Oh, You're a Useful Female Character? Good Luck Surviving Until the End
Female Videogame Characters and The Last of Us Franchise
Tags: #FemaleCharacters #Videogames #TheLastOfUs #DamselTropes #Spoilers #TropesInVideogames
It is nothing new that the videogame industry has an exhaustive tradition of using female characters as plot devices for the male lead character (Gray, Voorhees, and Vossen, 2020). One of the most idly used gendered tropes is the ‘damsel in distress’, where the narrative centers around a damsel rescue or escort mission. As a plot device, damsels serve as the main motivation for the (usually) male lead to execute his mission. Arnita Sarkeesian (2013) has pointed out, women do not have to be a helpless victim throughout the entirety of a game to fit the damsel trope but rather, the female character gets reduced to a state of helplessness and requires the help and/or rescue of the male hero at some (or multiple) points during the game. Whilst some damsels have much more active and integral roles in a game, and therefore are not created equally, they are all eventually pushed into a state of helplessness.
Alongside the damsel trope, women are often reduced to passive background roles, objects of pleasure, or subordinates to the male lead (Dill et al. 2008). The female sidekick as such is often not just reduced to being non-essential, but becomes a burden to the player rather than providing a clear benefit (Voorhees, 2016; Sarkeesian, 2017; Stang, 2017). In contrast, the father-daughter trope – as seen in games like Bioshock Infinite (2013) – defies some of the burden depicted in traditional escort missions. The female sidekick Elizabeth is immune to harm dealt by enemies and is thus not in need of safeguarding per se. However, this also means that the female sidekick does not need to be factored in for gameplay strategy to pass a level and therefore does not warrant the player’s attention (Voorhees, 2016; Stang, 2017). To add to this, the father-daughter trope in particular serves as an excuse for male heroes to act on the expense of female agency by turning daughters into their fathers’ moral barometer as the plot revolves around paternal redemptions for past failures.
These issues are tied to broader cultural and societal practices of sexism and misogyny within the gaming industry (Gray 2012). Videogames have become deeply ingrained in our culture and play a vital role in perpetuating or challenging traditional gender roles. Fortunately, some developers have taken notice of these criticisms and sought to diversify their character choices. For example, in an interview with VentureBeat (Takahashi, 2013), creative director Neil Druckmann emphasised Naughty Dog’s intention to develop stronger and more interesting female characters for their game series The Last of Us. When looking more closely at the women within franchise, it becomes clear that the games indeed defy some of these criticisms of female videogame characters but are also complicit by portraying both passive and active women:
The Last of Us (2013)
Ellie, the most prominent female character in the first game, represents both an active and passive female character. At the beginning of The Last of Us, Ellie is a naive 12-year-old child whom Joel looks down on throughout the first half of the game. While she generally helps Joel out every once in a while by stabbing an Infected, she is still rendered helpless at various stages of the game. For instance, Ellie cannot swim which forces the player to solve ‘puzzles’ to help her navigate from point A to point B on planks of wood. Ellie is immune to harm and does not warrant the player’s attention for most of the game. Yet, Joel frequently calls out to her to ‘keep up’ - reminding the player that she is indeed a burden to the male lead. These are textbook examples of the classic damsel escort mission.
This is not the only trope that Ellie conforms to. She is designed both as a tool to aid the player and a victim (Stang, 2017). She is not allowed to carry any weapons besides her knife for almost 4/5ths of the game. Mimicking Elizabeth from Bioshock: Infinite, Ellie is often relegated to the role of doorman, squeezing into smaller spaces to allow Joel access to the next section.
However, when Joel is injured, we see a flip in her role, becoming a very proactive one and, in fact, the player character. Ellie ends up taking care of Joel, going hunting, trading for medicine, keeping them both safe, and ultimately using her skills as a strategist to lead danger away from the wounded Joel. Even when she is trapped by an enemy, she does not get damsel’d during this sequence of the game. Rather, by her own skills and powers, she defends herself, but still ends up traumatised by killing her captor. Despite becoming the heroine of the game, the story concludes by stripping her of her gained capabilities; Planning to sacrifice herself in hope of saving humanity, Joel goes against her wishes and ‘rescues’ her from the Fireflies’ hospital. Ellie’s narrative is reduced to Joel’s moral barometer feeding neatly into the father-daughter trope.
In contrast, the first female character we encounter in the franchise is Joel’s daughter Sarah who is the playable character for the opening sequence of the game. However, she is killed off before the title credits. Therefore, Sarah is nothing but a plot device to provide a tragic backstory for our main protagonist.
During the first fifth of the game, we encounter Tess. In contrast to many female sidekicks, she has a very active role. She is incredibly capable and assertive, shows strengths and leadership, and her relationship with Joel appears to be built on mutual trust. Tess is, in fact, the driving force behind the choice for the player to escort Ellie and join the Fireflies’ mission. Yet, once Ellie joins the two of them, Tess is reduced to the personal protector and the stand-in mother figure for Ellie and no longer leads the group.
Overall, it appears that her active role is used predominantly for the player to grasp the concept and controls of the game. Once the core mechanics are learned, it is therefore unsurprising that when Tess is bitten, she sacrifices herself to allow Joel and Ellie to escape. By this point, Tess has become a hindrance to the father-daughter trope and killing her character allows the trope to fully develop throughout the rest of the story.
Later in the game, we encounter Maria, the leader of the settlement of Jackson. While she is an active character in cutscenes, she is still rendered helpless and hides with Ellie when bandits attack the town. Joel and his brother Tommy, along with the nameless male patrol guards, save the women. Mirroring Tess’s role earlier in the game, Maria guilts Joel into continuing his journey with Ellie, preventing her husband Tommy from taking over the mission. Despite her prominent social role, Maria’s character is used to reinforce the father-daughter trope for the second half of the game.
The leader of the Fireflies, Marlene, is another woman in a position of power sidelined to the cutscenes. Early in the game, she is wounded, preventing her from traveling with Ellie to the Fireflies’ headquarters. Then, absent from most of the game, she returns for the final confrontation. Marlene is relegated to the villain role from the male protagonist’s perspective when Joel awakes in the hospital. Despite her own hesitations, Marlene approved the surgery that could save humanity but would inevitably kill Ellie. Joel and Marlene face off, and even though Marlene has shown Joel mercy previously, he kills her to allow the ‘father’ and ‘daughter’ to survive.
The Last of Us: Left Behind (2014)
In the DLC for the first game, The Last of Us: Left Behind, we meet another active female character, Ellie’s best friend Riley. Riley is presented not just as an equal but also often takes a leading and playful role throughout the story, as opposed to being reduced to Ellie’s sidekick or a passive subordinate. Yet, Riley is bitten by an Infected and dies at the end.
While it appears that the named female characters in the first game possess some control, four of them are dead before the end of the game, one is benched in the cutscenes, and the last is stripped of her agency for the sake of the male protagonist’s redemption. It is unsurprising that The Last of Us received criticism in regards to its characterisation of women. It seems, as a response to this critique, The Last of Us II makes up for the lack of female representation by introducing more diverse and capable women. Poorly, but still.
The Last of Us II (2020)
As a returning character, Ellie has grown into one of Jackson’s skillful patrol guards. Yet, as the story progresses, Ellie’s character regresses, clouded by revenge, anger, and guilt following Joel’s death. It is increasingly difficult for the player to empathise with her story. She takes out enemies rather brutally and the player is even prompted to torture another character at one point. The redemption arc Joel received during the first game is missing and Ellie is reduced to a state of self-destruction, taking on the villain role for the sequel. The naive child from the first game is gone, replaced with a driven, focused, and irrational woman traumatised at seeing the death of her father-figure. She embodies popular fiction’s idea of a woman consumed by her power, slave to irrational mood-swings. Ellie becomes the complete opposite of the character that received such acclaim in the first game and, as a result, she is ‘left behind’ by the end.
Our second protagonist and playable character Abby is equally capable and active. She is the daughter of the surgeon Joel shot during the final action sequence of the first game. As such, Abby goes on a revenge mission to kill Joel at the beginning of the second game. When Abby becomes a playable character – once her revenge arc is finished – she is allowed to progress and grow by questioning her affiliation with the Washington Liberation Front (WLF) and the reasons behind their mission. She teams up with two kids – Yara and Lev – from a rival organisation in a redemption arc similar to Joel’s. Abby is not just a driven, strong, and skilled character, but she also shows compassion, empathy, and growth. However, when caught by slave traders in the conclusion of her story, she literally loses her strength and is left to die before Ellie rescues her.
Dina, Ellie’s girlfriend, joins her mission to avenge Joel, and actually helps Ellie defeat any enemies they encounter. Nonetheless, once we find out that Dina is pregnant, she becomes a more passive character or a ‘burden’ to be looked after. Dina is left in a theatre rather than continuing the hunt with Ellie in Seattle. When confronted by Abby, Dina is reduced to helplessness and only kept alive because of her pregnancy. In contrast, Mel, Abby’s pregnant WLF ally, is a capable character regardless of her ‘burden’. She continues working as a surgeon, aiding her companions. Ultimately though, she is killed in a fight with Ellie.
Other minor female characters named in The Last of Us II are Nora and Yara. Nora, like Mel, is a competent medic for the WLF and aids Abby in her mission. However, the player, as Ellie, is forced to unnecessarily torture Nora for information and consequently kill her to further the plot. Yara, who tries to escape the Seraphites, a group of religious extremists, is another intelligent young woman. She teams up with Abby but is severely injured and loses an arm. Later, during a mission to rescue her brother, Lev, from the Seraphites’ island, she echoes Tess’ sacrifice in the first game allowing Abby and Lev to escape.
Could it be any worse in Part III?
Ultimately, The Last of Us franchise has created a variety of diverse and clever women who are nonetheless disempowered at some point during gameplay. During the first game, Ellie often feels like a burden and is stripped of her agency for the sake of Joel’s redemption. Tess loses her initiative after taking on a mother-figure role, because apparently it’s impossible to be a badass mum. Maria is there; in theory she has responsibility, but it never appears on screen. Marlene, the leader of a rebel organisation, cannot fend off one man. She leads a doomed group across the country, akin to the Donner party, and ultimately makes the horrible choice of sacrificing the one for the many. Yet, still, one man with a head injury takes out her whole army.
Throughout the second game, the player is continuously forced to hunt the opposing female protagonist. The creative director, Druckmann, wanted to write a story that ‘make[s] you feel dirty for everything you’ve done in the game, making you realise ‘I’m actually the villain of the story’’ (White, 2020). However, this becomes problematic when you stop and think about it for a second. Even the illusion of choice is removed; the player must actively press buttons to torture and kill other women to progress throughout the story. Instead of giving the player options, say a more difficult and time consuming therapy session or a trip to the gym, the player must perpetuate the cycle of violence. Which, in the end, leaves both Ellie and Abby worse off than they started; Abby is stripped of her physical strength and power; Ellie is alone, angry, and missing a few fingers.
The fate of the remaining female characters is not that much brighter. Dina, though, makes a good choice, grabs her kid, and fucks off. Poor Mel, after having her boyfriend/baby-daddy stolen, and Nora, who not only is bitten, but then tortured because why not cap inevitable death off with a little pain, meet their sad fates at the hands of Ellie, simply because they helped their bestie kill a man. Yara, perhaps the most sympathetic character in this whole sorry lot, loses her life after experiencing the joy of dismemberment.
To top it off, Druckmann had the audacity to say: “I wasn’t surprised that some people were put off by it […] The thing that was the most frustrating is then this cynical view of the game industry to say, ‘Oh, this is clearly a game made by men and they’re putting women in these violent situations,’ and it’s like, hold on, now you’ve just dismissed all the women that have worked on this trailer, including the cowriter who did the first draft of that scene” (White, 2020). But that’s not how the real world works.
Despite Druckmann’s fairytale intentions, it is the outcome that carries all the weight. You cannot ascribe values to the game that are not a part of its actual cultural impact. Most players did not pause the game to sit and think about the cyclic damning nature of revenge; most players just played the game. As Carolyn Petit, of Feminist Frequency Radio (Sarkeesian, Petit & Adams, 2021), has said, to function as a critique on violence, you need to show actual alternatives as a means to achieve the same goal. Druckmann, however, by left-reading his own work, is instead only perpetuating patriarchal violence. The presence of a woman does not make a work feminist; it just gave a woman a (probably) underpaid job.
While the series, particularly The Last of Us II and The Last of Us: Left Behind, often defies the classic damsel rescue/escort trope, the games still either strip capable women of their abilities – like in the cases of Dina and Abby – or kill them off – like in the cases of Tess, Marlene, Riley, Mel, Nora, and Yara – to further the plotline. Therefore, despite Naughty Dog’s original intentions, what the series has demonstrated is if you are a useful woman, you will be killed to further the story and strong female characters are inevitably rendered powerless in the end.
So evidently, the odds are stacked against you if you are a woman, but especially if you are at all competent. (But by our reckoning, the world of The Last of Us doesn’t have good odds no matter what.)
Sources
Dill, K.E., Brown, B.P., Collins, M.A. (2008): Effects of Exposure to Sex-Stereotyped Video Game Characters on Tolerance of Sexual Harassment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(5): 1402-1408
Gray, K.L. (2012). Intersecting Oppressions and Online Communities. Examining the Experiences of Women of Color in XBox Life. Information, Communication & Society, 70(3), 491-512
Gray, K.L., Voorhees, G., Vossen, E. (2020). Introduction: Reframing Hegemonic Conceptions of Women and Feminism in Gaming Culture. In: K.L. Gray; G. Voorhees; E. Vossen (eds.) Feminism in Play. Cham, Palgrave, 1-18
Sarkeesian, A. (2013). Damsel in Distress: Part 1 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games. Feminist Frequency, 7 March, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q
Sarkeesian, A. (2017). The Lady Sidekick – Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. Feminist Frequency, 27 April, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BrKqEtG-2w
Sarkeesian, A., Petit, C., Adams, E. (2021). FFR 161: Left-Reading Media: When you want it to be Progressive, Feminist Frequency Radio. 28 April, https://feministfrequency.com/video/left-reading-media-when-you-want-it-to-be-progressive/
Stang, S. (2017). Big Daddies and Broken Men: Father-Daughter Relationships in Video Games. Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, 10 (6): 162–174
Takahashi, D. (2013). The Last of Us creators react to critics of game’s female characters (exclusive interview). VentureBeat, 5 August https://venturebeat.com/2013/08/05/the-last-of-us-female-characters/
Voorhees, G. (2016). Daddy Issues: Constructions of Fatherhood in The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, 9 (2). https://adanewmedia.org/2016/05/issue9-voorhees/
White, S. (2020). The Last of Us Part II: How Naughty Dog made a classic amidst catastrophe. GQ, 9 June, https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-last-of-us-part-ii-neil-druckmann-interview?fbclid=IwAR3PDQsDaGxzleVY9y98CMmT9dAM24XB9MpPaT7BxF2zF3GFtJcl_9a-u-4
Image Credit
Evey [@eveygamephoto] (2021). "Our minds are troubled by the emptiness (1,2,3 vertical) #TheLastOfUsPartII#TLOU2#VGPUnite#PS5" 23 March, https://twitter.com/eveygamephoto/status/1374428813342347272 via The Last of Us II (Naughty Dog, 2020).