Week 5: “Acts of altruism are repeatedly presented in heavily gendered ways that are bound up in harmful myths about women as perpetual victims and men as paternalistic saviors.”

Anita Sarkeesian’s Damsel in Distress: Part 1 — Tropes vs. Women discusses how the Damsel-in-Distress trope disempowers female characters and robs them of the chance to be heroes in their own right. While playing Kingdom Hearts this week, I traveled to Alice’s world, Wonderland. While Alice is supposed to be the hero of her own story (she is supposed to save Wonderland and herself), in Kingdom Hearts, Alice is a damsel in distress. She is locked up by the Queen and then kidnapped by the Trickmaster, and Sora has to fight the Trickmaster to save her. Alice, the protagonist of Alice in Wonderland, has to be rescued. In her own story. And she apologizes to Sora. For him having to rescue her. Playing Kingdom Hearts has allowed me to realize that being a protagonist of a story does not equate to that character being portrayed as the hero of that same story (i.e. if you are a female protagonist, you are not the hero of your own story — because you are a female). The Damsel’d Alice is reduced to an achievable goal, an object. No one had to save Tarzan in his world, Deep Jungle. No one had to save Tarzan in his story, Tarzan. By depicting Alice as a damsel-in-distress, the developers of Kingdom Hearts are reinforcing and perpetuating the notion “that women, as a group, need to be sheltered, protected, and taken care of by men”. It’s a man’s world, and women just occupy it. That’s the message these video games are conveying by depicting women as damsels-in-distress.