TvW Episode 2 Close Look

Yeah, I'd forgotten that bit of the video. Whether you want to argue about how prevalent that particular sub-trope is it's very hard to argue that these aren't all good examples of it and all from recent AAA games.

Beat 7 wrote:

It’s no coincidence that the fridged plot device and the damsel plot device work in much the same way, both involve female characters who have been reduced to states of complete powerlessness by the narrative. One via kidnapping and the other via murder. The two plot devices used together then allow developers to exploit both the revenge motivation and the good old fashioned “save the girl” motivation.

Believe it or not there is another more insidious version of this particular trope-hybrid, which I call the Damsel in the Refrigerator. Now you may be asking yourself how can a fridged woman still be in distress? Since by definition being fridged usually sort of requires… being dead. Well here’s how it works — The Damsel in the Refrigerator occurs when the hero’s sweetheart is brutally murdered and her soul is then trapped or abducted by the villain. This ‘oh so dark and edgy twist’ provides players with a double dose of female disempowerment and allows developers to again exploit both the revenge motivation and the saving the damsel motivation but this time with the same woman at the same time.

This trope-combination can be traced back to old school sidescrollers like Splatterhouse 2 and Ghouls’n Ghosts but the Damsel in the Refrigerator has definitely become a more popular trend in recent years.

In Medievil 2 your murdered girlfriend’s soul is stolen and you must fight to save her.

Clip- Medievil 2
[Screams]

In The Darkness 2 your murdered girlfriend’s soul is trapped in hell and you must fight to free her.

Clip- The Darkness 2
“Her soul is mine!”

In Shadows of the Damned your murdered girlfriend’s soul is trapped in hell and you must fight to free her.

Clip- Shadows of the Damned
“Yes, help her!”
[Screams]

In Dante’s Inferno your murdered wife’s soul is trapped in hell and you must fight to free her.

In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow your murdered wife’s soul is trapped on Earth and you fight to free her.

Time - 8:21 - TBD (can't access yet.)

Because I have to constantly look out for repetitiveness in my own writing, the re-use of "more insidious" jumped out at me.

That's all I've got.

Just as a heads up, I might be away from a computer for a few days starting tomorrow, so expect a pause over the weekend and into early next week.

I'm GTG here as well. For the most part this particular episode seems a lot sharper / more impactful so far.

Yup. While of course there is still editorializing (this isn't a news report, this is the video equivalent of a hybrid academic/persuasive essay), I feel like while the first video was a little shaky in spots, Sarkeesian really hits her stride in this one.

She's using a diverse range of examples for each point, and backing her persuasive claims with a mixture of logic and the aforementioned examples. There aren't any insults or invectives being hurled at anyone.

I do want to say that it still bothers me a little to be taking the discussion down to such a micro level. It smacks of tone policing and I think it's still quite on-the-nose to point out that we have no women participating in this discussion - granted, there was plenty of that in the Games & Platforms threads on Sarkeesian and (of course) the safe space thread. But this degree of nit-picking at Sarkeesian's videos still makes me uncomfortable.

On the plus side, it is good to review the content of her video series since it's been a while since I watched them.

Yeah, I definitely want to make sure that we're not at all "tone policing" (which was a reason I was pushing for people trying to just keep the meta-dialogue separate.) I'm keenly aware that we haven't had many posts from women in these threads, though I feel like that might have been a product of how and why this particular exercise came to be.

It has been refreshing to look back at these videos again. They're really good. It is a shame they're still as relevant as they are.

Beat 8 wrote:

The Damsel in the Refrigerator is part of larger trend of throwing women under the bus in increasingly gruesome ways in an apparent attempt to interject what I’ll loosely refer to as “mature themes”. Developers must be hoping that by exploiting sensationalized images of brutalized women it will be enough to fool gamers into thinking their games are becoming more emotionally sophisticated, but the truth is there is nothing “mature” about most of these stories and many of them cross the line into blatant misogyny.

Since what we are really talking about here are depictions of violence against women it might be useful to quickly define what I mean by that term. When I say Violence Against Women I’m primarily referring to images of women being victimized or when violence is specifically linked to a character’s gender or sexuality. Female characters who happen to be involved in violent or combat situations on relatively equal footing with their opponents are typically be exempt them from this category because they are usually not framed as victims.

I'm back! It seems like Beat 8 was pretty quiet. Let me know if people are still interested, and we'll move forward.

Oh, I'm still following. Just already had my say and didn't have more to add.

Beat 9 wrote:

As I mentioned in our last video the damsel in distress doesn’t always have to be accompanied by a heroic rescue.

Clip- Max Payne 3
“Here I was again, with all hell breaking loose around me, standing over another dead girl I had been trying to protect”

Sometimes the hero fails to save the woman in question either because he arrives too late or because (surprise twist!) she has been dead the whole time.

Clip Montage
Dead Space – “Nicole has been dead this whole time”
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (2005)- “No! Kaileena!”
InFamous- “All my powers…and I couldn’t do a thing”
Deadlight- [Cries] “Kill me”

Or in the case of the 2009 version of Bionic Commando, not only has your wife been dead the whole time but, turns out she’s also part of your bionic arm.

Clip- Bionic Commando
“I never wanted you to be involved in this”
“It’s okay, I’ll always be by your side”

Yes you heard that correctly, his wife IS his arm.

Still reading and interested. Finding it supremely difficult to contribute in a meaningful way... mostly because of the laser focus and my tendency to ramble incoherently.

Incoherency is always welcome

I'll keep pressing forward with one or two beats a day on weekdays!

Nothing to pick out in this case; she's basically throwing out more relevant examples to illustrate what she is describing.

Nothing controversial in this beat. GTG

Beat 10 wrote:

But the most extreme and gruesome variant of this trend is when developers combine the damsel in distress with the mercy killing. This usually happens when the player character must murder the woman in peril “for her own good”. I like to call this happy little gem the “Euthanized Damsel”. Typically the damsel has been mutilated or deformed in some way by the villain and the “only option left” to the hero is to put her “out of her misery” himself.

We can trace this one back to the original 1980s arcade game Splatterhouse in which your kidnapped girlfriend is possessed and the player is forced to fight and kill her.

After saving his bitten beloved in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (2003) the hero must then kill her to gain the power to defeat Dracula.

Clip- Castlevania: Lament of Innocence
“Thank you”

In Breath of Fire 4 (2000) Elina has been turned into a hideous monster and then begs you to kill her.

In Gears of War 2, Dom is motivated to rescue his captured wife Maria. When he finds her, she has been starved and possibly tortured into a catatonic state; and so he shoots her.

In Tenchu: Shadow Assassins…

Clip- Tenchu: Shadow Assassins
“Do it, you must”

…the princess meekly asks the hero to cut her down to get to the villain, which he does.

A particularly egregious example can be found in Grand Theft Auto III (2001) when after you’ve rescued Maria Latore it’s implied that the protagonist suddenly shoots her because she is talking about stereotypically “girly things”.

Clip- Grand Theft Auto III
“I broke a nail, and my hair is ruined! Can you believe it? This one cost me $50!” [Gunshot]

The writers deliberately wrote her character to annoy the player so in the end, the violence against her becomes the punch line to a cheap, misogynist joke.

In Breath of Fire 4 (2000) Elina has been turned into a hideous monster and then begs you to kill her.

AUGH SPOILERS!!!

Eh, ok, I'm so late to the party for that one that I really have no room to complain.

I actually don't remember this part of the video, and have to admit that the "Euthanized Damsel" moniker is disturbingly fitting.

So Sarkeesian's point here continues to flow from the prior beats; she's accurately accomplishing her goal from an earlier beat of identifying multiple hybridizations between the Damsel in Distress and some other varied tropes.

So we’ve seen developers try to spice up the Damsel in Distress cliché by combining it with other tropes that involve victimized women. I’ve identified a few of the most common of these trope-cocktails, which join together multiple regressive or negative representations of women including the disposable woman, the mercy killing and the woman in the refrigerator.

This one is the first time that I'd be really curious to see how frequently it is used against women versus against men or general groups of people, because I know I've seen the "put them out of their misery" trope a lot in games over the years. Hell, Bioware games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age have gotten quite a bit of mileage out of the "mercy killing" trope.

The structure of this episode and the way she uses repeated rhythms is also really effective. Every time she hits a list so far has been dynamite.