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<\/a>. Why? Because the character was written with the expectation that most people will play it as a white dude … 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 \u201cdefault\u201d, but the reaction from the other non-player characters is the same … Brown Lady Shepard waves her intimidation up in a dude\u2019s 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\u2019s on the basis of her assertions, and not because she\u2019s a queer woman of color from a poor socioeconomic background \u2014 even though that\u2019s exactly what she is.\n<\/p>\n[…]<\/p>\n
\nWe don\u2019t need Lady Shepard to verbally eviscerate a racist or punch an ass-grabber in the face to know she\u2019s tough. We know she\u2019s tough by her non-explicitly-gendered actions \u2014 the same way we know Dude Shepard is tough.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nYes, I’ve been playing Mass Effect<\/cite> this weekend, about five years behind everybody else. And like everybody sane, I’m playing FemShep, as who’d want to play an overmuscled meathead if they don’t have to? To be honest, I usually play as a female character if I get the opportunity; gaming after all is as much about being somebody else than your normal self as it is about anything else.\n<\/p>\n\nUnderneath the surface FemShep, the female version of Mass Effect’s hero, is quite literally the same as her male counterpart: they share the same animations, the same dialogue trees, etc. Which means, as Lesley Kinzel explains above, that female Shepard is treated the same as male Shepard and people respond to her personality and actions, rather than to her gender or race. This is interesting, rarer than it should be in pop culture, let alone real life. It’s not completely unproblematic, still a standard sort of sci-fi adventure, but the ability to play a competent, tough female action hero and it’s no big deal, is worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … In Mass Effect, no matter what my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,305],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-geekdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4511,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4510\/revisions\/4511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}