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kutsuwamushiI told a friend that I thought CD Projekt Red had improved their portrayal of women, but not by much; I described it as baby steps. She asked an interesting question: What would giant steps look like to you?
That made me sit and seriously think about it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a capitalist dystopia where corporations have immense power. The state barely functions; there are no social services, and law enforcement is ... extremely conditional.
If you don't work for a corporation, your day-to-day life is probably hard. It's difficult to make ends meet and your neighborhood is probably run by a violent criminal gang. In this environment, a lot of people openly engage in sex work. You can see where this is going, probably - exploitation is everywhere, and Cyberpunk 2077 leans hard into it this sleazeball vision.
I have conflicted feelings about this. We don't really need more stories like this, at the moment, but it also makes complete sense within the setting. So given that starting point, how could Cyberpunk 2077 handled women - and women engaging in sex work - better? What do I think giant steps would look like?
A lot of these things are areas where I didn't think Cyberpunk 2077 made some steps but didn't go far enough.
1. The first step: It's not just women engaged in sex work; there are men as well. Overall I get the impression that they attempted to split the gender of sex workers fairly evenly, but fell short. The giant step: More men - with character designs by people who are attracted to men.
2. The first step: One of the characters is a sex worker. She doesn't enter the story as a victim, but as someone with agency who moves the plot along. The giant step: She should have stayed that way. She comes to a bad end - one that is completely expected if you just think of the tropes of sex work. It would have been much more revolutionary if she survived and continued to play a role in the story. As it is, she's basically fridged.
3. The first step: There is a gang sex workers and other marginalized folk who (among other things) have taken over certain businesses and made them better for the people who work there. One of the major supporting characters is a member and we get to this happen in a side story, albeit as part of a revenge quest. The giant step: It would have been really cool to be more involved with them instead of just this one character/side story. In other words instead of all of the instances of sex work we see being exploitation, let us see that it can be different when sex workers are given agency.
4. The first step: The slight majority of major supporting characters are women. They're all interesting and well-developed, and don't feel like characters whose story role is "a woman." I don't get the sense that they're women written by men, if you know what I mean. The giant step: Apart from Wakako, who is old, beautiful, and slim, they're all young, beautiful, and slim. Although CD Projekt Red has done a better job of giving women more varied bodies and facial types than in games like The Witcher, most of the women in the game are still designed to be conventionally attractive in a way that the men are not. Male character designs are still allowed to vary more, in ways that take them out of the boundaries of conventional attractiveness.
5. The first step: There are romanceable characters of both genders. The giant step: The male characters that you can romance are just much less interesting because they're less embedded in the story. This is not an inevitable side effect of so many of the interesting supporting characters being women; there are interesting male characters who could have been romanceable, but aren't because the developers weren't thinking that way. If they had made it possible to romance Jackie, now that would have been deeply interesting. Or Takemura! Cowards.
6. There's no step here: Isn't it strange that in a setting with so much Chinese and Japanese influence, none of the romanceable characters are Asian? ... ...
7. There's no step here: We're still deep in the gender binary.
That made me sit and seriously think about it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a capitalist dystopia where corporations have immense power. The state barely functions; there are no social services, and law enforcement is ... extremely conditional.
If you don't work for a corporation, your day-to-day life is probably hard. It's difficult to make ends meet and your neighborhood is probably run by a violent criminal gang. In this environment, a lot of people openly engage in sex work. You can see where this is going, probably - exploitation is everywhere, and Cyberpunk 2077 leans hard into it this sleazeball vision.
I have conflicted feelings about this. We don't really need more stories like this, at the moment, but it also makes complete sense within the setting. So given that starting point, how could Cyberpunk 2077 handled women - and women engaging in sex work - better? What do I think giant steps would look like?
A lot of these things are areas where I didn't think Cyberpunk 2077 made some steps but didn't go far enough.
1. The first step: It's not just women engaged in sex work; there are men as well. Overall I get the impression that they attempted to split the gender of sex workers fairly evenly, but fell short. The giant step: More men - with character designs by people who are attracted to men.
2. The first step: One of the characters is a sex worker. She doesn't enter the story as a victim, but as someone with agency who moves the plot along. The giant step: She should have stayed that way. She comes to a bad end - one that is completely expected if you just think of the tropes of sex work. It would have been much more revolutionary if she survived and continued to play a role in the story. As it is, she's basically fridged.
3. The first step: There is a gang sex workers and other marginalized folk who (among other things) have taken over certain businesses and made them better for the people who work there. One of the major supporting characters is a member and we get to this happen in a side story, albeit as part of a revenge quest. The giant step: It would have been really cool to be more involved with them instead of just this one character/side story. In other words instead of all of the instances of sex work we see being exploitation, let us see that it can be different when sex workers are given agency.
4. The first step: The slight majority of major supporting characters are women. They're all interesting and well-developed, and don't feel like characters whose story role is "a woman." I don't get the sense that they're women written by men, if you know what I mean. The giant step: Apart from Wakako, who is old, beautiful, and slim, they're all young, beautiful, and slim. Although CD Projekt Red has done a better job of giving women more varied bodies and facial types than in games like The Witcher, most of the women in the game are still designed to be conventionally attractive in a way that the men are not. Male character designs are still allowed to vary more, in ways that take them out of the boundaries of conventional attractiveness.
5. The first step: There are romanceable characters of both genders. The giant step: The male characters that you can romance are just much less interesting because they're less embedded in the story. This is not an inevitable side effect of so many of the interesting supporting characters being women; there are interesting male characters who could have been romanceable, but aren't because the developers weren't thinking that way. If they had made it possible to romance Jackie, now that would have been deeply interesting. Or Takemura! Cowards.
6. There's no step here: Isn't it strange that in a setting with so much Chinese and Japanese influence, none of the romanceable characters are Asian? ... ...
7. There's no step here: We're still deep in the gender binary.
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Date: 2023-06-26 05:48 am (UTC)(If you’re wondering where a complete stranger popped up from out of the wild blue, I strayed here from your grand opening of Little Details.)