representation for women in media has gotten worse over time, not just for games but in several genres, this might sound silly to many of you because "well things have to be better for women now, things used to be so much more sexist before now, we as a society are so much more enlightened because of x or y" and in some ways, yeah things have gotten better for women on the whole even in certain aspects within the games sphere, but this isnt about that. see what i mean is this, i want you to go to a list of ps5 games and look for how many have exclusively female protaganists, not as part of an ensamble (where even then women are very rarely the main protaganist but an optional playable character), not as a secondary playable character or a choose your gender system, just a woman who is the only one playable and it can't be a sequel to a game from last gen or a port/remake, now i want you to do the same for a list of ps2 games and youll find so much more and when you do find many of the more modern examples it tends to be games that explicitly take inspiration from these old games like stellar blade or wanted dead or are sequels to these games like bayonetta and tomb raider, there are exceptions to this almost always by sony or square enix with games like horizon and forspoken, games that elicit angry responces from exactly the kinds of people you'd imagine but games that elicit this because they now *stand out* where before they wouldnt have, these people got so used to being the centre of attention this and even last gen that now anyone else taking the spotlight from them is opressing them, i mean i want you to think about how many of the more modern examples of female protaganists are really truely that, how many are actually from games where you can completely eschew them by picking a male instead, how many are just side characters from ensamble games and how many are from franchises, reboots and remakes and are characters much older than me sometimes, it doesn't look great and nobody even points it out, they point to these and act like having a mute woman who's route is still written as though you're playing as a man and act like thats enough and that we should be greatful because its soooooo much better than how it used to be, but is it? is it really? when these characters are kept away from any and all marketing and often times relegated to being non canon or forgotten like in the case of the female persona 3 protaganist who was excluded wholesale from the games remake or the assassins creed female protaganists who despite claims that they're the canon option, never show up in merchandise or on the primary box art, these women who can be easily cast aside and forgotten, excluded from future games under the guise of "oh well we couldnt have both!" despite how once this would have easily been possible and did happen, thats the trick, that's how they get you, you get the basic bare minimum and are told you're eating like royalty because "oh well it's there and x aspect is far better than it was before" and when costs ever come into the equasion women are the first ones to get excluded or cut, it's deeply upsetting but it's also not hard to see how and why it came about.

i think its actually easier to look for anime for this answer, this might seem unrelated but trust me its not. anime and by extention the anime fandom in the mid 2000s was very much a space for women, womens interests were dominant, anime for women was popular and for the most part women were accepted, waifu culture hadn't taken over and it was a relatively safe space, this was partially because at the time the anime industry still very much wanted women, shoujo anime was big, josei anime was also big and even action shows like sengoku basara, bleach and naruto would give women fanservice and we watched them, think of many big anime from the era, sure there were anime for men like your DBZs and your one piece's and your fates and your trashy harems, but think about what was *really* popular, ouran, vampire knight, death note, fruits basket, inuyasha, code geass, sailor moon, tokyo mew mew, FMA, NANA, black butler, cardcaptor sakura and even shows that while you could say they were catered to men were still big with women, like the aformentioned action shows, haruhi and lucky star, something you almost wouldnt see now because these shows are either actively hostile to women like many of your isekai harems or shit like rent a GF which has replaced many of the shoujo shows or things like lucky star and haruhi and while jujutsu kaisen def has captured a female fandom, it's probably most of that shows fandom me included and you also saw something similar with haikyuu and this one i can attest to as i was at a screening for the movie in tokyo and there was not a single man there, these are very much major exceptions, you did not see this for the likes of hero aca, boruto or demon slayer and sure as hell not for the likes of chainsaw man. over time these shows stopped getting made, shoujo became a rare exception and many shows which werent shoujo like romance killer or skip and loafer were falsely labeled as such and while you would get some exceptions like the amazing best anime of the decade wotokoi, some otome and mobage adaptions and some low effort idolboy shows are kind of the best you can get, even yaoi has became somewhat of a rarity in the anime space and the answer here is much clearer cut than it is with games.

They stopped caring, it's really that simple, they realized that women would just put up with it because we're socialised to and that many of us, enough of us, would just take whatever we can get while mens tastes thrived , thus maximising profits and minimising effort to appeal to more than just a singular audiance that grew to be such weak pissbabies that they'd refuse to watch anything outside of that, new or old, the pushback against shoujo as a genre among men is much stronger these days than it ever was, though thats not to say women did put up with it, many had left it for other mediums, some for mobage and otome games but most to manga where shoujo and josei still thrive or to webtoons and manwha where women are welcomed, it's a fandom that reminds me the most of how anime used to be in its best days. what we can gleam from this is very simple, companies realizing they could do the bare minimum and get away with it, why have women when you can have men, why appeal to women when you can appeal to men and some will just accept it because we have no other option or people who grew into this and don't know that it used to be better and that's how you get to where we're at with games, though there is one other major specter here that i think played a part, gamergate.

i have gamergate trauma, i was there and i was heavily attacked during it, it was the last time i was ever really truely involved in online fandom and ever since it happened i more or less left it entirely, i was a victim of it you see, a random teenager caught up in a whirlwind of very angry men who just wanted to hurt someone, didn't even matter who, so as someone who was a fan of anita and quinn and would vocally defend them, the august that never ended was not a fun time for me and i've still felt the ramifications of it ever since, it bolstered my already bad androphobia, sent me into a near decade long span of misandry that i'm only just getting over and left me afraid to speak up online at all up until i made this website, even now i still feel hesitation when i speak about feminist topics on my own website, afraid to publish this stuff for fear of the same kind of backlash i got back then or have gotten in many of my recent dives into fandom, for more about that read my grasshopper manufacture article, but anyway gamergate made being a woman into games much much harder, sure the industry did change in some ways after this, people were more aware of feminist talking points and places like ubisoft and blizzard would eventually be called out for their work cultures, but it made the act of existing in these spaces as a woman so much harder, before this, before the digital radicalisation shit when a man saw i was into games usually it'd be a more positive responce, genuine excitement and a willingness to include me, sure sometimes you would get those gatekeepers and you would get creeps and benevolant sexism was sometimes apparent, but those werent the norm for me.

but now? it feels like the norm is more often than not that very same gatekeeping that was once a rarity, threats of rape, assult and doxxing are much more common, harassment was a constant worry and the sentiment that i'm somehow a negative to their industry and their games is much more prevelant than it ever was, harassment has become the norm and a genuine feeling of acceptance or even basic courtisy now feels like a rarity, epecially for women who do speak out about this, even in spaces that should be more welcoming from people who should know better, and it's not like this is small scale, the widespread nature of this male pushback isn't just relegated to a few small reactionaries, it's a full blown industry with figures that get millions of monthly views, i won't name names but you know the types and it's not like companies will even disown these people, one of them is in fucking dragons dogma 2 despite being involved in a hate campaign and it's basically wholley pushed me off of youtube as a platform due to how ready and willing the platform is to promote this stuff, every day i was inindated with it no matter how many accounts i would swap to or how many times i asked them not to reccomend it, even turning off my search history didn't help as they would still be reccomended under other videos, even things like otome game osts or ensamble stars music videos, it's fucked up and this stuff does and will radicalise people, i've seen it happen in real time, i have mostly left the net because of this in the past few months, i don't use youtube, i don't check news and outside of my patreon server i do not engage with fandom at all, i download music mp3's and anime, talk to readers and buy games online and that's the extent of my net usage, it's actually done wonders for my mental health and i would reccomend for many of you to do the same, if you can. anyway these companies see this and they do listen, they see how many prominant figures are these angry men and their bottom line will always be to cater to the widest audiance and that's how we got here, at least in part, when a female protaganist gets pushback, suddenly it becomes a lot easier to lean back, have her be optional or not there at all and just market it with men, i mean really, when's the last time you saw an ubisoft game with an exclusively female protaganist? AC liberation? beyond good and evil HD? that's about it, now think of how many of their modern female protags are either optional or side characters while the games are advertised with the male leads, it's not a coincidence.

of course that's not to say old games were always better at it, but it's much easier to find examples where it is, games for women that wanted to appeal to us, fanservice (that granted can still exist like in FF15 which was voted the best FF game among women in japan in a poll a few years back or baldurs gate 3 which had overwhelmingly took over the girlgamers subreddit for months) for us and games that even just had women as the sole point of view, sure they could often be sexualised and male gazey and this does suck, but they were still women and people like me could still easily see ourselves in their shoes, especially in action games this meant a lot to me when i first started getting into the genre, games like DMC2 with trish and lucia, musou games like senbas and dynasty warriors, death by degrees, horror games like silent hill 3, clock tower 3 and haunting ground that were unashamedly about womens fears and issues, the former two even having magical girls, another genre that used to be for women that has been hijacked by men in a post-madoka world, we had games like nightshade and red ninja, primal and tomb raider and even when the games did have male leads, they were often designed partially to appeal to us, games like dirge of cerberus, sengoku basara, devil may cry, hakuoki warriors, bujingai and the 3D castlevanias, this can still be seen nowadays with things like the yakuza games who very much revel in appealing to its massive female fandom, the new silent hill was hella focused on women and our issues (and take one look at youtube to see how well that went over), honkai star rail and genshin impact have been making millions selling strong female characters and the hottest men in the industry (tartaglia and aventurine my beloveds ) or the aformentioned FF15 and even 7 remake which made cloud almost unfair levels of pretty and the latter of which has tons of cool women as the focus with yuffie even getting a DLC expansion to herself, but it's feeling more and more like an afterthought and the female gaze characters have been being set more and more by the wayside in favour of just strictly male power fantasies.

a good example of this is with the devil may cry series. while DMC4SE had fantastic playable women with lady and trish (2 also as mentioned before had trish and lucia) and nero was smexy, 5 abandoned that wholesale with its men designed first and foremost as power fantasies and relegating its women to damsels to be saved while buck naked or a shopkeeper out of the action, even final fantasy has had its low points with games like 16 which has some super misogynistic writing and relegates its women to being side characters and even its bishie cast are still nowhere nearly as relevant as games in the past, an especially stark contrast to espcially many older games like the original FF7 which was a pioneer for the yaoi fandom or X-2 and 13 which had some of the best female focused stories in the genre, even atelier, a series once full blown joseimuke with shoujo and otome game influences and an otome spinoff in the form of elkrone, now focuses on fanservice for men and thigh shots in many of the ryza games, it's a lot of little things, but it really ads up over time.

now are some games still trying to appeal to women at all? yeah obviously, like i said sony and square do better for most, the aformentioned yakuzas, some FFs and mihoyo games all still do their best to most of the time, otome games are still solley the realm of women despite how some have tried to change it for the worse by attempting to force male protaganists and female love interests into it and is even in its golden age in the west in terms of localisations with new games practically monthly and we're even seeing more and more localisations of BL games like the nitro chiral stuff and some dynamic create games (my copy of tengoku struggle even just came in the mail today), cozy games are largely for and by women, a genre that also similarly to otome games gets a lot of hate with misogynistic overtones and stuff like farming sims is often unafraid of being for us, same with lifesims and you do get games with great women and sometimes even games that try and throw fanservice our way, but they're just not as common as they once were, not as mainstream and in cases like the cozy genre almost wholley relegated to the indie space ( that's not something i really want to get into as that's just not my sphere, i don't really play many indie games and so i won't speak on a side of things i just don't know about, this has all been mainly concerning the larger AAA and AA space since that's just what i know) and it shouldn't be that way, things could easily change for the better and we'd all be better off for it, while a return to the skimpy barely dressed action heroine isn't something i wholley want, i want a middle ground, more modern cooler designs with the representation those games gave us, letting women be cool and look cool doing it, i do see a lot of critisism of games like stellar blade and i even agree with some of it like with eve's design but it's also hard to ignore that it's much closer to being actual representation than any afterthought ubisoft campaign blank slate because it does put a woman at the forefront and it does let her be cool, i want this industry to thrive because i love games and to do so i think things like this that aren't as fun to talk about as those games need to be adressed, i don't want things like gender options for protags to go away, this works for some games and i love seeing women playable in ensamble games too, but i don't want this to come at the cost of women-led stories and i want things to be closer to how they once were with women being considered at all beyond just "eh they'll play it anyway we'll throw them the scraps".

i've been writing a lot about this kind of thing recently, had a lot of bottled up things to say about it and so used to not being taken seriously that now that i do have my own platform i do want to actually get my words in, maybe its closure like i said in the grasshopper article, a final goodbye to the net fandom sphere as i've fully left it and a last ditch effort to try and get someone, anyone to care while a difference can still be made or maybe it's just the frustrated cries of a woman who's completely given up, hoping someone can take over for me so i can fade into the background and go on with my life, it's all anecdotal anyway so weather or not you want to take this to heart is up to you, i don't know and i won't tell you what to think, i just want to go play otome games in peace.