It's not worth it if it's easy

Shepard ain't white: Playing with race and gender in Mass Effect

gemmalouisestuff:

These games were not written specifically with a woman, much less a woman of color, as the protagonist. At best they were written to be gender- and race-neutral, or at minimum they were written as the cultural default (i.e., white and male). Either way, the story lacks the encoded racism directed at characters of color in even the best of media representations.

When Brown Lady Shepard is rude, or curt, or dismissive, the reactions she receives from others are not to her gender or her race, but to her words. Why? Because the character was written with the expectation that most people will play it as a white dude, a character for whom reactions based on gender or race are inconceivable. He’s “normal”, y’see. In real life, and in most media representation, we are culturally conditioned to respond differently to a big ol’ white dude with no manners than we do a woman of color doing the exact same thing. The white dude is just a jerk, but there’s often a built-in extra rage factor against the woman of color, for daring to be “uppity”, for failing to know her place. This distinction is often unconscious and unrecognized, but it’s there. In Mass Effect, no matter what my Shepard says or does, not only is the dialogue the same as it would be for the cultural “default”, but the reaction from the other non-player characters is the same. (The only exception to this is the handful of times that Lady Shepard is called a “bitch” — I suppose Dude Shepard may get called a bitch too, but I doubt it. I find it fascinating that they would record specific name-calling dialogue in this way.) Brown Lady Shepard waves her intimidation up in a dude’s face and he backs the fuck down, just like he would if she were a hyper-privileged white guy.

My Lady Shepard faces no additional pressure to prove herself because of her background; if she is dismissed, it’s on the basis of her assertions, and not because she’s a queer woman of color from a poor socioeconomic background — even though that’s exactly what she is. I am not surprised real-life dudes don’t play as Lady Shepard.* Her character accomplishes something truly revolutionary, though whether it was intentional or not I cannot say. The most radical thing about Lady Shepard is that she does not exist for the enjoyment of heterosexual men…

…No one ever blames Shepard’s moods on PMS and no one ever asks if she’s on the rag, no matter how much of an asshole she is. No one ever suggests that Shepard is unhappy or excessively driven because she has not known the miracle of child-rearing and therefore her life is oh-so-empty. In a firefight, no one tries to protect Shepard from the violence, and afterward, when Shepard picks up a crate full of spoils, no one asks if she needs help with that. Thugs do not spare her feelings, nor do they fail to take her threats seriously. When other aliens accuse her of being overemotional, it’s framed as a human failing, not a female one, and when they call her crazy, it’s because she is actually doing some mad shit, and not because she’s just some silly unbalanced female.

This is a brilliant little essay, and highlights many of the reasons that I exclusively play Lady Shep (apart from the fact that I’m sick of Straight White Male heroes and I’m going to take the chance to play a woman whenever I can get it): she’s a badass chick who isn’t dismissed because she’s a chick, she can handle herself, and she isn’t there to be sexy for the guys.

This is exactly why Shepard is brilliant, why playing as fShep explodes my brain in a way that nothing else does. Because the hero of the galaxy, the one person they need, the person that everyone idolizes and follows without question… is a woman. And depending on how you create or play her, very possibly a queer woman of color. (Liara counts as gay, I will fight you. Whether Liara identifies as any kind of sexuality is irrelevant; a human who is attracted to women would automatically code asari as women. And just because they’re monogendered doesn’t mean that gender can’t be female if they want it to. …Sorry, sidetrack.)

Anyway, my very first Shepard (I have three now) was a queer black woman, and when I played ME2, I actually had to pause and blink because the first person she meets is a black man (Jacob), and the first display of heroics in my first playthrough of ME2 was a black woman kicking ass and taking names with support from a black man. IDK, it made the game so much more awesome to me than it would have been if I’d been playing default white Sheploo.

This article is fantastic. I will admit, however, that I play male shep most of the time, but only because I want to be a gay man and seduce the mens. When I did play fem shep I thought she was a much better played character (as in not a typical macho space marine man hulk).

Source: social-awkwardism