First of all, Spoiler Warning: I am going to spoil the end of Brothers and Frozen throughout this post, so look away now if you don’t want that to happen to you.

Do you have a person in your life, a friend or a cousin or an uncle, that is just a ton of fun to be around? Someone who is both capable of holding an entire room with a story while still being able to tone it down for the close emotional discussions that friends and family so often share? You love this person through and through, but there is some seemingly small flaw of theirs that makes you feel uncomfortable around them sometimes. Like maybe they drink a bit too much at parties and get a little rude, or they have a habit of saying subtly racist stuff that makes you a little uneasy. You want to love them unconditionally, but that little flaw holds you back. This is the relationship that I have found myself in with Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons.

In Brothers you play as a pair of brothers on a quest to a far-away kingdom to find a magical remedy for their sick father. They have already lost their mother, and their father seems to be on the way out as well. To save him, you cross through troll-filled caves, giant castles atop bottomless ravines, and ancient battlefields filled with dead giants to find this magical elixir to save your father. Yet, after overcoming all of these obstacles and hardships, what drives these two brothers apart is a woman. At one point towards the end of the game the brothers save a young woman who is about to be ritually sacrificed by a tribe of warriors to their blood-god. After freeing her, she joins the party and guides the brothers through a snowy village that is haunted by some sort of invisible monster. As she guides the two, the elder brother can flirt with the girl, and through some subtle gestures you can tell that the two are a bit smitten. At points throughout the village section, the girl exhibits feats of strength and balance that seem exceptional, but I thought that they were within the bounds of some sort of acrobat or athlete. Though I thought the girl’s athletic feats might be foreshadowing I had no idea how far the game would go.

After the snowy village section the girl guides the brothers to the entrance of a subterranean cave. At this point the younger brother protests that they are going the wrong direction, but the elder does not heed his warnings. At the bottom of the cave, the girl transforms into a half spider-half woman monster that attacks the boys. They work together to painstakingly RIP OFF 4 OF HER LEGS AND KILL HER, but not before she mortally wounds the elder brother. In this scene, the game plays upon the time-worn trope of woman as seductress and destroyer, tearing the brothers apart, both emotionally when she causes them to disagree, and physically by killing the eldest. The designers choose to make the wedge between these two brothers be a woman, and they choose to have her cause of game’s emotional climax. In what is otherwise an emotionally deft and subtle game, the crescendo is remarkably blunt; I mean the girl’s monster form is like some sort of nightmare mermaid: top-half woman and bottom-half spider. The message that women can be monsters and can damage the bonds of brotherhood is loud and clear. I still love the game for what it is, but like my uncle Johnny on half a glass of rum, I could see some aged and un-nuanced opinions on the role of women that made me uncomfortable.

I thought about this ending scene for some time and I wondered if perhaps the ending would be a bit more talked about if the game was gender swapped, with two female protagonists on a journey together and a male seducer. Luckily, this weekend I went to the movies with my girlfriend and we went to see Frozen, the latest movie from Disney. If you aren’t familiar with the film, like Brothers, it stars two princesses/sisters who happen to bond over a treacherous journey through a Northern-European themed fantasy land. It also features a seducer, but in this case the seducer is a prince from a nearby village named Hans. Like the spider woman from Brothers, he is at first a love interest of one of the two main sisters, only to later be revealed a usurper intent on killing both of the main characters. But, in the case of Frozen, Hans is a person who acts like a monster, not a monster disguised as a person. The woman in Brothers is quite literally dehumanized, as she becomes a monster that has no motivation beyond consuming the brothers for the sake of feeding. In contrast, Hans is an unfortunate prince born at the end of a long line of brothers who all outrank him in the line of succession; he is a conniver because he sees no alternative to the throne. He is a jerk and an attempted murderer, but at least he has characterization and motivation. At least Hans is still human. The only living woman (their mother’s ghost makes some angelic appearances) given any real screen time in Brothers is a monster in disguise.

So here I am. I love Brothers and what it does with its two main characters. I love the final sequences with the younger brother learning how to complete tasks that he used to need his older brother for. I love the vistas and I found myself melancholy after the game was over. But unfortunately I can’t think of this game without remembering its one nagging flaw: its use of a woman as a cheap source of conflict and its demonization of one of its only female presences. I really did not expect that a Disney princess movie would present me with a very similar narrative setup to Brothers, but with more nuanced gender relations. By no means is Frozen’s use of the seducer trope perfect, but it doesn’t irk me like Brothers’ does. Perhaps it is just that Brothers aspires to such heights and executes on so much of its goals that when it stumbles it is all the more glaring. I wanted to love this game unconditionally, but now I can’t help but see this flaw staring me in the face.