The Game of Spoons - How Susannah Slept with the Duchess

Preface - the following example comes from Dragon's Dogma, a video game for current-generation consoles in which, saliently, you get to create and customize the appearance of a protagonist and their main support character (incidentally, the source of the phrase "the beast fears fire").  In my first playthrough, I created as my protagonist  a tomboyish, freckly girl named Susannah.  This is her story...

So Susannah, this young fishing woman, she survived getting her heart torn out and eaten by a dragon, and was consequently fated to kill the thing.  She goes to the city, meets with the Duke, has some adventures, kills some critters; romance is not on her mind, though the captain of the guard and the guy who trains the volunteer soldiers out in the countryside are both kind of attractive to her.

She also gets contacted by the Duchess' maid to meet with the Duchess in secret.  There's been hints that something shady is going on in the duchy, and the Duchess is a lonely girl, recently wed and subsequently ignored who might know some things Susannah really ought to learn.  Susannah sneaks out to meet her and the first thing that happens is the Duchess confesses undying love for her.

Okay, girl is really isolated and and feels helpless, Susannah can dig; she's out of her element, too.  Susannah is a warrior in a country where the only other female warrior is an obvious sham and the Duchess was probably brought up on tales of courtly bullshit in the fantasy France from whence she came.  She's reading from a cultural script.  It's a little weird, but maybe they can help one another.

Then the Duke comes in and tries to strangle the Duchess, not knowing Susannah is even there, because of reasons of which Susannah is not aware.  Susannah intervenes, ends up in the dungeon for her troubles, escapes, and the whole castle plays it like nothing happened.  Even the Duke.  Okay, the duchy is fucked.  A while later, the maid shows up and says the Duchess got locked in a place awaiting either execution or a quieter sort of murder, and Susannah is the only one who can save her.  So she does.  She gets into the cell where they are keeping the Duchess.

They kiss.  Susannah throws her (gently) on the bed.  Discretion shot.

My first thought:  WAITAFUCKINGMINUTE Susannah's not gay.

My Second thought:  I am so glad I didn't end up playing this as a 12 year old boy.**

So how and why did Susannah fuck the Duchess?

Player Characters (PCs)* are not like characters in fiction.  They have a lot in common with characters in any other fictive medium, but their priorities as a tool of transmitting fiction are heavily skewed from those of characters in other media.  Heavily enough that I'm coming to envision them as a different sort of thing entirely.  PCs are, more than any other kind of character, vehicles for the player, as the player, to interact with the setting and story.

But that's how all characters work, right?  To an extent.  A significantly lesser extent than PCs.  You can identify with Dean Winchester all you want on the screen, but it is the choice of the writer, the director and the actor to determine what Dean does, how he behaves and how he communicates his thoughts and feelings.  You can control how you view the subtext and sexual tension, but if you want him to just kiss Castiel already, you've got to write fanfic.

If you want Bella Swan, a character praised and reviled for being as close to a vehicle for readers as a literary character can be, to go with Jacob instead of Edward, or realize that she's 17, out of her depth and put that rainy town of shirtless monsters in her truck's rearview, you've got to write fanfic.

With a PC, you can make these decisions based on what you want to see happen.  You can decide that Bella Swan is through being like Bella Swan and wants to be like Dean Winchester, and mechanics of the game might reward or punish the decision, but it can't prevent you from making it.

This is less the case in video games than in tabletop games, but it is still possible.  Susannah did not have to go on the mission to rescue the Duchess that led to the cutscene in which they had sex.  The mission was, however the only way in which you can access that location, so if exploration is why you're playing Dragon's Dogma, you will also, perforce, be exploring the Duchess' vagina.  Quoting myself: play or don't play.

Whether or not you or I buy into this notion of PC as vehicle for player to interact with the world, it's a concept that sits at the bottom of all game design, or, at least, all games in which a player controls or portrays a character.  The PC is not a fictional person, it's a diving suit or sports car or space ship.  It's your tool for interacting with the story, with the game mechanics, with the setting and with the other fictional people.  This is already running on kind of long, so I am going to have to look at how ableism rises from this starting point in the next part of this series, but ableism is far from the only fucked up thing that comes out of this concept.

I posit the tale of Susannah as an example.  You get issued a love interest (and another discretion tumble shot in the credits) based on stuff you've done with and for characters during the game.  There are five women set up as potential love interests and developing affinity with them is very easy.  There are significantly fewer males set up in the narrative as potential love interests and  I've figured out through subsequent playthroughs that it's kind of tricky to get a male love interest.  Actually, a couple of them are hard to even encounter, and the only one I've ever successfully secured (the real dragon's cultist-sycophant's TV Tropes style dragon), I did so by killing and bringing back to life (Julien really digs you after that).  Still have not gotten hot warrior action from either of the guys Susannah had her eyes on.

(ETA I cannot be 100% certain that this is not set up so to explore and encourage women loving women, but I'll let the difference between how the silver chestplate looks on male and female models (female version not included, but if you google "Slave Leia" you'll get the same level of coverage) and note that a large proportion of the support characters (appearances and gear chosen by other players) are female and wear them sit here as evidence in my favor.)

I assume it's because Capcom assumes that I will be a dude, and playing a dude!arisen (or will have a lesbian fetish), and I will give them that it did throw me to have Susannah assigned a sexuality by the narrative which was not the one I had in mind (at least in Bioware games, you have the out of saying "Oh shit, sorry I led you on" when someone wants to take you to bed).

These assumptions sit at the bottom of the awful shit that came out during the development of the recent Tomb Raider game (which is apparently, a lot better than I expected) about the player wanting to protect Lara from the dudes on the island.

Apparently, video game designers and publishers, when enough teeth are pulled to allow a game out with a default-female protagonist, they do not give her a love interest.  Jim Sterling (I'll link the segment when I am not at work, as the Jimquisition is all kinds of NSFW) quoted a publisher as saying players (guys) would find it weird for a hetero female protagonist to kiss a male love interest.

I'll let that sink in.

If nothing else, it's strong evidence after the point I'm making that PCs aren't characters in the sense that they are fictional people, but meant to be hollow vehicles for players.  Players about whom publishers and developers carry a lot of assumptions.  Players about whom tabletop designers carry a lot of assumptions.  Link and Gordon Freeman are mute.  Susannah slept with the Duchess, despite my believing she had a thing for Ser Berne.

Next time, I'll be getting mechanical and dorkly in describing how this translates into a lot of the ableism in how tabletop games work.

*Player Character - the character a player controls, PC for short, in most tabletop games.

**Seriously, I almost played as a 12 year old boy at first, but I could not get him to look right.  I'm glad I didn't.