@Nicked said:
@Jace said:
@stinky said:
@Jace said:
What if it was a little boy being pulled around by a girl instead? Do you think all the men would be in forums raging about a game that came out like 7 fucking years ago?
Don't you fucking people have something better to complain about?
why can't people think?
why was it not a boy? because the cliche is that women are powerless and need men to get through things.
if it was a girl leading a boy, people would assume the boy was sick, handicapped or a wimp and thus worthless.
what would be better for a woman to complain about than being thought an equal?
ugh, why do people want respect? derp.
"Why can't people think?"
Did you type that on accident or do you have trouble reading?
"Cliche is that women are powerless."
Oh, funny how the ruler of the castle they are in is a fucking QUEEN. Funny how you pick the parts that make your half-assed arguments look good on forums.
Try harder next time.
A lot of people have made the point that the Queen is powerful, but she's also totally demonic, so I don't think it's a very meaningful argument to make. She's the antagonist. The powerless girl is good and the powerful woman is evil.
I only ever played the demo, but Ico still seems like a game worth playing to me. However, I do think it's important to recognize what it is implicitly saying about women and how it might inform our culture or our ideas.
So let's break it down into components then. Ico contains one powerful, evil woman and one passive woman who is neutral (it's a stretch to call Yorda 'good'; her origins are a mystery). Are you saying that Ico contains an implicit message about how powerful women are evil and powerless girls are good? Because you definitely need to hunt out some more supporting arguments from the game if that's what you are alleging. It's a threadbare, uninteresting interpretation that ignores all the subtleties beyond 'the boy holds her hand and pulls her along'. The feminist interpretation necessarily ignores the fact that the boy is probably stronger because he's just arrived and the girl is weak from spending an unspecified amount of time in a cage.
There is barely a single room that Ico can get past without Yorda. If he doesn't bring her with him, he can't get out. As the game progresses you're given the impression that perhaps Yorda was never meant to leave the castle, which presents another facet to her passivity. By the end of the game, it isn't Ico helping Yorda escape. So is the game an indictment of male power? A statement of how men present themselves as heroes as a means to furthering their own interests? A criticism of how men use women up and throw them away? The boy is an outcast, sacrificed because he has horns - does that, along with the emphasis on light and shadow in the game, make it an allegory about prejudice and race? No, not really - that's all just masturbatory waffle. But it has as much if not more supporting evidence than 'Ico is a male chauvinist game that says women have to be evil to be powerful'.
'Recognising what a game is saying about women' includes recognising when it is saying nothing. I don't think it's important to talk about Ico as a statement of gender roles at all, when there are so many other much more important things going on in that game - such as what it does for linear narratives in games; how it creates emotional resonance; how it creates a series of puzzlebox 'test chambers' which are not only believable as real spaces but mysterious and intimidating; how it creates a story with very little dialogue; how the specifics of the fantasy world in the game are fascinating (why the curse, who's the queen, etc); and how it is living proof that the style of your art and animation is more important than your raw graphical horsepower.
Unfortunately feminist theory has become the cheapest and easiest way for pseudo-intellectuals to make themselves appear all right on and progressive. It comes at the expense of meaningful and interesting discussion about games. I'm not part of the Pat-Klepek-hating brigade, but to use him as an example: he links to gender prejudice articles all the time, but I watched my first Ryan/Patrick QL yesterday and each of the women in the game were referred to by Klepek as 'chicks'. That's an example of the useless, tail-chasing posturing that much of the feminist discourse surrounding games amounts to - unproductive, unsubstantiated right on waffle, and that's definitely all this Ico thing is.
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