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Feminism and Fire Emblem

In honour of Fire Emblem Three Hopes to release at the end of the month, this post will briefly discuss references to outdated opinions on women throughout the series. This is not meant to offend anyone but to show how with the right focus, the series can grow into something more. Please feel free to share your own thoughts!!!

Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG (role play game) that initially came out in 1990 by Nintendo with its latest release being Fire Emblem Three Houses in 2019 (Hilliard, 2019). The series was aimed toward a male demographic with chess-like gameplay and male protagonists. However, the series continued along with this style becoming repetitive, paling against the development of other series such as Bayonetta, Red Dead Redemption and Super Mario Galaxy. Due to the declining sales. Nintendo gave the developers, Intelligent Systems a chance to sell over 250,000 copies of a new Fire Emblem game else they would shut it down (Makedonski, 2015). Resulting in the creation of one of the most beloved games in the series, Fire Emblem Awakening. Releasing in 2012, the developers having no hope of saving the franchise decided to throw in many different mechanics they wished to explore which turned out to be extremely popular and became staples to the franchise as well as other games, creating new genres of video games. The game continues to be popular, selling over 1.9 million copies worldwide (Mcpherson, 2020). Their tactic, aiming toward a female audience.

Fire Emblem was appealing for its breakthrough in gender inequality with female leaders and avatars. It still falls into misogynistic roles with added features feeding into domestic activities such as cooking, tea parties and dressing, pushing aside the military based style to become more handholding. This follows Zoonenn's (1994) theory of structuralists tending to apply significance to activities based on culture like cooking toys being advertised to girls, drawing them towards more domestic interests to fulfil the continued view of women being “simpering housewives whose dream was to impress their authoritative, working husbands” (Gauntlett, 2002). This shows how Fire Emblem’s “progressive” ideas were still based on stereotypes especially towards women, playing into the idea of keeping women associated with domestic hobbies to keep them in domestic roles.

This can also be seen with the increased focus on romance in Fire Emblem with more detail in character interactions such as in Fire Emblem Fates adding an interactive option allowing players to poke characters and the Japanese release including an option to blow on them, to increase relationships. And Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates add the ability of characters to have playable children. The focus on romance and building families falls into the stereotype of women being more interested in romance and stories than men. Janice Radway’s 1984 (Zoonenn, 1994) study “Reading the Romance,” explains how women looked forward to stories that focused on the romance between the hero and heroine. Fitting into the stereotype of women being love crazed and unable to focus on more series topics to use as proof of how unfit women would be in political roles and claiming that giving women opportunities such as the right to vote, would just be a waste and ruin the results.

To conclude, as popular as Fire Emblem has become especially with a female audience, it still has a long way to go to break societal gender norms based on deeply rooted negative perspectives towards women. It holds great immersive content that could help increase its popularity and change the way women are portrayed in video games with some fine-tuning. A redemption ark, from over sexualising female characters and forgoing character depth, to topping the RPG genre with impeccable soundtracks, stories and characteristics that people constantly crave for. Allowing the core of Fire Emblem to shine through while supporting its female audience.

References:

Hilliard, Kyle. 2019. A Brief History Of The Fire Emblem Series. GameinFormer.https://www.gameinformer.com/classic/2019/07/25/a-brief-history-of-the-fire-emblem-series

Makedonski, Brett. 2015. Awakening saved the Fire Emblem series from cancellation. Destructoid. https://www.destructoid.com/awakening-saved-the-fire-emblem-series-from-cancellation/

Mcpherson, Rebekah. 2020. Fire Emblem: The 5 Best Selling Games In The Series (& 5 That Didn't Sell). The Gamer. https://www.thegamer.com/fire-emblem-best-worst-selling-games/

Liesbet Van Zoonen. 1994. Feminists Media Studies. Ch5

David Gauntlett. 2002. Media, Gender and Identity. Ch3, ch4

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