When creating its content, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) has the advantage of drawing from an IP that has been fleshed out tremendously since its inception. As such, there is an impressive array of character types - both physically and mentally - which illustrates several positions the designers have taken (perhaps inadvertently) on issues of race and gender: the link between African tribes and Wookies with respect to selling their own people as slaves, Jedi Jolee Bindo as a magical negro, the treatment of the Mandalorian race, and many others. However, all of these are overshadowed by the character of the primary female NPC, Bastila Shan. The attitudes towards gender encapsulated by her character, both in a narrative sense and a gameplay sense, ultimately imply a much less positive image than one would expect from a character intended as a "strong woman."
At the opening of the game, Bastila is presented as a war hero, almost a superhero - a woman chosen for a crack assault team, responsible for defeating the present Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Revan, and user of an incredibly rare force power, Battle Meditation, that increases the morale of her allies while decreasing that of her foes in a scope that can include battles on a planetary scale. All of these are swiftly subverted. The player's avatar and another character ridicule her for being captured upon crash-landing on the first planet in the game in an escape pod because her lightsaber rolled under her seat, totally ignoring the fact that when your (possibly, and by official word canonically, male) character crash-landed, they were tended to by another party member until they regained consciousness. She is shown to have been included in the strike force sent to capture Revan not because her own skill or merit - in fact, she's frequently derided as hotheaded - but singularly because of her special ability, in a manner echoing a woman receiving a position not on merit but because of a desirable physical attribute. Lastly, in the largest reveal of the game, she is shown to have not defeated Revan - Revan's apprentice Darth Malak had actually done that - but rather saved Revan's life while erasing their mind so the Jedi council could use Revan as a tool to find a powerful Jedi artifact. In the scenes that follow, she is captured (for the second time in the game) and eventually falls to the Dark Side herself, prompting the player to fight her on several occasions. She is redeemable, but in another questionable decision, this is only easy to do if the main character is male and has followed through a romantic subplot with Bastila. As such, over the course of the game, her persona - a strong female character - is picked apart as a facade for plot purposes.
Her prowess in-game reflects elements of this as well. Firstly, her weapon of choice is a double-bladed lightsaber, a weapon that all but the most devoted of Star Wars fans will remember as used exclusively by the villain of Episode I, Darth Maul. Of the dual-weapon-wielding options within the game, it is the weaker choice, as it allows less customization of special weapon properties than two lightsabers; nearly all strategy guides suggest two separate weapons if dual-wielding is to be used. More notably, over the course of the game Bastila leaves the party, when she is taken captive and subsequently turns to the Dark Side; when the player has her rejoin, either redeemed or otherwise, the player has no control over how her skills and powers are assigned, to the extent that she may have lost what abilities the player gave her when she *was* part of the team. In many cases the game reconfigures her to have less-than useful abilities; in effect, the game makes her a substandard choice, compared to *any* of the other characters, all of whose growth the player has control over from the point where they join on. Lastly, if a player *had* chosen to use her, but did not expect that she would be captured or turn, the player is suddenly without a their primary team member, in a manner that does not happen to any other character over the course of the game. These factors combine to make Bastila one of the least attractive characters, and certainly least attractive Jedi option, for inclusion in the player's party.
What exactly does this tell us of the attitude of the developers towards women? It rather neatly fits into the model of the Hegemony of Play: nearly all of the design team for the game was male; we see the game designed as pandering to a male player, with official Star Wars canon placing the main character as male and the 'most fulfilling' ending being most obtainable only if the main character is male; the character notionally introduced as the strong female is deconstructed into a thoroughly flawed, often contradictory, and frequently unlikeable character, a fact lampooned in the second game by one of the returning characters, an assassin droid:
"Statement: Oh, yes. My master had quite the collection of tortured individuals that seemed unable to confront their basic personality conflicts. Let me cite some specific examples. [...] [impersonates Bastila Shan] Mockery: "Oh, master, I love you but I hate everything you stand for, but I think we should go press our slimy, mucous-covered lips together in the cargo hold!" Conclusion: Such pheromone-driven Human responses never cease to decrease the charge in my capacitors and make me wish I could press a blaster pistol to my behavior core and pull the trigger. I am pleased that this does not seem to be the case with your current entourage."
If one agrees with Laurel's ideas about values (62-66), then one might wonder: what exactly is Bastila teaching us? That women are only useful for their 'special talents'? That they will act irrationally and turn on you whenever it is convenient for them to do so? That their poor decisions will make them ineffective and ruin whatever plans that men (as clearly the player is intended to be male) have to do Important Things? She allows no change, no real possibility to solve her problems in a natural, rational way; her change of sides is written in stone, as are her mood swings. The best the player can do is redeem her - if seen through the eyes of KotOR, does every woman need a man watching over her to keep her from a fall, from madness? In this respect, the game makes no effort at all to bring a positive change, to display values better than that toed by the hegemonic line.
When asked for their opinions on Bastila, many KotOR players will use words like "annoying," "hypocritical," even "bitchy." Considering the image she is originally presented with - war heroine, shining ray of hope for the good guys, overall a positive character - it makes it difficult to take other gender and race issues the game raises seriously, or conceive of them in a positive life. Perhaps the designers embrace better, less offensive values there, but given the level of outright offensiveness and failure that they manifested in Bastila, it somehow seems a little farfetched.
--Evan
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