The Portrayal of Parenthood in Gaming

James Vonder Haar is a white, queer undergraduate great books student with a background in amateur games journalism and a foreground in writing about gender and sexuality issues.  He hopes one day to join the ranks of sex-positive lawyers and fight for increasing acceptance of sexual and gender minorities within the legal system.  His blog can be found at aspiringalcibiades.blogspot.com.

This post contains minor spoilers for Final Fantasy XIII.

Sazh from Final Fantasy XIII. He's smiling genially, with a small chocobo chick jumping in his hand.

I went into Final Fantasy XIII fully expecting to dislike Sazh.  Square’s track record in portraying people of color is not exactly stellar, and I feared another reprise of Final Fantasy VII‘s Barret, who played the stereotype of the angry black man so much most of my friends named him “Mr. T.”  Sazh’s character design- at first glance stereotypical, including an afro- didn’t do much to allay my fears.

Admittedly, his characterization can be problematic.  When we first meet Sazh, he’s the humorously cowardly counterpoint to our badass heroine, Lightning. (Upon seeing a huge monster, Sazh cries out to his companion, “RUN!”  When Lightning charges toward the monster, he responds, “I meant AWAY!”  Of course, he doesn’t take his own advice, and soon joins her in battle)  This can be uncomfortably reminiscent of insensitive portrayals of people of color- it’s not as if media lacks dark-skinned sidekicks who act as comic relief and a contrast to show how awesome our (white) heroes are.

I found myself pleasantly surprised, then, by Sazh’s character development once he’s free to step out of Lightning’s shadow and interact with the other characters.  His “amusing” antics are gradually replaced with a serious and empathetic recounting of his relationship with his kindergarten-aged son, Dajh.  While I’m not inclined to spoil the details of this tragic storyline, suffice it to say that the ploy works to introduce real pathos into Sazh’s character and into the storyline as a whole without ever feeling manipulative.  Understated yet powerful, the subplot eschews much of the melodrama that characterizes the series, leaving behind a thoroughly believable tale of an admirable father willing to do anything for his son.  To top it off, it’s an engaging subplot that colors Sazh’s character without reference to his race, showing that he has an existence outside the archetypal Black Man.

With this being so successful, it seems curious that so few games have portrayed similar relationships.  Indeed, heroes of video games, and jRPGs in particular, seem to be ageless beings, suspended in a perpetual adolescence with no acknowledgment that their life circumstances might ever change.  Despite his ripe 21 years of age, there’s rarely any indication that Cloud views any possibility for a relationship with either Tifa or Aerith beyond that of dating, and Final Fantasy VIII‘s focus on courtship gives us only an oblique understanding of what Squall and Rinoa’s happily ever after consists of.  Bioware’s portrayals of romance, for all their excellence, often frustratingly zero in only on an admission of love, usually done right before the game’s climax; we have little knowledge of what the early stages of a romance would look like, much less what marriage or child rearing would.  In other words, the only life possibilities open to our protagonists up to now have been the ones available to the teenaged target demographic.

It’s tempting, then, to see Final Fantasy XIII‘s broader thematic palette as evidence for the growing sophistication and maturity of the average video gamer.  Perhaps now that we are no longer constrained to telling the stories that teenaged boys can empathize with, we might be able to encompass a wider swathe of narrative territory in our medium.  I’m optimistic that the wider diversity of video game players might make for more meaningful stories, but fearful that their messages, especially regarding marriage and child bearing, will begin to echo the normative scripts that plague other media.

It’s telling that I can’t praise the entrance of marriage into our thematic palette without cringing, and likely, without causing my readers to become justifiably defensive.  So much of discourse about marriage is tied into normative concepts that contend that it’s the only path to maturity, respectability, and self-actualization that it’s nearly impossible to laud its merits without implicitly condemning other relationship styles and methods of flourishing.  It’s seen as compulsory, at least for any mature adult, and those who remain outside it must be practicing an ultimately unfulfilling hedonism.  As a queer who is by no means decided on the institution of marriage or on the desirability of having kids, I won’t relish importing the narratives that denigrate myself, those whom I love, and my communities into my favored medium.  In my more pessimistic moments, I think perhaps the compulsory heterosexuality of previous Final Fantasy games would be preferable.  Better something that doesn’t reflect myself than something that insults me.

In the end, this wave of increasing diversity in gaming will only make the gaming demographic more closely resemble the general demographic, with all the attendant dangers of leaving out groups already marginalized by the mainstream.  Still, if it means that we can make games about more than a teenager’s quest to save the world, there will at least be a silver lining.

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