Davis Aurini - The Predominance of Male Protagonists

Aug. 3, 2013 - Davis Aurini

18:03

The Predominance of Male Protagonists

My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.youtube-mp3.org/ To read something stupid on this topic, go here: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/do-readers-judge-female-characters-more-harshly-than-male-characters/275599/

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	Recently there was some furor coming from the feminists over the fact that most of the protagonists of the video game shown at E3 were male.
	Now this is not going to be a video addressing them.
	Quite frankly, feminist women are just women that want to complain about something.
	They go searching high and low for anything that they can take issue with, and they complain about it, and they scream, and they try and fill up that void in their soul, and they get free money from the government for it.
	They're insane.
	I'm not going to be addressing feminists.
	However, this topic of the male protagonist is not something that I've seen properly addressed.
	Notably, Maddox put out a video about this, saying that essentially, if you women want more female protagonists, start building games instead of complaining about it.
	Which is basic common sense, but again, misses the root of the issue.
	And that root is the predominance of male protagonists, not just in video games, but in cinema, in novels, in legends as well.
	Heck, right now, I'm in the early development stages of a video game with a female developer, an old-school geek girl, and she wants the game to have a male protagonist.
	It's a widely recognized phenomenon, but very poorly misunderstood because we're so incredibly miseducated about reality nowadays.
	Both men and women tend to prefer male protagonists, and they tend to be harsher and more judgmental of female protagonists.
	So why is this?
	Well, let's look at the two basic tropes for most narratives.
	For most simple stories with a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist.
	Rescue the Princess.
	Now, Rescue the Princess, technically speaking, is a relatively new phenomenon.
	With Beowulf and with Gilgamesh, it used to be Rescue the Civilization, but let's just stick with it for brevity's sake.
	Rescue the Princess is a story that goes right to the root of who we are as human beings.
	That the guy wants to go out there and impress the girl and make sure she's safe and fight off anybody that's trying to hurt her.
	And women love the kind of guy that'll sweep them off their feet, who will take them on adventures, who will show them new and interesting things.
	It's just so innate.
	You constantly see this with the male protagonist.
	And what happens?
	What happens when you flip the sexes?
	What do you get then?
	Now, the same time that all of these feminists were getting angry about E3, there was a guy who'd put out a video game.
	It was an old 8-bit.
	It was either Legend of Zelda or Donkey Kong, if I recall correctly.
	And he was putting it together for his young daughter.
	Now this guy wasn't any sort of ideologue.
	He was just a loving father.
	And he wanted to give his daughter a game where she could identify with the protagonist more easily than she could with Mario.
	The funny thing, however, is that when he flipped the sexes on this, it wasn't a prince she was rescuing.
	It was her younger brother.
	Women don't want the sort of prince that needs to be rescued by them.
	And this guy, who, you know, just trying to help out his daughter, on a gut level, he could just feel that having her rescue the prince would not engage her.
	It didn't engage him, it wouldn't engage his young daughter.
	There is something primal in us that guys want to rescue the princess, but the young girl wanted to rescue her younger brother.
	Now what about situations where there is nobody to rescue the princess?
	What about situations where the princess has to rescue herself?
	Quite frankly, those are extremely bleak scenarios.
	When the hero has to go rescue the princess, it's fun and it's heroic and it's escapism.
	When a princess needs to rescue herself, it's dark, it's grim, it's gritty.
	All of us, seeing that happen, feel very protective and defensive. of the woman.
	We want to high-five the guy that rescues the princess.
	We want to help defend the princess that rescues herself.
	Another major theme that you'll see throughout all these basic narratives is the suffering and sacrifice and sometimes even the death of the protagonist.
	That this hero, this guy, goes out there and suffers incredibly for his cause, for his society, for what he believes in.
	And now when we see a guy suffering that much for something he believes in, we're impressed.
	We admire him.
	We want to be like him.
	What about the reverse?
	What about movies where a woman's suffering?
	We see a war movie and all of us guys think, can I be that tough?
	The girls are all crying and they want to go hug a guy after seeing that movie.
	What happens when we see a movie where a woman is suffering incredible amounts?
	Well, look at the movie Submission by Theo Van Gogh.
	Martyr for Western civilization, if there ever was one.
	This movie, all about the treatment of women in Islamic countries, infuriates us.
	It fills us with a righteous anger that anyone's treating women like this.
	So when a guy in a movie suffers torture and survives, and we admire James Bond for doing that.
	He's amazing.
	We all want to be that guy.
	Women all want to be with him.
	When we see this happening to a woman where she's enduring incredible suffering for the sake of what's right or for the sake of somebody else, we are infuriated.
	There is something deep in our biology that sends men out to achieve and to build and accomplish and drives us to be sympathetic to the woman.
	Men are the respected sex.
	Women are the sex that we empathize with.
	So now let's take this and let's put these wheels on the road.
	Let's take a couple of fairly well-known movies with fairly simple but very well-done plots and see what happens when we swap the sexes.
	The first example, Boondock Saints.
	This is a great movie with a male, well two male protagonists.
	So right off the bat, Boondock Saints, by the way, is a fun little escapist vigilante style movie.
	So these two guys wind up taking on the mob and just killing every single bad person that there is in society.
	The way they get involved in this in the first place is that they're at the bar and one of the mafiosos comes to the old bartender, this old crippled man, and starts threatening him if he doesn't pay up.
	And so the two Irish Catholic boys, you know, good young men, they step up to defend the older man.
	Again, this is something hardwired into our biology, that young men defend the old.
	What happens if you swap the sexes all of a sudden?
	All of a sudden you have a couple of young ladies defending an old man?
	That doesn't sit right with us.
	It doesn't quite process because we all know, we all know instinctively, that an old man, no matter how crippled he is, is supposed to protect young ladies from monsters.
	Let alone the whole girl power nonsense of seeing a svelt 21-year-old girl take on a hardened mafioso.
	We also know that doesn't happen.
	And it takes massive amounts of propaganda from cartoons to make us even start to believe in that.
	So right off the bat, you have a very dark setting for this movie.
	A movie where old men are too cowardly to protect young women, and mafiosos just freely prey upon them without caring, without any sense of guilt.
	When a mafioso beats up a man, or tries to beat him up, that's bad, but it's an adventure story.
	When a mafioso tries to beat up a woman and doesn't care about it, that's a horrid reality.
	And so then we see these two guys, these two young men, go out and decide not just to kill the two mafiosos that were going to beat up their favorite bar owner, but they take on the whole mob.
	They get their guns and they start taking everybody down.
	And they recruit their friend, who eventually dies before the end of the movie.
	Now the friend they recruit is a bit of an idiot.
	He's a bit comic relief.
	What happens if we keep this friend but have the two women?
	First of all, we can't make this friend a woman because seeing a woman get shot, have her head blown open, that's not a little bit sad that establishes how dangerous the bad guys are.
	That's, oh my god, that's horrifying.
	The recent superhero, realistic superhero movie, had that happen, where the manic girl got her head blown off at the end of the movie, and it emphasized that this is not a game.
	This is not silly, this is not fun, this is violent, brutal reality.
	In Boondock Saints, when their buddy got his head blown off, it made the bad guys a little bit scarier, but it wasn't horrible.
	It wasn't tragic or sickening, and the guy was a bit of a douche that deserved it.
	So now, we teamed this douchey guy up with the two girl power girls.
	What do we have now?
	Either, he's going to be the comic relief following them around and doing whatever they say, and then when he gets shot, instead of being tragic, he completely deserves it for being so incompetent, that these two 21-year-old girls are better gunslingers than him.
	We have no respect for him.
	We have no empathy for him.
	The fact that he's following them around taking their orders because he's that incompetent, that's why he got shot.
	He deserved it.
	Completely different feeling than in Boondock Saints, where the two saints got this dumb guy in over his head, and you feel bad for the guy.
	They shouldn't have let him accompany them, but he insisted.
	You like the guy even though he's a douche.
	Whereas with the women, you just feel contempt for him.
	Not to mention the, or, oh, the other way you can interpret this character is that he becomes the valiant defender of these women.
	So instead of being a douche comic relief character, he now has become a noble knight character that dies defending them.
	Not the same story, not the same light-hearted romp, and overall, the story just winds up being darker.
	You have this society where two young women have to take out all these evil mafiosos.
	The police don't care about young women getting assaulted by them.
	Nobody cares.
	The very last scene in the movie, which is a reporter doing the man on the street thing, everybody's debating over vigilanteism, that doesn't work when you have two young women.
	Because every single guy that said he supported them, pussy, can't defend yourself, you need a couple of girls to risk their life to defend you, screw off, hand back your man card, you're not part of civilization anymore.
	You swap the sexes in Boondock Saints, and what was a fun little action movie becomes extremely dark.
	It becomes more like Sin City.
	which is a fine movie, but it's not the same thing as Boondock Saints.
	So that's a...
	That's a masculine... masculine protagonist.
	And so...
	It's not impossible to have a female protagonist that is loved and amazing.
	And the best example I have ever seen of the female protagonist is Aliens, with Ripley in it.
	So Aliens, first of all, it's set in a very dark reflection of our modern corporate era, where the corporation completely dominates.
	There's absolutely no spirit of civilization left.
	There's no nation-state.
	There's just the corporation.
	So Ripley is established as a very devoted mother who is forced into working this soulless corporate job to support her family.
	And that's how the whole first movie happens.
	She has to be a roughneck on a freighter rather than being with her children the way she wants to be.
	Except the movie starts out and we find out that she's been in her little escape pod for so long that her daughter actually grew old and died and Ripley is broken by the fact that she completely missed her daughter's life.
	And so then Ripley is hired to be a consultant for this batch of Space Marines that are going back to the planet that she found the alien ship on.
	And here again, we see that we have rough men defending her.
	And one lesbian.
	But that's the thing, is she is not going there to be an action hero.
	She's not an action hero at the beginning of the movie.
	She's going there to be defended by them.
	And she doesn't get directly involved in anything until she finds Newt.
	Until she finds the little girl, the last remaining colonist that's been hiding from the aliens all this time, and becomes a surrogate mother to her.
	And finally, at the very end, when all the men have been killed, see, once again, if the princess has to rescue herself, it's a really screwed up situation.
	Things have gone completely pear-shaped.
	All of the soldiers are dead except for one of the pilots, and she has to rescue her surrogate daughter.
	She is a mother.
	It is a completely female role.
	And what more, who is she fighting against at the end of the movie, but the alien queen mother.
	It's a story of two mothers fighting to protect their brood in a world that has been so devastated there aren't any men left.
	This is why it's a great horror story, because the killing of the Space Marines and on the queen's side the defeating of all of her drones establishes just how bad and costly this war is.
	If women need to start picking up rifles to defend the nation-state, you know the war is going terribly.
	So let's bring this back around to video games finally.
	Video games are primarily wish fulfillment.
	They're an interactive experience.
	Some of them could be incredibly deep, but generally they're wish fulfillment.
	We want to see movies about a guy that we want to be like as men and that women want to be with.
	And in video games we want to play that guy.
	Now in some games, like the RPGs, you can choose a male or a female protagonist, and you have to pretend you're living in some alternate reality where men will just go up and attack a woman and feel okay about that.
	As opposed to Brienne Ftarth in Game of Thrones, she might be a really tough warrior, but no man is going to feel proud for beating her.
	So none of them want to fight her.
	It's a lose-lose scenario.
	In these video games, you have male raiders, you have female raiders, and you're just killing them left, right, and center.
	When in a proper narrative, the killing of female characters should be far darker and more brutal than the killing of male characters.
	And that's why, in the end, so many of these characters are male.
	Because there can be great female protagonists, but they are extremely rare.
	Either they're in an extremely desperate scenario where there aren't any men left to help them, which is hard to establish, or it's a very dark horror game.
	It's a movie like submission.
	It's not a positive experience.
	Much like everything Margaret Atwood has written, for instance.
	And it really begs a question, again, going back to Margaret Atwood, the fact that her universes, her novels, are so misogynistic that they'd be hard to believe in if you didn't know anything about the Middle East.
	But they're certainly hard to believe in in North America.
	So at the end of the day, people mainly want to play an active role.
	They want to rescue the princess.
	It's an easier narrative to write.
	It's an easier narrative to understand.
	And both men and women prefer this story.
	That's the real reason behind it.
	It goes right down to the base of our biology.
	And the fact that we don't understand this anymore, like I said, takes 12, 16 years of just constant educational brainwashing to make us think that men and women are interchangeable when we're so obviously not.
	This really goes to show why Taming of the Shrew is the one play by the bard that nobody wants to put on TV anymore.
	Take care of yourselves, folks.

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