, but he is always ready to offer something in return, giving you transport in his helicopter, information on where to go next, or even simple thanks. Steve, however, is constantly impetuous and rejecting Claire’s help; making the player, who has rescued him by proxy, less inclined to appreciate him. This shows that a large part of reactions to rescuing characters are rooted into the way the player is treated by the character being rescued. If a player has to rescue an ungrateful character, then regardless of gender they’re unlikely to enjoy it—their efforts in gaming haven’t been validated by the response the game gives them. On the other hand, if gamers have to rescue thankful, useful characters, they are perfectly happy, regardless of the gender of the parties involved in the rescue, because they have received positive response to their actions, affirming their choice as worthwhile.

Aqua and Terra (Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep (2010))

Aqua and Terra are two of the three playable characters of Birth By Sleep, a prequel to the Kingdom Hearts series—however, Aqua is the focus of the game, which is divided into four chapters, two of which you play as her for. The pair are students of Master Eraqus, a man who trains them in wielding the ‘keyblade’ to fight darkness in their universe. When the time comes for them to finish their training and become keyblade Masters themselves, Aqua succeeds, and Terra fails, leaving him ashamed and looking for a new way of gaining power. Terra, in his quest for strength, meets Master Xehanort, the villain of the game, and is infected with dark magic, eventually becoming possessed by Xehanort. The narrative then switches to Aqua’s point-of-view, and the player must set out to rescue Terra from Xehanort’s clutches, as well as their third friend, Ventus.

Aqua’s storyline is an interesting example of the female-rescues-male plot because, unlike Bayonetta and Claire, whose situations with Luka and Steve were treated with ambivalence or criticism, her attempted rescue of Terra received large amounts of praise from the playerbase. The final segment of Birth By Sleep, where Aqua sacrifices herself to save Terra from the dark world he has fallen into, is remembered by most as the highlight of the game—Aqua is undoing all the damage he has caused and saving him from his own mistakes, bringing the story to a satisfying, if sad, conclusion. If nothing else, proof of her popularity can be seen in a poll Japan’s most popular gaming magazine Famitsu ran, voting for the top five most popular characters in the Kingdom Hearts franchise—a series a decade long, with dozens of characters to choose from. Aqua came fourth—outranking all the other Birth By Sleep characters. Her popularity shows that not only can a woman rescuing a man be tolerated, it can also be an action worthy of praise—definitely communicating progress in the decade between Code Veronica X and Birth By Sleep.

Heather Mason and Harry Mason (Silent Hill 3 (2003))

This one I’ve included not so much because of a rescue, but for a lack thereof—Harry, similarly to Steve, in the Resident Evil example above, is killed to create motivation for Heather to escape the cult that have started pursuing her in the game. This falls in line with a trope similar to the traditional ‘heroic rescue’ plotline, called Women in Refridgerators. This trope is where, instead of a villain capturing a hero’s important support character, they outright kill them, permanently disengaging them from the plot and creating a need for revenge—and the victim is almost always female. Harry Mason is an extremely rare male version of the trope; he was the hero of Silent Hill 1, and now, he is nothing more than a corpse acting as a pointer to go and get rid of the cult who killed him.

This shows another side to reversed gender roles in gaming—one of the main reasons that men are never kidnapped or captured is because rescues tend to involve a ‘revenge’ aspect. While games are reasonably comfortable depicting women engaging in violence or wanting vengeance, they never seem to be able to merge the two—perhaps because of the drive for destruction it implies? When a female protagonist tries to hurt something, it’s usually portrayed as being necessary—Claire has to protect herself from zombies—or to achieve a certain goal—Bayonetta carving a bloody path towards her past. Female protagonists almost never manage to cause harm for the sake of causing harm—something which the idea of vengeance implies. Furthermore, when women want vengeance on someone, they are usually unsuccessful—see a similar example in Fortune from Metal Gear Solid 2, who swears vengeance for her dead father, only to be shot when she confronts his killer. Game narratives place many barriers in between women and violent impulses, even when men in the same situation are freely allowed to take vengeance and enjoy combat. From the same game as Fortune, we have Raiden, who is able to avenge his parents’ death without any issue.

So, with these precedents set, it’s surprising to see Heather not only issued the task of avenging her father, but succeeding in it—immediately after finding his body, she dispatches The Missionary, the monster that killed Harry, and then spends the rest of the game searching for Claudia, the woman who organised Harry’s death. When she encounters Claudia, the pair come to a standoff, which ends with Claudia ingesting a creature that causes her to create the game’s final boss, an eldritch god, at the expense of her own life. As Heather descends into the arena for the battle, she sees Claudia’s robes left on the floor, and exclaims ‘you can’t be dead—I was gonna kill you!’, before immediately attacking God, trying to wipe out the last remnants of the woman who took her father’s life.

Heather’s indirect fulfillment of her stated need to take revenge is interesting, as it is something that has never quite come to fruition anywhere else. While she is unable to kill Claudia personally, she does manage to destroy everything Claudia had worked for and created, resolving her need for vengeance, even if in a roundabout way.

This list certainly isn’t comprehensive—it’s just a set of examples I personally found interesting. Just off the top of my head, I can also name Lenneth and Lucian (Valkyrie Profile), Lightning and Hope (Final Fantasy XIII), FeMC and Shinjiro (Persona 3), Jen and Lewis (Primal), Kya and Frank (Kya: Dark Lineage), and Madison and Ethan (Heavy Rain). However, I think the four I’ve written on do show the differing ways female protagonists can be portrayed going through male plotlines relating to rescue and revenge. If anyone else has any examples, it’d be cool to hear them—I’m actually really interested in male and female gender representation in games, and I like learning about titles with interesting female characters whenever I can!