Conflicted

Excuse me while my feminist side rears her lovely head. Things I’m encountering are prodding me to think about how female leadership is portrayed in the stories we tell.

In my current video game, Fallout ’76, America was destroyed in a nuclear war. After spending 25 years in a fallout shelter, my character is roaming what used to be West Virginia. There are no other humans left except vault dwellers like me (a. k. a. the other players). But I do encounter various factions of survivors — or what’s left of them.

For most of these factions, the leaders are/were women. Awesome! Female empowerment. But then, uh-oh — they’re all dead, along with every member of their group. You take on a quest line, hoping to connect with this woman and her organization, and at the end you find her body. With some loot, of course. Time for the next quest line!

Of the post-apocalyptic survivor groups I’ve encountered so far, seven of them were led by women. I have found three bodies, two have disappeared without a trace, one was replaced by a robot that thinks it’s her, and one I’m still searching for. (Not with much hope.)

On the masculine side, three groups were led by men. One was replaced by a robot and I haven’t found the other two’s bodies. There is another faction that I don’t know yet who led them.

Okay, it’s the post-apocalypse. It’s a given that almost everyone is dead. But the unbalanced ratio is telling.

So I alternate between happiness (Cool, women leaders are in the post-apocalypse) and depression (Oh, women can’t be leaders UNTIL the world ends). It’s good that women are shown to lead. But then all their leadership ends in failure.

As the title says, I’m conflicted. What is the message here? Are the game writers showing women as leaders, just to prove that women shouldn’t be allowed to lead? Maybe they didn’t want to show males communicating through the angsty audio recordings we get from the females. Maybe they wanted to be inclusive but didn’t about the subtext.

Maybe, even they don’t know. But I kind of think they should.

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