Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Justin(e) Bailey

I noticed recently that every significant work of fiction I've been enjoying this summer features awesome, ass-kicking, female protagonists. So naturally, I've been thinking a bunch about feminism, the expectations of gender in narrative, and other gay shit like that.

I never took Gender Studies in college. I was too busy with more important subjects like American Modernism, and 17th Century Metaphysical Poetry. But I'm pretty sure one of the early things they teach you is that a truly open-minded person must go through a series of stages before shedding their skin of sexist preconceptions. (See what I did just then? With that their?) I'd also wager that one of those early stages is encountering a situation that makes you totally reassess your view of the world and the gender roles surrounding you for the very first time. A feminist epiphany of sorts.

Anyway, as I said, I've been thinking about such things lately. And I realize now that my personal feminist awakening was back in 1986, involved a video game, and was probably shared with thousands of other boys my age. I'm talking about the very end of Metroid for Nintendo: after hours and hours of slaying Space Pirates and blasting the evil Mother Brain with the arm canon of your robotic power suit, your character, Samus Aran, turns towards the screen, takes off the helmet of his cyborg suit, and reveals that he is actually a she. A beautiful, awesome, alien-ass-kicking SHE.

I love how this article describes it: Samus' garish space armor falls away and thousands of pre-teen boys had to come to grips with the fact Mother Brain had just been wasted by a cootie-infested girl.

Amazing, right? I'm not totally convinced Nintendo had a geniune feminist agenda going (if you continue playing and beat the game again, you get to see Samus in a bikini), but still: totally blew my mind at the time, and still kinda does.

1 comments:

Geoffrey said...

This was also true of Mario and Mega Man, I believe. Both women.

Commenting at 2 am! All right!