People. Are. Freaking. PEOPLE.

I know, I know.  I promised I'd do something with mroe relevant pictures this time.  time, however, has not been kind to me.

/e shoves 3ds and Pokemon X under pillow

You saw nothing.

But honestly I have been INCREDIBLY busy with working on our alpha for game design, so this will be... another text post, really.

I was perusing my tumblr (The main blog I use to find things) dash and I saw a gifset (for those uninformed, a gifset is a bunch of animated gifs all relating to a certain theme - often of a longer scene from some visual medium.  Sometimes these also include words) that was focused on a quote about writing strong women.  I particularly liked this one because it did not feature only white, cisgender (Identifying as the gender one is assigned at birth), as far as I know heterosexual women.

I tracked the quote back to its source and first, I will give you the quote in question (VERY minor language involved but frankly even if I censored the language, you'd still know.  Besides which censoring it sort of loses the meaning of 'quote'.  click the link to her page!  the entire thing is quite an interesting read.):

Screw writing “strong” women.  Write interesting women.  Write well-rounded women.  Write complicated women.  Write a woman who kicks ass, write a woman who cowers in a corner.  Write a woman who’s desperate for a husband.  Write a woman who doesn’t need a man.  Write women who cry, women who rant, women who are shy, women who don’t take no shit, women who need validation and women who don’t care what anybody thinks.  THEY ARE ALL OKAY, and all those things could exist in THE SAME WOMAN.  Women shouldn’t be valued because we are strong, or kick-ass, but because we are people.  So don’t focus on writing characters who are strong.  Write characters who are people.

madlori

There are several takeaways to this, but the biggest for me?  Is the very last line.  And it's the one I never see included in the gifsets.  Write characters who are people.  I don't say write a woman like you would write a man because that isn't the right method.  don't write men like you would write women, either.  Each character is whole and distinct.  

People would often think of me that I would be offended by seeing a woman in distress portrayed in a game.  That is not so much the point.  The point is when said character is reduced only to their distress.  When their character is reduced to that of being a prop to be rescued.  I object to the use of people as props, no matter their gender or sexuality.  People. Are.  People.  

Another quote to think about, by the ineffable Meryl Streep (... I fangirl a little.)

"No one has ever asked an actor, you play a strong minded man. We assume that men are strong minded or have opinions. But a strong minded women is a different animal."

Again- It sums it up in a nutshell. You'd NEVER mention a Strong Male Character.  Men are "strong" by default.  Women can BE strong , according to popular belief, but it's not a default.  The default is using women to prop up the male main character.  The options are almost literally two:  Strong, and treated as one would treat a man, or weak and not treated well at all.  Even the "Strong" female character can be flipflopped to being ridiculed if people determine she has become too feminine, or "weak".  

And that's not right.  People.  Are.  People.   (Man now I REALLY need to cover the Metroid series because that is a super fun landmine.)