Sierra 320, Feminism in the Mainstream or Gender Reversal? (draft)

Mainstream video games are generally considered the domain of men. On the rare occasions that female characters appear in video games they are usually portrayed as princesses in distress or scantily dressed caricatures with breasts several times larger than their heads. For many companies such characters are a selling point for their massive, testosterone driven target audience. It is because of this that the character Kat in the 2010 Fall Blockbuster Halo Reach seems like such an almost illogical exception, and a welcome breath of fresh air.

For those of you not in the know, the Halo games are a series of sci-fi shooter set in the year 2552. First contact with an advanced alliance of alien species calling itself The Covenant turns into a seemingly unprovoked holy war. As human worlds fall one after another, the war becomes desperate. Halo Reach is set on the last colonial planet of humanity, Reach. The player is part of an elite team of commandos (code named Noble Team) as they do everything they can to delay the imminent conquest of Reach. The second in command of Noble Team is the brilliant, witty, no nonsense, one armed soldier code named Sierra 320, Kat for short. I've attached two videos from the campaign below, watch the top one first and don't watch the bottom one if you don't want a spoiler.

Fanboyism of the second clip aside, the video shows a distinctly different form of female video game character. One who is badass, smart, and most impressively, not meant to be a sexy selling point (citation).

From her facial scars, to her relative lack of femininity, to her robotic arm, Kat seems to break every gender stereotype that male gamers have grown so used to fantasizing about. Many on the internet would argue that Kat is simply a woman adhering to male stereotypes, similar to the over the top action heroines of the blacksplosion movies in the late 70's and early 80's (citation), however, that is not necessarily true. More importantly, it may not even be relevant.

As with any stereotype, gender stereotypes are simply a method of categorizing something without having to invest any effort into getting to know it. We male gamers have gotten so used to seeing ultra-sexualized female characters that the adjective sexy has come to be synonymous with the adjective female. If I had to take a guess, the sheer amount of hate for Kat, most of which centers around her being unable to drive (none of the AI in Halo ever could) or the argument that women have no place in war, likely stems from the fact that Kat violates the usual chain of logic needed to identify a video game character. To many male gamers, the process of understanding a female game character is as follows: Female ----> Pan camera to see chest better ------>BOOOOOOOOOOOOBS. And that about it. Personally I've always found said train of thought utterly disgusting, but personal sentiment aside, the difficultly in identifying Kat's gender so to speak comes not from the fact that she doesn't have female traits, but from the fact that the traits perceived as female in video games are impossibly unrealistic.

So to answer the original question, Kat is NOT a female from a video game perspective. Unlike Laura Croft from the Tomb Raider games, she does not sexy fight. She kicks serious alien ass, often times in brutal and unladylike ways. However, Kat is still a woman by biological definition, her dog tags list her gender as female, and in the end that's not what matters. Being a female did not prevent Kat from fighting on the front lines of a near hopeless war. Having a different social perspective did not stop a sniper from killing her in the middle of a sentence. At the end of the day Kat's ability to come up with brilliant plans, repair a comm. unit with more shrapnel than transistors, or keep fighting after losing her arm were far more important to Noble Team then her gender. It appears that when faced with extinction, humans can overcome the odd idea that women are in some way inferior or unable to fight like men. The only question I can't seem to be able to answer is why we need an apocalyptic war in order to realize this.