I like how in dungeon meshi most members of the toden party are written as gender bent versions of classic shonen archetypes.
For example, chulchuck is like the character that 'are technically adults' that cater twords pedophiles, he's technically an adult, but ryoko kui makes him a man and a divorced father as well showing how unrealistic the 1000 year old argument is.
Senshi on the other hand is put in the position of the 'mommy' type character. He trys to act like a parental figure, cooks, and has most of the fan service. But him trying to act like a parent is countered by the fact that everyone is an adult, so he's just being weird. He shows how weird Classic shonen tropes for group dynamics are.
Marcill and falen are the two men who everybody ships together.
So, I wanna talk about Silksong, not really in terms of the gameplay (that’s a whole other can of worms), but instead about the treatment of women/female characters. Specifically, I wanna look at Hornet’s gender, why the fuck the game keeps sexually harassing her, and the themes/presentation of gender in both games.
Hornet, compared to Ghost from HK 1, is explicitly female. She/Her pronouns, Princess of Hallownest, runs about in a goddamn red cloak/dress thing instead of being naked (like most bugs) or clothed in a long grey ankle length cloak (like most Vessels). She is Woman Character.
And so, as a Woman Gamer, I find it really unsettling how Hornet, the Woman Character, is getting harassed by the other characters in Silksong: Nuu, Kratt and the Flies of The Slab. Yes, each time it happens, Hornet gets a badass prison break montage (The Slab) or bitch-slaps them (Kratt and Nuu), but considering that it adds no narrative or gameplay value, I’m confused why it’s included at all and worried about the implications.
In Hollow Knight, the female characters are pretty much only mothers or wives, except for Hornet. Iselda (wife). Herrah (Hornet’s mother). The White Lady (mother, wife, strangely hyper sexual). Gruz Mother (it’s in the name). Queen Vesta (already dead, later retconned to be another of Hornet’s mother figures, and as a queen bee, she is also defacto a mother of all the other bees in the hive, thats how bees work).
Hornet is pretty much the only female character whose femininity isn’t the only aspect to her. She’s cool, mysterious, badass, right? Well…she’s also Hallownest’s caretaker, basically playing nanny to the Dreamers and Black Egg Temple and killing all the other Vessels that escape the Abyss.
This only gets worse when Hornet becomes the main character of her own game. The female characters in Silksong are a little more nuanced, but so many are still kneecapped by motherhood. Grand Mother Silk (it’s in the name). The Broodmother boss fight (the name). Characters like Lace and Shakra escape their fate of just being Woman Character in Video Game…
But in her own game, Hornet doesn’t.
This probably doesn’t seem terrible on the surface, but twice across this game, Hornet is stripped of her cloak/dress thing and left naked - when you get the Drifter’s Cloak upgrade, and during the Slab sequence (not that the Slab isn’t sick as hell). Why does Hornet need to be naked during these moments? Why does she need to be shown putting the cloak back on when she gets Drifter’s Cloak? When you get upgrades in Hollow Knight, like Mothwing Cloak, Shade Cloak etc, you don’t get naked. It just happens. So why does Hornet get naked when she gets Drifter’s Cloak?
Why, when she is captured and taken to the Slab, is the Main Female Character stripped naked and locked in a cage? Couldn’t they just have taken her needle and tools? Why did she have to get naked?
As well, Hornet gets weirdly harassed by both Nuu and Kratt. I’ll talk about Nuu first.
Nuu, the little pink sadistic hunter, is confirmed in game to be young, to not be a mature adult. She needlessly emphasises how Hornet is a mature adult, and how cool it is that Hornet hunts down all these monsters. Then she…wants to taste the juices of Hornet’s foes, and approaches her with a weird kissy face and tries to touch her. Hornet slaps her away, and Nuu seems decently chastised. Nuu, being young, gets a slight pass for being creepy, but not much.
With Kratt, it’s even worse. He offers Hornet access to his hot spring, and then tries to peek on her bathing multiple times, until the player slaps him away. He has the audacity to whine about her/us hitting him, insisting he was innocently doing repairs, but the entire scene is so uncomfortable.
(There is another instance where an NPC tries to creepily touch Hornet and she slaps them away, Grindle, but I can excuse that since he was trying to pickpocket her, not assault her)
I really just want to know: why? What do these moments add to the game’s narrative? What would we lose from not seeing Hornet’s body? What would we lose from cutting Nuu and Kratt’s harassment? Not a lot, since both of them are entirely missable moments, and literally don’t affect the game at all.
I just think it’s disappointing that, even today, we still receive games (as fun as they are) that have very weird attitudes towards their female characters, and very unpleasant attitudes about harassing those female characters and stripping them naked. It’s creepy at its most innocent and borderline sexual harassment at the most extreme.
We’re still telling stories to this day that frivolously include undeveloped female characters, and the female characters that are developed, are still treated like this. These moments of gendered discrimination and gendered stereotypes are really concerning. The moment with Kratt, and the escape from the Slab, smack of some serious internal misogyny and the casual attitude the world still holds about women.
I think we should demand better from our games, especially when they have an explicitly female main character.
There’s something I see a lot—either because I interact with that kind of content and it gets pushed to me, or because I follow people who reblog it—and it’s when people in the fandom say that Brienne deserves better than Jaime Lannister.
I’ve read a lot of takes about this, about whether or not she deserves better, and honestly, I think that’s beside the point. What I haven’t really seen, at least so far, is a gender-based analysis of this idea that women “deserve” something better.
The idea that a woman deserves something better comes from a patriarchal tradition in which women, before we were considered political subjects and therefore not full members of society, were basically commodities used to arrange marriages that served family interests; especially in upper-class families. It’s true that in more humble families there was sometimes room for marrying for love, like just liking the neighbor, but in bourgeois or aristocratic families, marriage was purely about convenience.
Women had no power of their own. They had no value on their own. The only value they could have was the one granted to them by the man they married. In other words, they were only as “good” as the man who chose them. Because women didn’t choose; men chose them, since men held the power.
So if a “great man” —wealthy, well-positioned, from a good family— chose a woman, that meant she was valuable, because a great man had chosen her. But if she was chosen by a man of lower status or reputation, then she was worth less. This strips women of agency; not just in their romantic lives and future as wives, but also as sexual subjects. Women weren’t seen as beings who desire, but as passive objects of male desire. A woman doesn’t desire; she is desired. A woman doesn’t choose; she is chosen.
So when a woman who was considered “valuable” (because of her family, dowry, or social position) ended up marrying a man below her status, people would say she deserved better. Why? Because it wasn’t even conceived that she could have chosen him. Women didn’t have the right to desire or to want. They were only passive objects within male desire and patriarchal society. So people would say: “No, no, you should be able to choose someone better.” Because what she wanted didn’t matter. What mattered was how society perceived her through the man she was with. If he was poor, she was poor. If he was a king, she was a queen. Never on her own, always through him.
And this perception still exists today. Not in the exact same way, obviously, but it’s still there. Just look at fiction: it’s always fine for a rich, handsome man to end up with a woman “below his level”, it’s even seen as romantic. That’s because there has never been an issue with a man, who is already a social and political subject with inherent power, choosing someone “beneath” him. His status doesn’t depend on her. But a woman’s traditionally has depended on the man she’s with. That idea has been passed down through culture and literature to this day. We’ve grown up not only in a patriarchal society shaped by this history, but also consuming romantic narratives that reinforce it.
Which brings me back to Jaime and Brienne. Sure, maybe Brienne could “deserve better.” But that’s irrelevant. Because when we say that a woman deserves better than what she chooses, we’re stripping her of autonomy. We’re taking away her right to desire, her right to choose.
A woman doesn’t need a “better” man; more attractive, richer, morally superior. She needs what she wants. She has the right to want what she wants. So if Brienne of Tarth wants an idiot —because Jaime Lannister is an idiot, I love him, but he is— then that’s it. It doesn’t matter that she could have the greenest flag in all the Seven Kingdoms. It doesn’t matter that he could be someone without a dark past, someone who hasn’t slept with his sister or pushed a child out of a tower. None of that matters. What matters is what she wants. And if she wants him, then that’s what’s right for her. Because denying women the right to desire—to want, even sexually—is deeply sexist. Saying “you deserve better” ignores that women are independent individuals, complete in themselves, capable of making choices, even bad ones. And having the right to make mistakes also means having the right to choose.
So this whole “Brienne deserves better than Jaime” rhetoric feels incredibly sexist to me. It treats Brienne the same way patriarchal systems have always treated women: as beings whose value depends on the man beside them, instead of recognizing them as autonomous individuals who choose for themselves. What that does is take Brienne as a character and basically reduce her to a passive subject; that is, someone who has no value on her own and no individual worth to choose what she desires, what she wants, or who she wants to be with. Instead, it turns her back into a woman who is merely a complement to the man she’s with, someone whose value depends on his status or reputation in order to have any worth herself.
And no, she’s a woman, and like all women, she has value in herself. On top of that, she’s an incredibly complete character within the story. She has her own plotline, her own personal struggles, her own arc, her own goals, dreams, and conflicts. All of that makes her not just a fully developed, well-rounded, three-dimensional character, but also, as a female character, a deeply complex and human woman. As an individual in her own right, she has the right not only to exist independently, but also to desire. And yes, she can desire a guy who’s an idiot. Does she “deserve better”? No. A woman deserves exactly what she wants. She deserves to pursue her goals, her dreams, her desires, and her passions. Whether she could “aim higher” or not is irrelevant, because she doesn’t need to prove her worth by going further. She is already valid in herself.
So basically, everything I’ve said comes down to this: people who claim that Brienne deserves better than Jaime are being deeply sexist, stuck in an archaic mindset, and operating with a worldview that feels straight out of the 18th century, and honestly, they should just keep quiet.
Cho and Lavender were villainized by the narative in favor of Ginny and Hermione
Rowling despises teenage girls with traditionally feminine interests. She only treats those who don’t want to be like “other girls” or the pick-me girls well in the narrative. It’s clear she projects a deeply personal issue onto certain female archetypes, which makes me think she must have a lot of unresolved resentment, probably dating back to her childhood. She portrays Lavender as foolish for being desperate over Ron, when in reality, that’s not foolish at all—it’s completely normal for a teenage girl experiencing her first relationship and not knowing how to handle her emotions. She also mocks Lavender and the Patil twins’ interests, like Divination, girls’ magazines, or gossip, as if those things were inherently frivolous and shallow. It’s as if being a girl and enjoying “girly” things automatically makes you stupid or as if femininity itself is incompatible with having depth and other, more “serious” interests.
Likewise, through Harry’s praise of Ginny for not crying—contrasted with Cho, who does—she implies that sentimentality, emotional expression, or a lack of self-control are negative traits, while repressing emotions (which is traditionally associated with masculinity) is a positive thing that makes you “tougher” or “stronger.” Narratively, Rowling always favors Hermione for “not being like other girls” and turns Ginny into the ultimate pick-me girl. She’s a character who barely matters or has any relevance throughout the series until she suddenly transforms into the perfect cishet teenage boy fantasy: the girl who is super hot and sexually desirable but at the same time doesn’t waste time with “girly stuff” because she’s too busy acting just as aggressive as any macho guy, being hyper-focused on sports, and being “one of the boys,” cracking jokes, being rough, and acting cool. She’s a girl bro, the embodiment of the perfect woman according to male fantasy, not female. It’s as if she were designed by a hormone-driven teenage boy rather than a woman in her thirties.
Ginny is a disaster of a character from a gender analysis perspective—truly atrocious. And then there’s Luna, who doesn’t bother anyone because she’s too weird, yet she’s accepted by the “not-like-other-girls” girls precisely because of that weirdness. She’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, completing the trifecta of contemporary misogynistic female stereotypes embodied by Hermione, Ginny, and Luna—the only teenage female characters who are curiously treated positively and praised by the narrative. The rest are torn down at some point, specifically for reasons directly related to their gender.
Something I find stupid, is when Liberals hear a Republican say, "we need fathers back in the home" their knee-jerk reaction is to assume we're being misogynistic and saying single mothers can't properly raise children when that's not totally it. It's also for the benefit of the mother to have a father in the home. Have you ever tried to raise a baby singlehandedly? It's extremely hard and puts SO much strain on the mother. Without a husband to help, a mother takes on ALL responsibilities. No human was made to do that. And it can negatively impact a child. As a woman myself, I can say for certain that women are much more emotional than men on average. Because of this, mom's don't always react to things logical but emotionally instead. I'm speaking from experience ngl. Whenever my mom would do this, it was dad to the rescue. He was able to handle things logically and fairly because he was less emotional. But, ofc, mothers are essential as well. Because they are emotional, they have higher levels of empathy, which is necessary for child development. Both genders play a key role for raising children. We need to stop denying this truth. For the mother's sake, father's sake, and child's sake. This is reality.
Monster Prom changed my life and impacted my life just as much, if not more than Danganronpa and made me realise I'm not cis at all. And one of those reasons.
Was Milo Belladonna.
(Abs are slightly edited for my guilty pleasure. Ahem)
For those who don't know anything bout them or the game they originated in, the Monster Prom series is a visual dating series where ya can date monsters and hook up with them. The series is rather colorful and has plenty of black humor and yet still charming and down to earth regardless, with so much love behind the series.
Now Milo Belladonna is a reaper and a non-binary influencer, who is extremely proud and haughty, but also gentle and caring and encouraging too. When I first met em I did dig their design but I grew to love em for a number of reason.
The first, was their voice. Being voiced by NB VA Casey Mongillo is certainly a plus for any character, especially for a queer one. It's just so charming and soft spoken, while still being firm and strong to boot.
The second reason is....how Milo defies gender entirely.
How Milo defies gender entirely and deconstructs it
When you look at Milo, you see both a blend of masculine and feminine qualities. Masculine wise their body is lean and sturdy, along with their short hair and usually masculine attire. Feminine wise though they have painted nails, cute clothing and pose suggestively. (Note: I'm not saying that those qualities are exclusive to their most common forms, it's just an example.)
When looking at Milos other outfits, they range from firm clothing to beautiful dresses. They defy gender and I love them for that. They show us, just how unique and individual we can truly be, if we let go off those norms. Not that it's bad to follow them, if they suit you. Nothing wrong with being cis or straight, whatever makes ya happy. Its about how you live your life in the end and ya should never live it in fear. But that's not the only reason I love them. I also do, because..
... they represent true freedom,
something we all aspire to be. Not bound by any rules or norms, but to be your own true self. And Milo being a reaper encapsulates that especially, because we only do live once (or not, depending on your religious beliefs).
If we do not make the best of our lives then what's the point?
Milo already realised that and thanks to that, they are so confident and free, dancing like leaves in the wind and following the flow of life itself. To go with the current yet to remain firm.
I love that about them. Whenever I see em I blush...I love them. To think that fiction can have such an effect on me, shows how powerful fictional characters can be, even if they are not sentient.
But I digress. Thanks to Milo I begin to realise what living truly means and for that I'm grateful for it.
Thank you Milo. And thank you Casey for doing wonderful work ^^ (Not that you'll read this but still)
Making my first (?) character analysis post because 1) I dislike posts equating Viktor’s “tiny waist” to his gender identity, and 2) I think people are missing how Viktor truly sees himself in S2. Nothing wrong with having headcanons about your favourite characters, including gender identity. (I’m not your parent, I can’t stop you.) But a person’s waist size doesn’t determine how femme/masc they are.
(Also Viktor has a small waist due to illness and possibly malnourishment.)
In season 1, Viktor is very well put together. Short, neat hair and pressed clothes. But the further the season progresses—and the less control he has over himself—we see his hair get longer, unbrushed, and his clothes hang loose, so he hasn’t bothered to resize them.
In season 2, he wakes up made of metal, further losing control of his appearance. The way I interpreted the way he views himself in S2 is this: like the end of S1, he doesn’t care about his outward appearance. (The artists wanted to evoke religious imagery with his appearance, hence the robe and longer hair.) But in the astral realm, we see how Viktor really views himself: short hair, his body more filled out, healthier, stronger.
And in the very end, he looks even more like his early S1 self, when he was most in control of his body.
Viktor feels masculine to me, and if we’re being really spicy with our takes, Jayce feels more feminine-coded than Viktor is. (At least by society’s standards of what being feminine is.)
Side note: Ultimately it doesn’t really matter how you perceive fictional characters because… you know, they’re fictional, but if I’m being serious for a second, in today’s current climate gender identity is so, so important. Please be respectful and kind.
This is an essay I wrote for class during my summer semester in a gender psychology class about the gender formation of Spencer Reid. I thought someone out there might like to read it so here it is!
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Spencer Reid
Additional Tags: Character Study, Character Analysis, Essays, gender study, Gender Analysis
Summary:
This is an essay I wrote for class during my summer semester in a gender psychology class about the gender formation of Spencer Reid. I thought someone out there might like to read it so here it is!
