Making Female Player Characters: Why Do I Do It?

This blog is running all over the place right now. I know I said I was doing another Type-0 post, I know I said I was going to do a WoW post. In a way, this is sort of a WoW post, but it is really more than that. This has been something I've been thinking a lot more about lately than ever, and the title pretty much says it.

I know I am not the only person who does this. I recall Blue Highwind saying he'd make the main character of a particular JRPG a girl and name her Blue. Nobbel, a YouTuber who does a lot of Warcraft stuff, seems to almost exclusively play female characters. But that's not to limit my perception of who does this to people who are somewhat "famous" on the Internet. Many, many people--not just guys--play as the other sex in, as far as I know, mainly an RPG that enables you to make your own character from the options they give you. Because A) I am more familiar with guys playing as female characters and B) I am one of those guys, this post will focus more on that side of the coin.

I can't really say what makes guys do this. I'm afraid to think that most of them are doing it with very creepy misogynistic undertones, especially since the ones I do know (my best friend, Blue Highwind, Nobbel) aren't really misogynists. However, it would be naïve for me to deny that there are guys who do create these sort of characters as an ideal, and that's as far as I want to go with that before I get creeped out. Indeed, I think when it comes right down to it, at least at the very beginning of the moment when one decides what they are going to play as, there is a big psychological factor in attractiveness. This may apply to women who play as male characters too, and I will admit I am not even exempt from this. When one is presented a choice to create something that they are to play as, just simply how attractive the character can be will certainly affect one's liking of that character, just as how people in real life will show more liking toward attractive people as they first meet people. This liking, the sense of "this is good" in the brain, is probably what plays the largest role in why I and several other guys decide to make a female character, regardless of whether we are conscious of that line of thinking when we do make our characters. It's a tendency to be more immediately happy with and--ugh, I hate to say this word--fond of the character.

I'll admit that when I did start making these characters for the first time, it was gross and misogynistic. Well, not in the sense that I got a sort of pleasure in "controlling" a female character, but more in the sense that I created ideals. This was, however, way back in middle and early high school, when I was an idiot and didn't know better, like so many others of my age. This actually began in World of Warcraft, and to be honest I actually never thought of making any female characters at first. My first World of Warcraft character was an Undead (Forsaken) warlock by the hideously stupid angsty name, Teenagedeath. But then I played the game with my best friend, who made female Blood Elves specifically because they were attractive, and that became the trend for me since then. So, yes, originally I would make these characters because they were attractive, during my silly adolescence.

Over time, though, I would start giving less and less thought to making them. Even as I would learn about feminism and misogyny, what classifies as such, what is sexism, all these things, I would continue making these characters. Sometimes I'd feel guilty about it too, because I would remember why I started doing it in the first place (hence why I am writing this to explore why I still do so now). But for the most part, I don't even think about it, like I'm not even self-aware anymore when I do this. So why do I still do it, then, if I am to deny that attractiveness is the main reason why I do it? I'm afraid I cannot just simply give a satisfying answer, so I hope I manage to convince somebody, at the very least myself, that I don't do this for any real creepy reason.

Along with thinking less about this whole thing as time went on, the different games I'd do this in expanded from World of Warcraft to The Elder Scrolls and even Halo. But enough of me justifying it with how much of a "natural" thing it's become for me.

I think an important factor in why I do this is that I have a creator's complex. I write fiction, and as such, I end up liking characters and making them with their own lives and such. I think if there's a reason that relates to this and plays into why I make female characters, I think it's because I just want to see them as the warriors and magic users that take down monsters and stuff as opposed to male characters. And plus, I sometimes completely imagine backgrounds for characters of which there are none. For my death knight, in example, I think of her as the Blood Elf I made back in The Burning Crusade, who was originally a light-hearted, upbeat paladin who set out with the other Blood Elves to Outland to find what became of her people's prince and the envoy that went with him. When it was found that this prince was going to call upon the destructive powers of a demon commander in a strange attempt to bring power to the whole Blood Elf race (in which case would actually destroy not only them but the rest of the world as well), and he planned to do this through what was once the Blood Elves source of energy, the Sunwell. When the Sunwell Plateau raid was released, she lent her strength as a now-"extinct" "shockadin" (in terms of gameplay this was a paladin that utilized more of destructive spell power as opposed to attack power, and it was overpowered as hell), and she not only helped stop this demon commander from entering the world, but even restored the Sunwell's energy and brought salvation to her people.

In the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, the way I imagine her story here is that she was going to set out to kill the Lich King, who, before her time, had originally destroyed the Sunwell and thus was why the Blood Elf prince went out to Outland-- to find a new source of energy. Wrath, however, was also where I stopped playing at some point, so the original character behind my death knight as she is now was lost to me forever, and she never got to fight the Lich King. So in Mists of Pandaria, her body is found by the Lich King (the game's official timeline and lore set aside to work for my story) and brought back to life as a death knight under his control. But a branch of the death knights under the Lich King's control find themselves free of his will, and my death knight was one of them. Horrified at the desecration of her life, the fact that all of her friends seemed dead, that she never fulfilled her highest goal for her race, and that she couldn't even remember her own name, she sets out to destroy the Lich King, annihilating his armies and commanders with the very power he brought her back to life with.

I'm sorry, I completely did not expect to suddenly nerd out here, but I am hoping that you at least expected that. I mean, hello, you are on a gaming blog. Well anyway, I'm not wholly done detailing the lives of my characters, for I feel I also need to justify another character who may attract the attention of those aiming to shoot me down and be disgusted with me, and that is my warlock.

I can already imagine the criticism.

Before I get into actually explaining my decisions here, I would first acknowledge that yes, this could be perpetuating misogyny even if it isn't my intention. Other people will see this character, find the outfit attractive, and figure out how they can also make their female characters into strange perverted sex symbols in their heads. However, I did not make this character with the intention of being some form of self-made fan service. This character is a warlock, a character capable of controlling demons and fel magic without succumbing to the corruption of such forces. In this game's world, demons do tend to use sex appeal to bring their victims to their demise. In one of the raid dungeons, Black Temple, there are several enemies that are actually just people corrupted by fel-magic who have become concubines, which I interpret as the victims of these demons and their manipulation. So getting back to my character, who has studied demons and fel-magic, and became the master of these forces as opposed to it being the other way around, she'll use similar tactics of deception and corruption to destroy her own enemies (although how this makes any sense in the setting of an actual in-game raid eludes this backstory. Still, I digress!). Plus she is supposed to be confident, and perhaps a bit sadistic in the sense of drawing pleasure from exploiting someone else's weakness, even if it is something like an unhealthy addiction to sex. Hence the outfit and the demon wings and such.

So moving my obsession with creating characters aside, let's talk about why I went through the trouble of putting this outfit together. I still initially wanted my character to bear skin, but it wasn't as much, only through a dress that only covered her breasts and the skirt everything else, save for two slits that ran up the thighs. Then I found something that allowed me to give demon wings to the character, which I thought was really awesome for the role. At that point, I just wanted to create something that I thought looked cool with the demon wings, and keeping the lore that was already in the game in mind, I centered the pieces I picked around the demon wings in order to match the look of a character that would take advantage of her foes, not something made for the sake of fetishism.

I knew doing this would "invite" other players to make all sorts of odd responses. People are all like, "Damn your character looks so slutty (not as criticism but as a strange sort of compliment, I can't tell which is worse)," and some do whistle emotes or they make up their own inappropriate emotes (thankfully these are only written out), and all of it actually kind of annoys me a little. It's not so much to the point where I'm going to make a million-page rant about it, because again I just knew this would happen. You can't really expect better of the gaming community in general. My character isn't "slutty." In the long run, getting down to reality and interactions between real people, and leaving made-up lore and character info out of this, I didn't make my character to be everyone's fetish. I wanted something that I thought would look cool with the demon wings and make sense with the whole "character-that-studies-demons"/"warlock" look, and this is what I went with.

I don't even feel that all this is enough for me to justify my character to other people seeing me with criticism, so I'll just say this: my regret of the outfit is that it exists in the same world where sexism and misogyny exists, for if neither did at all, perhaps nobody would solely see this outfit as sexually appealing or inviting as I don't.

So usually when it comes to character customization for these characters, I just want to go with what looks cool to me. Note that my character is the only character that appears almost naked. If you were to see my other characters, as I'm sure I've posted before, they aren't dressed that way. My paladin's outfit is my second favorite armor set in this game, and this game has a variety of armor pieces seemingly endless in scale. My death knight is wearing armor that my old Burning Crusade character wore before the days of being able to customize armor appearance. This armor was stuff that dropped in the final content update of Burning Crusade, which brought the Sunwell Plateau raid. Everything in that patch, down to the armor itself, is brimming with Blood Elf lore. That armor was the armor of the High Elves and Highborne before and shortly after the Well of Eternity was destroyed, back when all the elves lived as one civilization. Plus, my death knight's version of that armor is actually like a faded, even "sickly" version of what it looks like for other classes, which is fitting for both death knights themselves as well as this character, who was supposed to be long-dead. And then on top of that, being armor associated with the elves, it is even more fitting for my death knight as she's supposed to be a character that's driven to bring glory to her race.

So I hope I have convinced you that, when it comes to this kind of customization, I think about the appearance on a much more complex level than "it's attractive." I sure as hell convinced myself of that, and if it hasn't for you, well then too bad because ultimately what you think doesn't matter because this is what I know. I'm sorry for wholly discrediting your criticism, but I will agree with you that, unfortunately, because of today's world, things like this may only make the problem worse by making other people think, "It's okay to make up and play as female characters for the weird-as-fucking-Hell reason of self-gratification." I also don't see this as something limited to just video games (but I will admit that is probably the worst sector of this issue). This is a problem I'd have to face in movies and even my own actual fiction. I could make a novel out of my warlock's character, do my utmost best to make her a human being in an actual story and not some walking fetish in a porno, and people will still see her as such because she's nearly naked and incites other people to think, "I can write pornos with walking fetishes." Unfortunately, other than "just don't make the character at all," there's nothing I can do to stop those weirdos.

Getting back to the whole reason why I make these characters in general, I think it is both a mixture of habit (this is something I've been doing for a long time) and my love for making characters... and of course, let's not forget that attractiveness reason I mentioned (which, if you remember, and you really should because it wasn't that long ago, I said is a seemingly uncontrollable psychological factor. People just show more liking to pretty things and people). Hell, even in Halo: Reach my female Spartan, which I initially just made female without even thinking about it, started to have a life of her own in my head. Honestly, I think it's great exercise for my own writing in the future.

That's my post, then. I feel like there may be some loose ends, some ideas that I meant to explore but didn't actually do so. Oh well, I still think I got my main points across, and I even managed to make myself feel less guilty about all this. I actually managed to make myself feel like a zealous dick, almost overly confident in my own belief, so yeah, that's good. I guess I'm gonna go then. Good night, everybody, and see you next time with an actual post about some sort of video game related somethings!