I still hold it in my heart that one of the great sex pests of the comics industry once told me the best way to open an article, while turning down my work, was to open with a snippet of something relatable to the audience I was writing for. When I was still pining after the comic industry, I never could quite figure out who that person was supposed to be: anyway, a few years later that guy got divorced but it’s really funny looking back that the interaction was there in the first place. My whole life up until that moment I’d mostly spent fully deluded. I was capable of being something I wasn’t: a journalist, a writer, an author, an artist, a lover, a fighter.
When I was around 6 years old, before knowing who I was or that there would be an opportunity to find that out, I was obsessed with The Legend of Zelda. In my head, Link wasn’t anything like other characters I knew: here was this girl in a skirt of green grass who held a sword and shield the size of her body and cut down evil in the wilderness. Nobody knew but me how I saw myself in my head, playing in the yard and swinging sticks around.
It was my older brother who was the person who told me that actually, Link was a boy. It wasn’t a polite disagreement, it was a screaming match between a 6 year old and a teenager. My brother would hold me down and tell me if I wanted to be a girl so bad I could be one for him, in the shower together. I would keep quiet about it until I was in my later 20’s, processing growing up in a house constantly paraded through by kids who didn’t have their own owners – I gravitated towards videogames as a way of dealing with being alive.
In those videogames, I sought out the women I could find who helped make me feel comfortable, and in that secret relationship I never told a soul how I felt. It was a lonely growing up – even as I struggled to come to terms with a masculinity that never felt like it fit. I would choose the men over and over again, sheepishly connected and trying to seem like any kind of Good Man I could while abusing a rotating train of women I failed to connect with in real life, holding in my heart words and phrases about how they would never accept me as queer.
My concept of gender is based on videogames, I can’t refute it.
It’s unlikely that I ever actively chose to be a woman in a videogame as a form of self preservation: videogames forced me to become the type of woman that their audience was receptive to. The audience for videogames is overwhelmingly teenage and adult boys in the ages of 12-30. Outside of that, the demographic falls apart: we’ll see in the upcoming sexualization revival that it’s ultimately sales that matter the most to the money holders, wether or not those wallets are lined with Rainbows or the even more hyper imagined enemy of videogames, women who cut their hair short and smoke cigarettes in a masculine way.
I was forced to be a specific idea of a woman in the Cammy’s and Lara Crofts of the last several decades of consoles and PC games: always the idea of what a woman can be often created by men, and almost always straight men who fawned over their digital creations as if they were wives and simultaneously daughters.
I thought of this list, when I was thinking about you: the person who made me this way the most. Here’s a euology for our friendship: the ten women videogames most forced me to be.
10. SAMUS ARAN
But Samus Aran is lonely in that space suit. Nintendo has created a body of work solely about defining Samus Aran in Metroid as anything but a woman: she’s a bounty hunter, a worker, a killer first and foremost. The space pirates refer to her as The Hunter and the suit she wears was always feminine, but recent games have decided women with lip injections can only be submissive and motherly. People might write about Samus Aran until the day I die, and after – there is enough fan art depicting her as a statuesque weapons platform sweating in a leotard that I still have friends who are happy their likes are private.
9. RAIDEN (metal gear solid)
I remember hearing over my shoulder that I looked like a faggot the first time I grew my hair out: fitting that the first time Solid Snake slimmed down and let his curls out that players reacted similarly, like they’d been lied to by a passing woman on a date. Raiden is as much a woman as any trans person: a failure of masculinity who must be removed from their own choice on how they present themselves. At the time of release, Raiden is a woman, still wearing the language of femme even in robot high heels that can hold a sword.
8. LARA CROFT
When you’re writing you eventually come to wall: do I write about my dad, or do I not? Seemingly putting it off as long as possible, Lara Croft was possibly the first Sex Object I was ever exposed to, and my dad owned every single one of her games. But to me, Lara Croft was something strange and alien: rich and high society, dismissive of men yet used by the marketing heads at CORE to be a sex symbol. A busty, gun-toting snarker with a british accent like something out of a playboy centerfold. I never liked Lara Croft until I started watching her die. When Lara Croft dies, it is both grotesque and euphoric going back to the original tomb raider. A soft breathy moan punctuated by snapping cartilage and a loading screen.
7. JILL VALENTINE
Jill’s outfit alone launched about a hundred thinkpieces about acceptable dress codes for the post apocalypse. Jill is “one of a kind’ in my head: I felt ashamed playing her, like I was in on some kind of secret my family should not have known about. Jill wasn’t like other characters I’d experienced before, she could inhabit something in my head and stick around. Jill swings her hips through the streets of Raccoon City, clutching a shotgun close to her waist, she is never there to play around. Jill felt like a secret shared between friends and I we had to honor telling no one about. Resting in a black disc I kept in a sock drawer like a piece of contraband. It wasn’t until years later that I saw a different Jill Valentine in Umbrella Chronicles, exhausted under her eyes and pale with sick depression that I saw the connection between my body and hers.
6. MILEENA
If I had a quarter of a billion dollars and enough staff to give PTSD from looking at the most gore you’ve ever seen, the Mortal Kombat franchise would pivot tomorrow to making games about Mileena. I vividly remember her because she was part of the butt of a joke: Mileena, underneath her mask, has a hideous tarkatan face. Growing up with the series, Mileena was something of a joke – it wasn’t until she started being featured more prominently in the plot that her appearance was toned down and laced with more sexuality. Placed in front of players who have to hear her talk now, she becomes another slightly troubled but all together mostly a piece of excessively gore driven eye candy, what is actually stunning about Mileena driven to irrelevance the more hands Marketing gets on her.
5. SUE STORM
Marvel Rivals is new, but I’ve spent about two-hundred hours staring at the trinkets-called-women the developers have put in front of me, bodies stuffed full of jiggle physics and bursting at the seams with thigh-overflow and crotch-gaps: the men look like overstandard cartoon characters with 1980’s action figure silhouettes, and every woman is there to be depicted as some kind of fetish. Sue Storm’s chest braces against a breeze on the loading screen and shakes uncontrollably with no player input, jutting her hips out at the touch of a button. Sue will likely be the front-runner for dozens of pages of fan art, invisible – except for the shape of her body.
4. RYU
The cast of Street Fighter is a cast of leering portraiture composed to come to life out of LCD cards into a ballet of stylized martial arts violence. The women in Street Fighter stare at the players, all hyper-idealized bodies of muscle and sinew and tone that command audiences and fans to fetishize their bodies to the degree they become part of the mill of artistic endeavor that exists to spin Art into Fan Art. I stare into Chun-Li or Cammy, they stare at me back. The pixels get closer to my face, I look at the ripped sprites of them decades ago in MSpaint trying to make sense of what it is I get when I look at the women in this game, representing me. I choose Ryu and maybe I do it out of fear. My own body disgusts me. Ryu makes sense. Ryu is a girl, right?
3. MERCY
OVERWATCH like most videogames now is chock full of women in supporting and action roles: all of them focus tested and assembled like so much LEGO to be played with by players. I become enchanted with Mercy the first time I play Overwatch, and I crave to see her tied up or bound, tethered to other players by an elastic rope of pure gold. I feel something when I play as her, but she’s so thoroughly sexualized in a way to appeal to the minds of men who want their mothers to tell them it’s going to be okay that she loops through her own lasso into a kind of constructed, motherly femininity or a secret whore behind closed doors. Mercy is a fetish of a costume, of a woman I play with like a toy. I stare at the screen, picture in picture
2. THE HERALD
My Herald in Dragon Age: Inquisition is a nervous pile of failures, dictated by a sweaty wrist choked by THC on the side of the television full of rooms papered over in carpet, stucco and white-apartment paint. She never looks right in those opening cutscenes, a deranged cop-out of personal anxieties too great to be enjoyed in a videogame. I remake her, molded out of clay, every single one a fetish or a decoration of the kind of womanhood I want to grasp at. She can’t be me and I can’t be her, her eyes are a strangers, I settle for making a ginger elf with the face of Guybrush Threepwood and the actions of a mild-mannered sociopath that only knows how to navigate the world out of a kind of wounded self-interest. I wear the costume of a man well.
1. BAYONETTA
Something happened to my brain: I spent teenage years and twenty years going to bat for Bayonetta every chance I got. I read the most mind-dead articles written by Jock Men about how actually Bayonetta was uniquely feminine: she was a character in the way a Masculine Man could never be: butterflies and sexuality and sensuality wrapped up in violence and a body covered in her own hair draped to the floor. The Natural Oils of a Woman in a videogame, for all to see: is there not some kind of truth in the choices that we don’t get to make? In twenty years when I still have a fever for killing angels, when I dream that I might be able to have my own presence with how I carry myself, will I not still think of Bayonetta? a noxious fetishist’s idea of a woman ran through the filter of an art director trying to Make It All Work, is all I am still not an attempt by some man to get stepped on for the enjoyment of the Audience.