#but those two character combos are sooooooooo

[altschmerzes]

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

here's a clip from, as a bit of a curveball bc i was just recently reminded people also care for this project of mine and so very much do i, my gideon the ninth 'fix it but break it way worse first' resurrection fic :)

so, from my dead are mine (and yours as well as mine), from very far ahead in chapter 9, after the dust has settled and we all have to figure out what to do now, how to interact with each other in this weird new normal we're arriving to:

“Silas!” It’s impossible to tell which of the Fourth had been the one to holler the name from far across the room, and it takes Harrow a few moments to realize that this is because it hadn’t been one of them at all. The voice had been two voices, Jeannemary and Isaac yelling over in twin tandem, melting together into one high bird’s call that aims to summon the boy over to them for some unknown purpose. Glancing at Silas, Harrow is not surprised to see the hard, stone expression on his face or the rigid stiffness in his body. Colum is the only person she has ever heard refer to him by his first name. Harrow doesn’t know what sort of operation they’re running in the Fourth or Fifth, but she can’t imagine it’s smiled upon to take that sort of liberty in the Eighth House. He doesn’t react at first, just stands there and stares across the room at them. At his sides, Silas’s hands are held in tight fists.

“Silas, come here!” This time it’s just Jeannemary, exasperation tinging her voice as she yells to be heard from where she and Isaac stand, almost outside the room entirely. Harrow is not the only one who’s noticed the way Silas has reacted to them. Abigail, who’s seemed to materialize out of nowhere for the dozenth time, leading Harrow to wonder if that might be some kind of special necromancy they teach you in her House, gets his attention with a light touch to one tense shoulder. He gives a very faint, almost imperceptible twitch that Harrow might not have noticed if she hadn’t herself bit back enough flinches to know what it looks like when one is just barely not all the way smothered. “They mean it well,” Abigail tells him. Her own voice is quiet, deliberately kept low enough not to be heard by the teens she refers to. The sound of the words and the look on her face is not quite a warning, but it’s not quite not a warning either. “That’s probably our fault, Magnus and I. We’ve never been formal with them. But they mean it well.” There’s no reply. Silas barely glances at her before he’s looking back across at Jeannemary and Isaac, still impatiently waiting for him at the doorway. “If you must correct them,” Abigail goes on, once it becomes clear that he’s not going to say anything, “I’d ask you please do so kindly.” This time she gets an answer, if only in the form of a quick, sharp dip of Silas’s chin. He nods to Abigail, ignores Harrow completely, then starts across the room to where two pairs of hands have started to beckon him, waving in the air like they might physically pull him over faster by doing so. If Silas says anything to them about the name, rebukes them for using it or orders them never to call him such a thing again, he doesn’t do it within earshot, even of Harrow’s sharpened hearing. The only thing that filters through the doorway in that deep, resounding voice unmistakable for anyone else, is, “What is it, then?”

[stack-of-shame]

Tony Hawk’s Underground: Go Get Some Women, You Woman

Game #37: Tony Hawk’s Underground, Neversoft, 2003

Playing Tony Hawk's Underground as the female avatar is the strangest experience. First of all, it's dead obvious that they were imagining a male character when they wrote the dialogue. Everyone is calls you "dude" and "man" constantly.

At one point, you and your friend, later villain get arrested. This scene starts with a police officer's boot on your avatar's neck. Then the cop tells you you won't make your skateboarding competition unless your avatar is willing to "do them a couple favors, hehe.” This is an outright horrifying image when your avatar is a WOC. 

Later, you're put on a mission to retrieve women for a party. You drive up to strangers on a motorized cart full of potted plants. After you impress the women, they say something vaguely flirty and join you, a stranger, on the cart. Keep in mind the cart is a two-seater, so women nos. 2, 3, and 4 are foced to ride with the plants. 

Don’t make the combo too big though. You’ll look like you’re compensating. 

This party was thrown in your honor for a successful magazine shoot. But it's now your job to go "get some women", because the party honoring you, a woman, is "a total dudefest,” says an NPC you’ve never met and never meet again. This is clearly the result of the female avatar being an afterthought, but taken at face-value, it is incredibly creepy. Not that riding around in a cart full of strange women and plants is any less creepy if you’re playing as a man. Actually it’s almost worse because now it’s creepy in a more intentional way, I guess?         

This all is just my reaction as a privileged white cis dude. I don’t even want to think about what this was like for any women playing the game. I think when we talk about representation in games, we forget how bad it used to be, and how many of those problems simply got toned down rather than fixed. Re-experiencing Tony Hawk’s Underground has made it all the more obvious how games pushed women away. This game takes masculinity beyond masculinity, to a place where there are only men, and girl-objects. And if you’re a woman you better count your lucky stars you’re on the skateboard because it’s the only thing keeping you a man. 

Ah, I remember you mentioning something like that in your Ted Talk

I considered the possibility that the female avatar is intended to be off-the-charts butch. Call it my last stand in the fight against being overwhelmingly embarrassed and ashamed. But it doesn’t hold water. The female avatar’s voice is bubbly, with a little fry. Her voice is perfectly honed to sound cool and relatable, but not so masculine as to threaten the other characters’ masculinity.

Without having heard this voice, I had used create-a-skate to make a badass biker-punk looking character with a red Mohawk. Now, there’s no reason that someone who looks like my character couldn’t talk like a 12 year old Miranda Cosgrove. But unless you go far, far out of your way to make the character look like the girl from Lazytown, the sound you expect to hear is a brassy 20-something alto with a pack-a-day rasp. This is not the time for lofty hypotheticals about dissonance between a character’s voice an appearance. This is a case where the game gives you a grown woman to play as and then makes her talk like a toddler who takes elocution lessons.

Or perhaps the avatar is meant to be a lesbian, the straw man in my head says.  If that’s the case, so is every other woman in this universe. It’s the only way to explain the coos of, “Wanna put lotion on my back?” during the “Impress 3 Bikini Girls” mission. Again, one could disingenuously twist this scenario to try and argue some kind of statement about sexual liberation. But the obvious truth is that the question is directed at the player. “Your combos are sooooooooo big,” comes the voice again. 

It should come as no surprise that women weren't flocking to a game where even if you play as a woman, women are still treated as a prize.