“There is a persistent belief that mothers are defined by that role,”
May 14, 2017 10:32 AM   Subscribe

Why is motherhood so poorly portrayed in video games? by Kate Gray [The Guardian] “If everything I learned about motherhood was from games, a large part of it would be “you die roughly five minutes after giving birth, surviving just long enough to leave a memento or a letter that will later serve as the motivation for your child to do some big quest”. You are less a nurturing, sentient human being, more a plot device. The statistical probability of this happening is worrying on a pandemic scale: there’s Ellie’s mother in The Last of Us, Evie and Jacob’s mother in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the drowned mother in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, the protagonist’s mother in Fallout 3, the saintly Lady Comstock in Bioshock Infinite (who, when she returns to life, does so as a nightmarish and deadly siren) … the list continues.”

• Why Portrayals of Moms in Video Games Are So Messed Up [Broadly]
“Where are all the mothers, and why can't we play them? It almost seems like video game developers are creatively constrained in their narratives by the concept of a mother. It seems natural for a father to go out into the big, wide world fighting evil; women, on the other hand, appear mostly stuck in their traditional roles as childbearing caregivers. "Mothers are the ones you leave behind," wrote Carly Smith in a 2014 article for the gaming site Polygon. Not only is that boring from a technical standpoint, but it's also just sad.”
• Where are all the video game moms? [Polygon]
“Game development teams — very often led by middle aged men — are happy to churn out fictional models of brooding, paternal excellence. But they take a very different approach to depicting motherhood. Polygon looked at a selection of more than 40 recent or recent-ish games featuring moms and mom stories, representing a cross-section of story-based games covering the last decade or so. We found that gaming generally treats moms as background narrative props for protagonists, very often dead or absent. Sometimes, older women with children are presented as anti-moms, whose quest for power concludes with sentiments of regret generally absent from games in which male villains are vanquished. Those women who are portrayed as positive mother figures are often not actual mothers at all.”
• Dead, Evil Or Distant: The Reality Of Motherhood In Gaming [Now Loading]
“You’ve seen it a thousand times over—fathers as catalysts for heroic transformations in the video game universe. Either that or they’re just some really sad dads... but they are no less prevalent. There are inexhaustible numbers of tropes available for adaptation that allow this trend to thrive and continue. There are apparently also some pretty catchy tropes that keep mothers in at the low-to-no level of existence. But why? It would be fair to say that the invisibility of mothers is more a symptom of a larger issue in modern storytelling than it is a pitfall of video game writing alone. But while it's becoming more common to see a female heroine in a film or #TV show, #VideoGames remain a few steps behind.”
• Why is motherhood so badly portrayed in video games? [CBC.ca]
“"To have a mother who's dead or missing or absent is a cheap way of making people have feelings," she says. "Very rarely are [mothers] the protagonist." While there are several nuanced portrayals of fathers in games, why is motherhood so often portrayed so badly? "I think it's a multitude of reasons," Kate says, citing the lack of female senior game designers as one reason. "A lot of time people think stories about motherhood won't sell because they think there aren't a lot of 30-40-something-year-old women playing games," she says. "And that is provably untrue.”
• 5 Moms in video games who deserve our thanks [Nerdist]
“In games where a bond between two people serve as the overarching narrative, the driving force behind an adventure or goal is usually the mom. She is the inspiration but is never able to join her child because that role is handed to someone else. She may be remembered fondly as the father laments her loss while passing the torch to his daughter. “She loved you very much,” he will say before they set off for adventure. These invisible mothers do have relationships with their children but we rarely have the opportunity to experience it. These mothers cannot grow alongside their kids the way a father/child duo can. That’s not to say that moms are doomed to stay as passive figures forever. There are games where mothers do exist, and their presence does not go by unnoticed. Here are some of our favorite maternal figures in video games.”
posted by Fizz (44 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3. Best portrayal of motherhood in games.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:35 AM on May 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Do we know Seamus's motivations? Maybe she's always been a kick butt mother....
posted by Nanukthedog at 10:42 AM on May 14, 2017


Pretty much every (maybe actually every?) pokemon game has your mom as a character who supports your quest to become the very best, like no one ever was. In at least one of them, there as a plot device where, when you head out out your pokemon training quest, your mom jumps at the opportunity to go on an adventure of her own as soon as you are out of sight.
posted by 256 at 10:54 AM on May 14, 2017 [19 favorites]


This isn't just video games, every kids book or fairy tale for ever is about an orphan and most YA novels too as well as fantasy (which are basically kids books for adults). It simplifies the heck out of your plot and gives you a nice easy back story/ reason to go on a quest. Plus it allows kids to fantasize about what life would be like without their stupid annoying siblings and parents and a bunch of stupid rules and family expectations, which kids enjoy doing.
posted by fshgrl at 10:58 AM on May 14, 2017 [20 favorites]


If we’re feeling generous, we could suggest this is down to the fact that video games have habitually drawn their archetypal structures from fairy tales (the brave prince rescuing the fair maiden, etc) – and in these ancient stories, the death of a mother is a familiar inciting incident. But that’s not really good enough in the era of sophisticated storytelling – and the malaise is a lot more complicated.

That's a pretty big lampshade she's throwing out there. I think the author would need to make a case for games being farther from fairy tales before I'd buy this argument. A game isn't a novel. It can't take you into the same kinds of places.

'For example, many fairy stories begin with the death of a mother or father; in these tales the death of the parent creates the most agonizing problems, as it (or the fear of it) does in real life. Other stories tell about an aging parent who decides that the time has come to let the new generation take over. But before this can happen, the successor has to prove himself capable and worthy.'

- The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim

I mean you could easily make other arguments about thing not being represented in stories. For example, The Lord of the Rings totally ignores the pastoral life that hobbits enjoy in favor of focusing on one small group of hobbits and an adventure they go on.
posted by durandal at 11:02 AM on May 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


One thing I've seen pointed out is that many Disney protagonists lack a mother, but still have a father in their lives.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:04 AM on May 14, 2017 [8 favorites]


The elephant in the room is of course that the reason why games are not about "motherhood" per se, is because motherhood is 90% bloody boring: Hanging around the house, feeding babies, trying to get them to sleep, housework, cooking cleanin.... The last thing most mothers I know would want to do is play a game about the crap they have to do each day anyway. Farmville is not played by farmers - it's played by office workers.

There is also the fact that games often need to make manifest a kind of "state of emergency" such that normality no longer applies. What easier way than to have the mother figure die.
posted by mary8nne at 11:22 AM on May 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


Many, many traditional stories also involved dead children (as late as at least the 1800s, it would have been unusual for all children to have survived). It's a trope that's fallen out of favor as families have come to expect their children to live.

It's interesting that the dead mother trope persists.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 11:26 AM on May 14, 2017 [6 favorites]


If we are going to talk about the missing Mom problem and it being sourced from fairytales then look no further than Shakespear. I did a grid one time with the name of the play and the mother's fate/role. All I can say is mom is very absent (a chunk of the history plays), if not dead/about to be dead (Macbeth) or in a coma/unnatural sleep (Winter's Tale.) The mother is a compelling force by her sheer absence and even female heroines of a certain age are childless e.g. Lady Macbeth, Lear's daughters.

But the worst one for me is this, Titania in a Midsummer's Night's Dream. Titania is a surrogate mother to the young prince whose mother was Titania's friend: "But she, being mortal, of that boy, did die; And for her sake do I rear up her boy, And for her sake, I will not part with him." (Act 2, sc. 3) Titania's dispute with Oberon is his lustful intentions towards the boy. She stands as a protector of her friend's child and is overthrown by the play into the arms of a donkey headed mortal. Tell me about the mothers in Shakespear? They are mute, dead, complicit or compromised. It is not just video games.
posted by jadepearl at 11:32 AM on May 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


Best portrayal of motherhood in games.

Pretty sure that title belongs exclusively to the character "Mother" in Mother 2, which was localized as EarthBound. The mom in Mother 3's pretty good, too, although she's a little tropier. I feel like she transcends the tropes she inhabits, but that's a spoilery conversation for another time, perhaps?
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 11:39 AM on May 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


It strikes me that some people may not actually be familiar with the mom from EarthBound, so let me explain: the protagonist can come home to his mother to have his favorite meal and be completely restored in health and psychic energy before he goes back on his world-spanning adventure. As his adventure continues, if he's away from home too long, he gets homesick, which is a statistical ailment which makes him pretty useless in combat; the only way to treat homesickness is to return home (which isn't really practical for most of the game), or to call home and chat with mom from a pay phone or the nearest hotel. This means that as you play the game, each time you arrive in a new town or return from a harrowing adventure in some out-of-the-way cave or sewer, you run to the nearest phone to call Dad at work to save your game, and call Mom at home for a few words of comfort and to prevent homesickness.
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 11:44 AM on May 14, 2017 [31 favorites]


As others pointed out, this is not just video games. If mom is alive, she prevents kids from having adventures. Dads are presumably too stupid to do their jobs and keep the kids safe, by comparison.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:45 AM on May 14, 2017 [8 favorites]


I immediately thought of the beginning of Fallout 4, then realized you pick your character's gender. Speaking as a mom irl playing the character as a mom, the beginning of Fallout 4 hit me really hard.
posted by potrzebie at 11:47 AM on May 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


Just ask Aeneas.
posted by boo_radley at 11:53 AM on May 14, 2017


If mom is alive, she prevents kids from having adventures. Dads are presumably too stupid to do their jobs and keep the kids safe, by comparison.

Yeah, I think this. If the mom is still alive, then in order to keep the kids safe, she would be the one going out on the adventure, not the kid, because the number one thing moms do is keep their kid safe.

As to why we don't have more mom protagonists who venture out to fight evil- I think it's a combination of kids in video games being really hard to get right, and the fact that most games are written for 20-30 year olds who, in a society with older first childbearing, are not often themselves moms or really able to empathize with what I would call /actually/ mature themes.
posted by corb at 12:50 PM on May 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


One (non-playable) video game mom who struck me as unique was Commander Shepard's mother in the Mass Effect Series. Apparently she's only in the story if you pick the Spacer background, and she's a badass space captain in her own right. But when Commander Shepard was at the end of her rope throughout all of ME3, losing friends and planets left and right, I thought it was a powerful moment when she got to talk with her mother and get her support.

Then one of the articles linked above pointed out that the two things video game moms do are (1) be dead and (2) tell the player how proud she is. And the wiki I linked makes it clear that Hannah Shepard firmly sits in camp 2.
posted by ejs at 1:29 PM on May 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


One of my longterm contentions is that outside of mecha pilot, the most hazardous occupation in anime is being a mother. If they aren't dead, then they're sick or dying or frozen in the ice or something.
posted by happyroach at 1:36 PM on May 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


I agree that getting rid of the parents is a great narrative convenience.

Still, it's weird how few good non-dead mothers there are in games. The only one I can think of is Ana, Pharah's mother in Overwatch. Both are playable characters.

If you do help a relative, it's often a male (Beyond Good & Evil, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Tomb Raider, Dishonored 2 (as Emily)). The only females I can think of are Faith's sister, in Mirror's Edge, and Emily in Dishonored 1/2.
posted by zompist at 1:53 PM on May 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Tell me about the mothers in Shakespear? They are mute, dead, complicit or compromised.

Had I a dozen sons, — each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, — I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country, than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.
- Volumnia, Coriolanus, scene iii
posted by Apocryphon at 2:15 PM on May 14, 2017


Mod note: One deleted - sorry, long passages of rot-13 text doesn't really work here. It's fine to give a spoiler warning, and let folks skip over the comment if they're spoiler averse.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:18 PM on May 14, 2017


The deleted comment was mine, and concerned two other Mass Effect characters: Matriarch Benezia and Samara, both of whom can be seen as confirmation of ejs' points, the latter mostly depending on the player's choices.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:15 PM on May 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Still, it's weird how few good non-dead mothers there are in games. The only one I can think of is Ana, Pharah's mother in Overwatch. Both are playable characters.

Moxxi in the various Borderlandses? Is a sort of okay mother?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:59 PM on May 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Moxxi in the various Borderlandses? Is a sort of okay mother?

As long as you are not fat.
posted by Samizdata at 4:08 PM on May 14, 2017


This isn't just video games, every kids book or fairy tale for ever is about an orphan

It's hard to see why this is relevant to a post about why there are fathers but not mothers in video games.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:12 PM on May 14, 2017


Yoshi lays eggs and carries babies around...
posted by oulipian at 5:35 PM on May 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


And then you've got Chrono Trigger, where the mother is referred to as "Chrono's Mom."

[Fallout 4 sorta spoilers ahead]




My first play of Fallout 4, I did as a female character. There wasn't a same-sex option, so it's the only way I could have a husband in game. I tend to play in first-person mode anyway, so it mostly worked for me. The opening chapter really shook me. I carried his wedding ring with me for the rest of the game.
posted by xedrik at 6:12 PM on May 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


On this topic, I think Dune rates a mention, where the boy-protagonist Paul is cast adrift into the hostile desert when his father is betrayed and killed, and it is his mother who goes with him on his epic journey, protecting and teaching him until he grows up and comes into his own strength.

If 90% of people involved in game design are male, it's really not a surprise they are reluctant to write female characters... you write what you know, of course. The solution isn't to ask the men to write more women POV stories (which would... probably not end well), the solution is to hire more women, but there aren't enough IT grads so you got to take a step even further back and make sure more women go into IT degrees to begin with.
posted by xdvesper at 6:22 PM on May 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


Fairy tale mothers were dead because at the time they originated, women were dying in childbirth left and right so it was a moor realistic rope in storytelling than it is now.

Mothers in Shakespeare are dead because you've only got a certain number of convincing drag artists in your company. (I often wonder about the original Gertrude; I'd love to know more about whom that part was written for.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:35 PM on May 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


One thing I've seen pointed out is that many Disney protagonists lack a mother, but still have a father in their lives.

They don't just lack a mother, the mother's are traumatically torn from their children. Bambi, Dumbo. And I don't know about father's, but there are lots of uncles. Disney is all kinds of fucked up.
posted by Room 641-A at 7:09 PM on May 14, 2017


But that’s not really good enough in the era of sophisticated storytelling

I'm sorry, when?
posted by bongo_x at 8:00 PM on May 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


I haven't read all the linked articles, so forgive me if I'm saying something obvious or included, but I think this is one reason GLaDOS is so resonant. She's definitely got a mom (especially Mom-as-seen-by-teenaged-girl) vibe to me.
posted by Mchelly at 8:02 PM on May 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


the solution is to hire more women, but there aren't enough IT grads so you got to take a step even further back and make sure more women go into IT degrees to begin with.

You don't need IT grads to run the companies or write the stories. Are they promoting coders to lead their creative teams instead of looking for people with experience in, for example, making movies or writing books?
posted by pracowity at 11:13 PM on May 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


You don't need IT grads to run the companies or write the stories. Are they promoting coders to lead their creative teams instead of looking for people with experience in, for example, making movies or writing books?

It has to do with the culture of the company and the direction the leader takes. For example, in an engineering company (where 80% of the employees are male engineers, and maybe 10% are accounting / personal assistants and 10% are IT support)... it's much more likely that the CEO, and everyone else who holds senior positions in the company, will be engineers. The company will make decisions by consensus in a very engineering oriented manner. You will see the company make very different decisions if their CEO and senior management was populated by, say, Marketing people. Or Finance people.

Same goes for the male / female ratio. Decisions are made by consensus, but if you get a senior meeting where 7 men are evaluating the quality of the work of 1 woman, it's not ideal, not necessarily because of malice, but because they simply aren't able to do it effectively (it would be like asking 5 marketing people to evaluate the soundness of an engineer's solution to a problem). A company like that would still run - and it could still run well - but they would make very conservative decisions from an engineering point of view. Imagine Space-X being run by a CEO with a background in marketing and advertising instead of engineering, for example, if Elon Musk left. Or for a more practical example, Tim Cook vs Steve Jobs.
posted by xdvesper at 12:00 AM on May 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm not really up to date on videogame narratives, but I imagine there are some significant similarities in the problems game narratives face in regards to mothers to that of other popular culture narratives like movies. There is something of a double trap in writing a mother into the narrative since some of the values associated with motherhood, at least in the US, places a limit on what can be done without running into criticism.

Unlike fathers, who can be good or bad, attentive or absent, without raising much notice or complaint, mothers tend to be defined by their role as parent. This creates a problem where if one writes them as having interests and obligations outside the family, or god forbid, greater than the familly, they might not be seen as "good" mothers and draw criticism or have them seen as abandoners of their children, where writing them as attentive and loving mothers then seems to limit them to being household figures where little action can occur and where their presence outside the home is more a distraction than aid as their skills in the home translate poorly to outside events and their overriding concern for their children would be more distracting to the main character's actions than useful in their traditional motherly mode.

Even when pop culture does make works centered around a mother, the tendency then is to make the children her central focus and the crux of the narrative, either because they're in need or because she isn't attending to them properly. So the very idea of motherhood is so laden with this kind of cultural baggage that it seems like creators often prefer just to imagine them gone rather than deal with them.

It needn't be that way of course, and some do get away from it, but there is the added difficultly of young men not wanting to identify with either a mother figure or a character tied to tightly to their mother. So there is likely an element of business decision making involved as well. Not for nothing are the frequent references to motherhood being a thankless job.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:44 AM on May 15, 2017 [3 favorites]


Also perhaps worth noting is the idea that a mother's love is unconditional, so they'll still care for you no matter if you slay those thousand aliens or hide out on a space freighter away from the fight, whereas a father's respect is seen as conditional, something needing to be earned. So, actions, by this account, matter more to the father who judges than the mother who won't judge.

Some added resonance in this regard might come from there being so many more absent, distant, or withholding fathers in real life, which might add some additional emotional connection to narratives about reconnecting with a father as opposed to the more likely present mother.

Negative associations with mothers tend to come more from viewing the relationship with them or their abilities as a parent as faulty, something more difficult to build a narrative around to find resolution as it doesn't lend itself as well to the kind of tidy ending popular culture tends to favor.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:04 AM on May 15, 2017


The company will make decisions by consensus in a very engineering oriented manner...

I've never heard that games businesses do consensus decision-making. Do you have any links on this?

Decisions are made by consensus, but if you get a senior meeting where 7 men are evaluating the quality of the work of 1 woman, it's not ideal, not necessarily because of malice, but because they simply aren't able to do it effectively (it would be like asking 5 marketing people to evaluate the soundness of an engineer's solution to a problem).

It sounds like you're saying that men can't evaluate the work of women because women work differently? I'd probably just call those guys sexist if they can't evaluate a person's work based on the work rather than who did it, but I hope you mean something different here.
posted by harriet vane at 4:24 AM on May 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I played as female my first time through Fallout 4, and I end up with much of the story dependent on my being a mother and (later) what kind of mother I am.

But, yes, for the most part, moms are in the way or off-screen motivation or something like that. Whereas, man, you cannot swing a flaming sword in videogameland without hitting a bunch of daddy issues.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:16 AM on May 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


I can't speak for games, but I write children's books, and I've wrestled with some related issues. Like Fshgrl points out, getting rid of parents early on serves a lot of plot purposes. In my first novel for kids, the father lives far away, and the mother gets kidnapped early on. The protagonist then goes on a quest to get her mom back.

The big challenge is that this is book 1 in a trilogy, and if I didn't want to have the mom get kidnapped at the start of every subsequent book, I had to come up with a reason why she'd let her kid keep going on risky magical adventures. It has required some care in constructed my characters and my plots, and I ultimately concluded that Mom would want to come along on the adventure, which has made for its own set of complications. I can see why it's easier to just kill off the parents on or before page 1.
posted by yankeefog at 6:29 AM on May 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


man, you cannot swing a flaming sword in videogameland without hitting a bunch of daddy issues.

Mass Effect has a ton of those. Ironically, the most chill dad in the game is a member of the all-female asari, as the non-bearing parent. (When Shepard suggests that she would also be known as a mother on Earth, she calls Shepard an "anthropocentric bag of dicks.")
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:34 AM on May 15, 2017


The big challenge is that this is book 1 in a trilogy, and if I didn't want to have the mom get kidnapped at the start of every subsequent book, I had to come up with a reason why she'd let her kid keep going on risky magical adventures.

"You brought back HOW much money from your adventure? "
...
"OK, time for you to go outside and get some gol- I mean some fresh air. Here's your sword and your shield, and I made you a lunch. Unless you'd like to help reroof the stable? No? Well then, off you go, and be sure to get thoroughly lost in the forest."
posted by happyroach at 10:45 AM on May 15, 2017 [5 favorites]


Ha!

Happyroach, that would have saved me several hundred pages of character development. I'm going to have to hire you as a consultant for my next trilogy.
posted by yankeefog at 1:49 PM on May 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


I've never heard that games businesses do consensus decision-making. Do you have any links on this?

Hmm. My assumption is that it is unfeasible to run, say, a 200 man operation, 2-3 year project, budget about $50 mil, entirely by fiat. I've never worked in games. Where I have worked, typically the heads of each team (say 8-9 teams) all have a seat at the business review meetings so they can advocate for their function. They may or may not have veto power. It's the structured interaction of different teams with different priorities that leads to robust decision making.

It sounds like you're saying that men can't evaluate the work of women because women work differently?

Hah! GRRM is one of the most famous writers of our generation and some of his female POV segments (Daenerys) are so cringeworthy as to be the stuff of legend. He evidently thought it was good enough when he was writing and publishing it. Everyone has their blind spots - particularly in a narrative sense - pick a cohort of male writers and I would say many of them would not be able to write a convincing women POV narrative, and am similarly skeptical that they would be able to judge the quality of it.
posted by xdvesper at 4:41 PM on May 15, 2017


By an odd coincidence, two of the games I've played through this year both involve mothers as protagonists (or mothers to be), and both involve the protagonists going over their childhood memories and their relationships with their own parents as the primary setting for the action. Bound is one of them, the other I shouldn't really expand on for fear of spoilers. I also played Cooking Mama this year, which technically has a mother protagonist, but I'm not sure how much it's really about motherhood.

The fact that the creators of video games are primarily male and frequently not parents is the simplest answer for why there aren't more stories about mothers in games, but I think another part of it is that many games' mechanics focus on destruction, killing or domination as opposed to creation or nurturing. This may stem back as well to the makeup of the developers, but also I think speaks to the fact that video games are a safe space to explore destructive, "masculine" impulses, whereas more creative, "feminine" impulses are more frequently rewarding in real life.

One exception that comes to mind is Shelter, in which the player controls a mother badger trying to keep her cubs safe in the wild. Ostensibly, tamagotchis and Lemmings may be about motherhood as well, by virtue of trying to protect and care for creatures that can't handle life on their own.
posted by Durhey at 1:03 PM on May 16, 2017


Durhey

The fact that the creators of video games are primarily male and frequently not parents is the simplest answer for why there aren't more stories about mothers in games, but I think another part of it is that many games' mechanics focus on destruction, killing or domination as opposed to creation or nurturing. This may stem back as well to the makeup of the developers, but also I think speaks to the fact that video games are a safe space to explore destructive, "masculine" impulses, whereas more creative, "feminine" impulses are more frequently rewarding in real life.

I've had some thoughts about this being related to Western narrative, which has roots in Greek drama. Typically the protagonist needs to overcome and "earn" his victory over the antagonist. We can only measure how worthy the protagonist is by how strong the antagonist is - if the antagonist is weak and loses with no effort, we tend to feel the protagonist didn't earn his victory and don't think the narrative is very satisfying. This leads to narratives which emphasize masculine characteristics (bravery, grit, strength), even when overlaid over female protagonists.

This stands in contrast to, say, the kind of narratives you find in Japanese media, which accepts some genres of stories which focus on revelation and surprise. The protagonist exists to reveal the twist to the audience. You can see great examples of this in the top grossing Japanese domestic movies like Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away... which have storylines criticized by Westerners as lacking a satisfying climax or conclusion (precisely because the narrative element of protagonist conquering the antagonist is missing. the story opens strongly, then meanders this way and then and eventually comes to a close).

Specifically in Howl's Moving Castle - it was actually adapted from a British novel, so I want to be clear, this has more to do with what narratives different cultures find resonate with them, not that each culture is "only" able to write certain narratives. In Howl's Moving Castle, since there is antagonist to defeat, it opens up more avenues for writing - the main character's key quality is her compassion, something which would not really be something you see in a Hollywood blockbuster, it wouldn't really work in the context of a typical Western narrative. You can't really "defeat" an antagonist with compassion, at least not in a satisfying manner. You could defeat them with some other quality and then show compassion to them.

I also particularly enjoyed Ashitaka's journey in Princess Mononoke - in defending his village from a demon, he received a fatal curse. Instead of going on an epic quest - to either cleanse himself of his curse, or to exact revenge on the ones who sent the demon to his village - he goes on a journey to "see with eyes unclouded by hate." He exists to reveal the story of the world for the reader. (also, themes of acceptance and peace, and avoiding needless struggle and conflict)
posted by xdvesper at 6:33 PM on May 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


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