Sunday, March 10, 2013

Tropes vs Women in Video Games part one: Damsels in Distress

Zelda, Princess Peach, the “Damsel in Distress” trope

In writing, lazy tropes abound—I certainly use them time to time—many reasons for this are that tropes are a very easy to communicate an idea to an audience by generating a sort of symbolism. Anita Sarkeesian of FeministFrequency is beginning to release her Kickstarted project “Tropes vs. Women in Videogames” after her astonishingly successful campaign (her ask was $6,000 but she netted almost $160,000.)

In this video she explores the history of the “Damsel in Distress” trope and how it works. It’s suggested that she’ll be going over the more recent incarnations of this trope in a later video—this is a series after all.

I’m happy to see it coming out so soon! As with many video projects, I expected this one to take a bit longer in editing and preparation. However, getting almost 27 times the original ask can certainly help to speed the process a little bit.

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