What Blizzard gets wrong and a lot of others get wrong is HOW they try to make women strong.
I haven’t played TWW but I already know what to expect. They essentially replace what would’ve been a male character, a male role and insert a female in it’s place. But men and women aren’t strong for the same reasons.
My mother was strong too, as well as other women in my family, but never in the way represented in a video game. It wasn’t because they ran around with huge biceps, were always angry and snarling at everything or spoke in a sinister/smokey voice. It was because they were resilient and enduring.
That’s what people tend to forget. Women and men in society portray power and authority in a different way, it’s part of nature. Men are naturally stronger than women, especially the really strong men, many times over the strongest woman. They’re not going to achieve their means to leadership in the same ways.
There’s also plenty of weak men that become leaders as well, it doesn’t always have to be strong men oozing of masculinity. So, as much as Blizzard and other gaming companies try to spread diversity, they’re really just swapping out genders and creating unrelatable characters that have no reflection or relation to society.
Fantasy, as much as it is make-believe, derives from our experiences in reality. Star Wars wouldn’t be relatable if the story at it’s core wasn’t based on human behavior with human characters that are relatable to. This seems to have been lost by many, thinking you could just switch out expectations or experiences by mixing and matching whomever with whatever.
It leaves the story feeling flat, unrelatable and not hitting any string of reality within us, so it comes off forced, disingenuous and unrelatable.
You can make any character strong, evil, good or even both. But how that’s being done is in a very generic and simplistic way and what ends up happening is the characters are void of a soul.
