A Rebuttal on Anita Sarkeesian

What's up caffeine addicts,


In a way, I was a bit reluctant to do a blog post about this. After all, Anita Sarkeesian is a pretty prominent voice who many people look up to. My problem with her is when she bashes something she very clearly doesn't know much about. In the end, I decided to write this post because I felt that it makes complete sense for me to calmly present a counter argument against Anita Sarkeesian's claims in an attempt to prove her wrong. I am not doing this to bash her or her opinions; I am doing this because sometimes it's important to calmly allow someone to understand the other side of an argument. It seems like she takes things out of context more often than not.

What I am talking about in this case is her recent tweets which have gone against the newest game: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

With this rant, I will try to systematically break down her tweet and prove them wrong while also proving her followers wrong and try my best to keep an open mind.

Let's start with the first: "The slew of perfect scores BOTW [Breath of the Wild] received from critics shows that most still don't give a damn about how women are represented in games."

This one won't be too long to debunk. To add some context to this, so far BOTW has been the second or third highest rated game in history while also beating the record for achieving the largest amount of perfect scores in history. Now, I do not completely understand where Sarkeesian is going with this. This game is a masterpiece. Just because something may be misogynistic, which this game is not but I will get into that later, doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve the praise for the incredible work these people have put into this masterful work. There are plenty of things, some of which we discussed in class, which can be seen as sexist and wrong but that doesn't make them not worthy of at least some of their praise. Not unless they go completely overboard with their sexism. Everything has its flaws, a perfect score doesn't exempt it from that. Sure, maybe these reviewers don't care about female representation in video games, but giving BOTW a perfect score does not automatically prove that.

The other tweets work with each other so I will put them all together.
1) "Through the memories player can collect, BOTW acknowledges the ongoing problem of Zelda being damseled but doesn't do anything about it"
2) "Critics might call out sexism in games with bad gameplay but often act as if it's not worth mentioning when the gameplay is great. It is.
3) "There is so much to admire in BOTW. Its gameplay is incredible. But that absolutely doesn't excuse its use of tired, sexist plot devices.

Alright, let's do this. First of all, if you actually collect the memories in the game, you can see that Zelda as a very intelligent woman who is trying to have her voice heard. First, some background is needed. Zelda is the reincarnation of the goddess Hylia. So, in the game, Zelda has to try to awaken her powers in order to defeat the enemy in the game called Ganon. Because of this, her father tries his best to have her constantly pray and learn about the history of Hyrule, the place they are in, instead of receiving a real and more comprehensive education. In the game, Zelda actually goes against this by not only teaching herself mathematics and engineering but also becoming one of the lead scientists in re-engineering the machines that would help destroy Ganon. Zelda is obviously shown in these memories as a very capable and incredibly intelligent woman, not a damsel in distress.

Adding on to my counterargument that Zelda isn't "damseled", you can also how powerful she becomes when she obtains her powers. Link, the person who you play in the game, was put in a 100 year sleep after the initial battle with Ganon because Link lost the battle. So during all of those 100 years that Link was gone, Zelda was the one fighting and keeping Ganon at bay. She isn't captured by him and made obsolete. Zelda is the only reason the world wasn't destroyed by the time Link woke up. And yes, Link throughout the game has to build himself up so that he can go to the castle and help Zelda. But thats the thing, he went to help Zelda fight Ganon, not save her from him. Zelda even dealt the final blow and helped Link fight Ganon at the final fight.

All in all, there is no point in this game where Zelda is depicted as a damsel in distress. Throughout the entire adventure she is depicted as an incredibly intelligent person who loves engineering and biology while also being a major badass with the way she is able to handel Ganon single handedly for 100 years. Anita Sarkeesian, and many other people at this point, need to learn that this more to things than their surface. People aren't black or white, sexist or not sexist, racist or not racist; the world is much more complicated than that. If we just look more into the context that surrounds a subject or a specific person, than we can better understand, judge, and change the opinion of those who are in the wrong. But pointing fingers at random things that are no where near wrong just because they seem wrong at the surface is no way to go about life. This isn't the first time Anita Sarkeesian has tried to label something it isn't and it won't be the last.

Stay Awesome.