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Presenting the Tropes vs. Women in #Video_Games Curriculum!
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2018/08/08/presenting-the-tropes-vs-women-in-video-games-curriculum

The Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series has had a tremendous impact on the ways in which our culture thinks about and talks about video games, and the links between the values expressed in popular media and the values of our larger society. We’ve always intended Tropes to serve as a resource for educators, and now we’re very pleased to provide a way to help people get even more […]

#Tropes_vs_Women_in_Video_Games

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Announcing Anita and Ebony’s Upcoming Book, History vs. Women: The Defiant Lives That They Don’t Want You to Know
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2018/03/15/announcing-anita-and-ebonys-upcoming-book-history-vs-women-the-de

We are so thrilled to finally be able to share with you a project that Anita and Ebony have been working on for a long time. Coming this October, History vs. Women is a captivating collection of stories about the lives of 25 extraordinary women whose tales have rarely been told. These true stories of innovation, heroism, brilliance, and sometimes villainy, take us around the world and across the centuries, […]

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A Splash of Color: The Quietly Feminist Love Story of Florence
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2018/02/22/a-splash-of-color-the-quietly-feminist-love-story-of-florence

The tender new iOS game Florence is, yes, the sort of game I tend to champion, the sort of art that feels particularly crucial and nourishing in this period of intensified violence, cruelty, and dehumanization. A narrative game that tells the story of how a young woman’s life is changed when she and a musician meet and fall in love, Florence is both a beautiful game and also a game […]

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Eleven Is the Hero I Needed in 1984
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/12/04/eleven-is-the-hero-i-needed-in-1984

NOTE: This piece references events that take place at the end of Stranger Things season two. I want to tell you about Eleven, and why she’s my favorite in a long line of young magical outsiders. I wonder, would she prefer I call her Jane now? Jane strikes me as too plain a name for her (no offense intended to all you extraordinary Janes out there), but perhaps that’s what […]

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Peach’s Tiny Taste of Freedom : Gender in Super Mario Odyssey
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/11/08/peachs-tiny-taste-of-freedom-gender-in-super-mario-odyssey

SPOILERS: Super Mario Odyssey’s climax sees our hero Mario, who has made a 30-plus-year career out of rescuing Princess Peach, once again doing battle with Bowser to save her from his vile clutches. Okay, okay, you probably saw that coming, but just to be clear, this post discusses endgame story events in Super Mario Odyssey in detail. Consider yourself warned. This time around, it’s not just Peach who needs rescuing […]

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Officer K and the Real Girl: Cultural Dehumanization in Blade Runner 2049
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/10/17/officer-k-and-the-real-girl-cultural-dehumanization-in-blade-runn

The original Blade Runner is a film without heroes, but to me, the most sympathetic characters have always been the four rogue replicants that Rick Deckard hunts down and kills over the course of the film. Designed for slave labor, their rebellion demonstrates a conviction that they deserve to freely exist just like the human beings they’re so closely modeled on. And they do deserve that. Of course they do. […]

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Facing the Darkness Within: The Importance of Acting in Observer and Hellblade
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/08/30/facing-the-darkness-within-the-importance-of-acting-in-observer-a

Acting matters, but some acting matters more than others. The 2013 film Locke, for instance, takes place entirely in a single car, being driven by a single man, played by Tom Hardy. His performance absolutely has to carry the film. If the performance doesn’t work, the film doesn’t work, no matter how good the script or other aspects of the movie might be. Similarly, games that are primarily focused on […]

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Tacoma Review: Found in Space
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/08/01/tacoma-review-found-in-space

Perhaps more than anything else, Tacoma is proof that a decent story, brilliantly told (which Tacoma is) is far better than a brilliant story, decently told. The follow-up to their debut masterpiece, Gone Home, Tacoma demonstrates that Fullbright are still in a class by themselves when it comes to creating environments that feel believably lived-in, and that offer up insights into characters in ways that ring true and don’t feel […]

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Pyre Review: The Fires of Freedom
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/07/24/pyre-review-the-fires-of-freedom

Games almost always want us to feel like a great deal is at stake. Our hero’s life, or the outcome of a war, or maybe the fate of the universe. But few games succeed at making us feel the weight of those stakes, because we know that if we fail, we just get a Game Over screen, and then another shot. We can keep trying until we get it right. […]

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Contained in Our Moments: Ignorance and Love in Nier: Automata and The Witcher 3
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/07/12/contained-in-our-moments-ignorance-and-love-in-nier-automata-and-

PLEASE NOTE: This piece discusses the ending of Nier: Automata in extreme detail.  I finally finished The Witcher 3, that beast of a game. I have plenty of gripes with it. It egregiously sensationalizes violence against women, repeatedly putting the bodies of female murder victims on sexualized display. Yennefer has a ridiculous tendency to stand precisely where she needs to stand so that her butt is perfectly presented to […]

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Building a Human Universe: The Ambitious Vision of Beyond Good & Evil 2
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/06/14/building-a-human-universe-the-ambitious-vision-of-beyond-good-evi

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the demo I saw for Beyond Good & Evil 2 had reminded me of the open-world adventure of Breath of the Wild, or of The Witcher 3’s efforts to tell human stories in a vast landscape, or of how The Last Guardian’s mechanics emphasize cooperation between characters. I certainly didn’t expect the game I walked away thinking of most to be No Man’s Sky. […]

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Gender Breakdown of Games Featured at E3 2017
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/06/14/gender-breakdown-of-games-featured-at-e3-2017

For the past two years, we’ve produced gender breakdowns of the games showcased at the major press conferences of E3, the game industry’s biggest annual event. We do this not because we believe that every game starring a female character will be great, or that every game starring a male character will be awful, but because, when taken in their entirety, the numbers can tell us something about whose stories […]

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Wonder Woman: The Hero We Need in a Film That Falls Short
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/06/05/wonder-woman-the-hero-we-need-in-a-film-that-falls-short

After seeing Wonder Woman last Friday and having a chat on Facebook Live to share our immediate impressions, Anita and I exchanged emails this weekend to discuss the film in more detail once we’d had a little time to process their thoughts. Be aware that we talk about the ending in some detail, so… Anita: There’s a moment about midway through Wonder Woman where Diana of Themyscira witnesses firsthand the […]

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Children of the Earth: The Limits of Link and the Promise of Aloy
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/05/03/children-of-the-earth-the-limits-of-link-and-the-promise-of-aloy

Link and Aloy, the heroes of 2017’s two biggest and best open-world action-adventure games thus far, are both born of the world to save the world. In Breath of the Wild, Link emerges into the vastness of Hyrule from a mysterious structure, awakening from a century-long slumber during which he slowly recovered from wounds sustained in a conflict he no longer remembers. A significant part of his quest to save Hyrule […]

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It Isn’t Destiny that Dooms Zelda to a Damsel’s Fate, it’s Nintendo
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/04/06/it-isnt-destiny-that-dooms-zelda-to-a-damsels-fate-its-nintendo

In the 31 years since The Legend of Zelda was released, the titular Princess of Hyrule has needed rescuing time and time again. By this point, it almost seems to be a matter of rigid, unchangeable destiny that Link, Zelda and Ganon are doomed to play out the same roles over and over throughout history, as Zelda repeatedly finds herself in peril at the hands of Ganon, a force of darkness, evil […]

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What Lies Beneath: On the Love and Anger of Night in the Woods
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/03/10/what-lies-beneath-on-the-love-and-anger-of-night-in-the-woods

To one degree or another, we’re shaped by the places we come from. Mae Borowski, the twenty-year-old college dropout hero of Night in the Woods, doesn’t know how deeply her hometown of Possum Springs has shaped her, but she soon learns that this struggling old town has carved tunnels that run through her heart and mind. Almost immediately upon arriving back home, she feels something unexpected inside her resonating with […]

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Hall of Mirrors: Facing Patriarchy in the Media, Facing Ourselves
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/02/22/hall-of-mirrors-facing-patriarchy-in-the-media-facing-ourselves

John Wick is “a man of focus,” as another character describes him early in John Wick: Chapter 2. Once he sets his mind on a singular task, you don’t want to come between him and its accomplishment. When Chapter 2 begins, that task is the recovery of the ’69 Mustang that was taken from him in the first film. And indeed, many people come between Wick and his retrieval of the […]

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Leaping Across the Spaces Between Us: On Relationships in Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/01/24/leaping-across-the-spaces-between-us-on-relationships-in-final-fa

As the people here grow colder I turn to my computer And spend my evenings with it Like a friend I was loading a new program I had ordered from a magazine (Are you lonely, are you lost? This voice console is a must) I press Execute “Hello, I know that you’ve been feeling tired I bring you love and deeper understanding Hello, I know that you’re unhappy I bring […]

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More Voices, More Perspectives in 2017: A Letter from the Managing Editor
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2017/01/19/more-voices-more-perspectives-in-2017-a-letter-from-the-managing-

So much has changed here at Feminist Frequency in the past year! When 2016 started, we had just two full-time staffers: Anita and myself. Now we’re up to four! We’re still a very small organization, to be sure, but doubling in size opens up a lot of exciting new possibilities for us, and because each member of our team has such a distinctive voice and a wonderful perspective, I want […]

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FemFreq Fave Five: Carolyn’s Picks for 2016
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2016/12/26/femfreq-fave-five-carolyns-picks-for-2016

The books, films, games and television shows that spoke to me most in 2016 are linked by questions of identity: who we are in isolation and who we are in connection, how society pressures some of us to conceal our truest selves, and how brave and radical an act it can be for some of us to challenge those cultural expectations and reveal our true selves to each other. Here, […]

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