click the link above for an article by Jenni Lada that may be of interest:
"The premise of the “Final Girl” feminist film theory is that, through a surviving female lead character in a movie, the audience is able to investigate the nuances of the film and deepen the terror experience in a way that would not be possible if a man were to take the lead. Moreover, many argue that the way the final girl is created and fights the villain allows the opportunity to make her more masculine.
The Fatal Frame series of video games challenges this notion through the lead characters and the manner in which they dispatch the ghostly villains that surround them. With this shift, Temco is challenging the notion that the final girl needs to become masculine. This makes the argument that a girl does not need to tap into or mimic some sort of masculine behavior pattern in order to face and defeat a fearsome opponent."
...or does it just allow game designers the excuse to design lead female characters as cute, 'virginal' and naive, sexually pleasing to a male audience, and unthreatening to a female audience, thereby merely enforcing existing gender stereotypes?????
Without wanting to fall into the japanese stereotype of Lolicon obsession.. I have played fatal frame 1 and and thought the following..
ReplyDeleteAs a man, i felt the way in which the characters acted and sounded made me feel voyaristic. Which is in someways mirrored by having to use a camera as part of the games arsenal of weapons.
This is clearly a game made for an eastern audience and I don't fully agree with Jenni Ladda's film theory parallel. (not to say I disagree with the theory itself, I just don't think it applies the FF3)
Having a lead female character does allow you to show the vunrable aspects of human nature like fear and confusion, which perhaps are harder for eastern devolopers to bring across in a male lead but isn't that itself a sexist assumption?
If anything I got a sense that, from a western point of view, this was far more to do with the psychological struggles of a young woman (its interesting to note that the central character is a 23 year old profesional photographer mourning the death of her fiance) rather than a story of a woman having to become more masculin in order to survive.
A better example of the final girl, in videogames, would be Samus Arin from the metroid series.
http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/118/1183695p1.html
(look at #3)