In recent years, Magic: the Gathering has made a serious effort to improve its depiction of women. The past couple of years has seen such high-profile armor-plated badasses as General Tazri and Alesha, Who Smiles at Death.
Quick backstory: the plane of Ravnica is ruled by 10 guilds. The Boros guild is effectively a militarized police force. At the head of the guild are the firemane angels and in command of them is Razia. I guess that she thought the standard issue boobplate wasn’t empowering enough and that a platemail thong would better inspire the morale of her troops.
Wizards of the Coast maintains their baffling process of making steps forward then making jumps back when it looks like they’re really progressing.
It’s not that we should censor or be down on individual women for doing things that make them feel empowered, but the larger question shouldn’t be about individuals. It should be about systems. Why do we live in a world where the easiest way to be empowered is to put your naked body on display when that’s not true for men? Why is that something we commodify? Why do we have such a limited set of options to begin with?
These are all very important questions to ask about popular depictions of female “empowerment”. Yet we so rarely see them asked, let alone treated as a systemic issue, not individual choice of a person (or fictional character).
~Ozzie
Posted on
It’s not that we should censor or be down on individual women for doing things that make them feel empowered, but the larger question shouldn’t be about individuals. It should be about systems. Why do we live in a world where the easiest way to be empowered is to put your naked body on display when that’s not true for men? Why is that something we commodify? Why do we have such a limited set of options to begin with?
These are all very important questions to ask about popular depictions of female “empowerment”. Yet we so rarely see them asked, let alone treated as a systemic issue, not individual choice of a person (or fictional character).
~Ozzie
Posted on
If there’s something more pathetic than refusal to finally have a female protagonist in a well-established game franchise (especially when there’s clearly demand for it!), it’s the attempts to justify why only a guy main character is a possible option.
Jim points out what amazingly absurd rhetoric Nintendo employed lately to explain why neither female Link nor playable Zelda are viable option for the next Legend of Zelda game. The arguments are downright nonsensical.
At this point @LewieP’s joke explanation* sounds more cohesive than anything Nintento representatives had said:
