VIDEO GAMES: Goodbye to the Damsel in Distress

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the female characters in video games and cartoons were damsels in distress, waiting for the all powerful male to come and rescue them. Donkey Kong decided to capture Princess Peach and Mario had to go through the obstacles in his way, such as rolling barrels and broken ladders, to try and save the helpless princess. Then, again he had to rescue her as she was captured by Bowser and held captive in the castle in the original Super Mario Bros game.

Whether it’s Olive Oyl needing Popeye to come to her rescue from Bluto, Princess Peach sitting helplessly waiting for Mario to save her from whoever has captured her, or Rapunzel sitting trapped in the tower until the prince came to save her, the idea was always the same. The female was in need of a male savior.
This brings to mind Freccero’s thoughts on power and how it relates to group identities and marginalization. Freccero believes that within popular culture, we can see hierarchies among identities, where certain groups are considered to be more powerful and others are more marginalized. The examples above show power in relation to gender identity within video game texts and cartoons. In the past, we would see more and more texts revealing how the male gender was considered to be the more powerful identity. Females were portrayed in ways that represented them in a marginalized light. Throughout the years, in video games as well as cartoons, we have seen a lessening of this power dynamic that used to be so much more evident before. In today’s culture, you will see a lot more strong, independent female characters, some being the main hero of their own game. Some examples include Lara Croft of Tomb Raider, Jill Valentine of Resident Evil, Princess Zelda of the Legend of Zelda, and even Princess Peach is no longer considered a damsel in distress, as we see her fighting off her opponents in games like Super Smash Bros.

In this case, the marginalized group has been gaining more and more power throughout the years. Even if the hero of a particular game is still a male, the goal to achieve at the end of the game has shifted towards other things rather than the need to save the female character, the damsel in distress. By comparing video games of today’s time to those of the past, we see the ways in which power has moved through the different texts and even though it hasn’t entirely changed the hierarchies of the gender identity represented in these texts, it has shifted them towards a more balanced level.