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Bye, Bye, Birdo: Heroic Androgyny and Villainous Gender-Variance in Video Games

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Queerness in Play

Part of the book series: Palgrave Games in Context ((PAGCON))

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This chapter uses textual analysis to contrast heroic androgyny in series like The Legend of Zelda and NiGHTS with the mixing of gendered signifiers to convey the otherness of particular NPCs in games like Resident Evil: Dead Aim, Fable 2, and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. This chapter aims to problematize the global game industry’s acceptance of masculine-skewed androgyny as aesthetically pleasing and acceptable while portraying gender-variance as aesthetically displeasing and unacceptable. Ultimately, this chapter asks how we can interrogate the privileging of specific types of androgyny in queer games culture and criticism in response to its depiction in mainstream games culture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Diane Carr, Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 163.

  2. 2.

    Fabio Lorenzo-Cioldi, “Psychological Androgyny: A Concept in Search of Lesser Substance. Towards the Understanding of the Transformation of a Social Representation,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 26, no. 2 (1996): 145.

  3. 3.

    Larin McLaughlin, “Androgyny and Transcendence in Contemporary Corporate and Popular Culture,” Cultural Critique 42 (1999): 206.

  4. 4.

    Lola Phoenix, “The Pursuit of Androgyny,” Medium 20 December 2015. https://medium.com/gender-2-0/the-pursuit-of-androgyny-6a0ffa7aa1ff#.soshlkddl.

  5. 5.

    Anita Sarkeesian, “Ms. Male Character – Tropes vs Women in Video Games,” Youtube 15 December 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqYLfm1rWA.

  6. 6.

    Megan Farokhmanesh, “Animating women should take ‘days,’ says Assassin’s Creed 3 animation director,” Polygon 11 January 2014. http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/11/5800466/assassins-creed-unity-women-animation.

  7. 7.

    Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Androgyny: A Conceptual Critique,” Social Theory and Practice 8, no. 3 (1982): 248.

  8. 8.

    Elsewhere in this volume, Mark Filipowich describes androgyny in the Final Fantasy series in further detail.

  9. 9.

    Sam Leeves, “Culture Bytes: Androgyny in Video Games,” Alt:Mag, 1 August 2014. http://www.altmaguk.net/2014/08/androgyny-in-video-games.html.

  10. 10.

    Art of Fighting, SNK (1992).

  11. 11.

    Mike Taylor, “Interview: Takasha Iizuka talks NiGHTS,” NintendoLife, 5 December 2007. http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2007/12/interview_takashi_iizuka_talks_nights.

  12. 12.

    Tha pirateninja, “Androgyny in Video Games (Mainly JPRGS),” 13 May 2008. http://attentionallfriends.blogspot.ca/2008/05/androgyny-in-video-games-mainly-j-rpgs.html.

  13. 13.

    Ibid.

  14. 14.

    Sam Leeves, “Culture Bytes: Androgyny in Video Games.”

  15. 15.

    William Audureau, “Miyamoto, la Wii U et la secrete de la Triforce,” Gamekult, 11 January 2012. http://www.gamekult.com/actu/miyamoto-la-wii-u-et-le-secret-de-la-triforce-A105550.html.

  16. 16.

    Bruce K. Hanson, Peter Pan on Stage and Screen 1904–2010 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 27.

  17. 17.

    Anita Sarkeesian, “Ms. Male Character – Tropes vs Women in Video Games.”

  18. 18.

    Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017).

  19. 19.

    Zelda’s appearances as Sheik are discussed in further detail in Chap. 6, written by Mark Filipowich elsewhere in this volume.

  20. 20.

    Ocarina of Time (1998).

  21. 21.

    Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1973), x.

  22. 22.

    Patricia Hernandez, “Some people think Link might be a girl in the new Zelda,” Kotaku, 11 June 2014. http://kotaku.com/some-people-think-link-might-be-a-girl-in-the-new-zelda-1589374151.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Meredith Li-Vollmer and Mark E. LaPointe, “Gender Transgression and Villainy in Animated Film,” Popular Communication 1, no. 2 (2003): 89–109.

  25. 25.

    Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Androgyny: A Conceptual Critique,” (1982): 254.

  26. 26.

    Meredith Li-Vollmer and Mark E. LaPointe, “Gender Transgression and Villainy in Animated Film”; Amanda Putnam, “Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films,” Ed. Johnson Cheu, Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability (London: MacFarland & Co, 2015), 147–162.

  27. 27.

    Mary Daly, Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), xi.

  28. 28.

    Jennifer Diane Reitz, “The First Transsexual Game Character?” 2001. http://www.transsexual.org/birdo.html. np.

  29. 29.

    Other potential examples like Reaver from the Fable series have been removed from the list because they do not so closely conform to the list of attributes of the gender-variant villain.

  30. 30.

    Li-Vollmer and Lapointe, 103.

  31. 31.

    The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011).

  32. 32.

    Jess Marcotte, “Queering Game Controls” (presentation at the Annual Convention of the Canadian Game Studies Association, Toronto, ON, 31 May to 2 June 2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Western University, London, ON, Canada

    Meghan Blythe Adams

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  1. Meghan Blythe Adams
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Science, Information Arts and Technologies, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Todd Harper

  2. Department of English and Writing Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Meghan Blythe Adams

  3. Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Nicholas Taylor

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Adams, M.B. (2018). Bye, Bye, Birdo: Heroic Androgyny and Villainous Gender-Variance in Video Games. In: Harper, T., Adams, M., Taylor, N. (eds) Queerness in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90542-6_9

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