4) I’m not that interested in gnawing on the whole total paucity of choice bone again but the lack of even the ILLUSION of meaningful choice in most instances was just annoying. How many times did I stand there while someone killed an innocent person right in front of me? Then there’s the fact that every single element of the main plot is completely unchanged no matter what you do even though there were numerous instances where, given a meaningful choice, you could actually have done something to affect the outcome, even if it was just going to be for an epilogue card! If you just want to tell me a static story, then fine. Tell me it! (Frankly, on a fundamental narrative level I don’t think you’re that good at it, but go for it anyway!) But don’t present or market it to me as something I have any kind of control over.

3) Poorly paced and super segmented narrative. Most of each act has shit all to do with the previous acts. I understand the whole tenuous thread thing and know that they tried to fix it with the (clumsy) framing device and they’re going for a whole little things becoming big things sitch, but it’s all mostly just disjointed, which goes for the character/relationship arcs as well. Which is sad because they could have salvaged the game for me if they were better. (Fenris! We banged! And you left! And then… we apparently didn’t talk about it for three years???? Yet you get all pissy when Zevran propositions me THREE YEARS LATER? Oh. I see.) Unfortunately, due to the way the relationships were structured to fit into the framing device, I felt like I didn’t really get to know most of the characters very well at all. And if I don’t know them, I don’t really care about them.

2) I am so fucking over the insertion of supernatural beings as stand-ins for oppressed minorities. I am not a werewolf or a vampire or a fucking mage, okay. Frankly, such analogies are usually just a way for people to pretend that they’re being socially conscious while still not being forced to tell stories about anyone but conventionally attractive white people, and I’m sick (and bored) to death of it.

1) It’s ableist as fuck. At least five major storylines I can remember off of the top of my head boil down to LOOK AT ALL THE EVIL THIS ~CRAZY~ PERSON HAS DONE! Cuz they’re ~*~*~crazy~*~*~!!1 And that’s not counting the entire mage storyline in and of itself presented as them just hulking out/losing it and literally becoming demons. I straight up find the level of ableism in the game sickening.

In conclusion, all of this mixed together in a giant knot of umbrage and disappointment in my gut that caused me to play Dragon Age 2 through, beginning to end, exactly once and then go, “Okay, I’m done now.” and never touch it again.

1) It has to have at least two women in it,

2) Who talk to each other,

3) About something other than a man.

And just like that, because of the fact that there are so many things that don’t actually meet this basic criteria, a wonderfully incisive commentary was made on the representation of women in popular media.

Then, things kind of went to shit.

In short, people went way overboard, and evoking the Bechdel Test became less about legitimate consideration of the way that women were represented in fiction and more about slavish adherence to the letter of semantics which threatens to divorce all meaning from the entire affair.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that things shouldn’t pass the Bechdel Test. I think on a fundamental level, barring unique narrative circumstances, everything actually should, but that doesn’t mean that a) there’s nothing of value or feminist in things that don’t “pass,” and b) there’s automatically value and feminist content in things that do. For me, the spirit of the Bechdel Test has to be to make one aware of and ready and willing to examine the ways that women are treated by narratives. It’s to point out the extreme gender bias in popular culture. It’s a thought exercise. It’s a method by which to critique the representation of women.

Critique, however, can stop being constructive pretty easily when the underlying reason behind the critique becomes obscured or is forgotten.

When you’ve gotten to the point where, instead of examining women’s roles in the narrative and their relationships with each other, what you’re actually doing is arguing over whether a conversation between two sisters about their broken family and their individual methods of dealing with it “passes” because they mention their father in the course of it, you are no longer being constructive. You have, in fact, completely lost the fucking plot.

Like all social justice issues, feminism is a subject that requires nuance and complexity of thought. Pretending that there’s a simple checklist that can definitively answer every question is not nuanced and complex thought. Pedantic dissection in the interest of ferreting out a questionable blemish and disregarding the whole because of it is not nuanced and complex thought.

There are narratives that “pass” the Bechdel test, but are still wildly, gleefully misogynistic. There are narratives that don’t “pass” the test by certain accounts, but give both respect and full, rich, layered characterization and arcs to the women therein. There are narratives somewhere in the middle that “pass,” but still have clear gender bias and issues because simply meeting the criteria on that checklist does not actually indicate support of the philosophy behind it.

The Bechdel Test is a useful tool because it provides a lens through which to view media, but it’s robbed of all of that usefulness if one refuses to apply critical thought to it. And it stops being a tool and becomes a weapon when it’s used as an excuse to erase, deride, and dismiss women’s stories because you couldn’t tick every box on a prescribed list.

But Darius is cute and really likes her and is almost as funny as he thinks he is.

It is a painstakingly arranged non-plan, their assignation. They are supposed to be watching a movie. Charlie gives Darius no prior indication of her intentions besides the periwinkle blue sundress and strappy — though flat — sandals that she is wearing when he opens his door.

The opening credits are playing and Darius’s mouth is at the curve of her jaw. Charlie pulls away. She unstraps her shoes and slips them off, then reaches into her bag and presses a condom, wordlessly, into Darius’s hand.

“Are you sure?” he manages, eyes wide, twenty seconds later.

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t ask twice.

After, Charlie lies in Darius’s bedroom studying the walls. The sweat on her skin is drying and she feels unpleasantly sticky. There is a concert poster that she cannot make sense of, and she can feel Darius’s eyes on her bare back. She feels them as sure as if she were looking at him. She feels them as sure as if she were looking through them.

When she turns, the sheet is still tucked tightly around his waist. Charlie leans over the side of the bed and retrieves her bra, plays with the clasp.

”I should go,” she says. She slips her arms through the straps. The bedding rustles behind her as Darius sits up.

“My uncle is working tonight. You can stay.” His hand is gentle on her spine. She moves away. Her panties are a tangle and she turns them right side in before pulling them quickly up her legs.

“My parents probably wouldn’t be down with that.”

“Tell them you’re staying at a friend’s house.”

Her dress is only barely wrinkled. “I don’t think so, Darius.”

He is sitting up in the bed, his soft, brown skin has a golden cast in the dim lighting. He’s beautiful, but this isn’t where she wants to be.

Charlie leans down and presses a fleeting kiss to his lips.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she promises.

She is fixed and arranged moments later and passes through his house like a ghost. She is not used to her footsteps being soft, but there is something about the place now that she does not want to disturb.

Out on the street, the humidity cocoons her skin, and she walks to the curb, dress swishing around her knees. The streetlights have just come on and Charlie stares down at her long, brown legs, shining in the twilight. Her fingers are curved like tiny hooks around the straps of her sandals. They dangle there from her right hand like a medallion or a trophy. The grass tickles her feet so she stands directly on the curb itself; the rough texture of the cement is more comfortable. It reminds her of her cat’s tongue licking her soles when her bare feet dangle over the edges of her bed.

Charlie breathes in, then out, waiting for the world to be different somehow. It is not. And so.

She walks along the curb, elbows out for balance, and barely teeters back and forth as her thumbs fly over the tiny keyboard of her phone.

I’m at Featherbed and Charles. Come get me.

Charlie hits “send” just as her feet have carried her far enough for the Charles Road street sign to loom above her. She circles it once on her toes—they sink slightly into the soil—before her phone beeps.

On my way.

She closes the phone, tucks it into her bag, and waits.

Charlie hears him approach with the familiar sound of chain against gear, lever working at a methodical clip. He’s coming up from behind her, and Charlie does not turn to face him. She keeps her eyes on the horizon down West Charles street: the square little houses in their perfect little yards, porches jutting out like tongues. They loll on the lawns, panting to keep themselves cool in the oppressive heat.

The bike skids to a stop right beside her; the wind from its approach is cool on her back.

“Hey,” Colin says when she turns to look at him. The beginnings of a faint sweat bead on his forehead, and his unruly, brown hair is moreso than usual. She knows he hurried. It’s why she called him. One of many reasons anyway.

“Hey,” she replies.

He straddles the bike, balanced on the balls of his sneakered feet, and stares openly at her, his eyes drinking in her dress. Charlie punches his shoulder once she’s moved close enough. He grimaces and slides forward off of the seat, and she slides onto it, tucking her dress between her legs. Charlie holds her legs out and thinks of a canoe and oars as Colin stands on the pedals and begins to pump. He makes a wide arc and they go back the way he came.

He does not ask where to take her. He does not need to. She called, so he knows. It’s one of the benefits of having a best friend. Colin’s breathing is even and his motions steady as she stares at the curve of his back. The hang of his oversized t-shirt makes her smile. He’s too thin and hates it. She wants to tease him about it, but doesn’t. He’s only just caught up to her height, so she’s lost that angle, probably forever if he keeps shooting up the way he has. But she knows where lines are drawn. She always has.

The bike weaves across the streets when they get to Colin’s neighborhood. The houses cast bigger shadows. The two car garages are squat little companions to their girth. Charlie closes her eyes as she grips the bike seat and leans back. Just enough that she feels like there’s a small chance she might fall, but not enough for her actually do so. The wind whips through her hair and tickles her bares legs, arms, shoulders. When they come to a stuttering stop in front of his house, Colin tentatively maneuvering the physics of stopping a bike carrying two when it wasn’t built for it, she feels a loss.

They go in through the garage door and Charlie drops her shoes immediately next to the welcome mat. Colin flops down in front of the television in his room. It’s on, paused in the middle of a game. He returns to it as though she caused him no interruption.

Charlie stares at his bed and its mess of sheets and comforters. Then she steps onto it, walks its length and back again and considers bouncing — a relic of a bygone time. She does bounce once, down to her bottom and then off of the bed.

Colin exclaims as he nearly meets a grisly end in his game. Charlie walks into his closet. Arm bent backwards just so, she unzips the short zipper on the back of her dress and slips off the straps. It pools at her feet and she snatches a red tee off of a hanger and pulls it over her head. She walks back out of the closet and ransacks his bureau.

“Where’d you put your pants?” she asks. She walks closer to him, stands there, legs bare. His knuckles go white, and he doesn’t take his eyes off of the game.

“Right middle drawer,” he says.

Charlie checks and finds a pair of cargo shorts and pulls them on.

“You gonna save?” she asks as she drops onto his bed. She stretches out her limbs, trying to reach all the edges.

“Gimme a sec,” is Colin’s distracted reply.

He is good to his word, and a few minutes later he relinquishes his game and changes the disk. They spend the better part of an hour killing zombies. Few words are spoken and all of them are regarding the game. Charlie sits cross-legged on his bed. Colin has moved back to lean against the bed directly under where she is sitting. If she moves her hands just so, if he leans his head back just so, his thick, kinky hair will brush against her fingers.

They’ve escaped the first stage of the zombie apocalypse when he asks.

“Did you?” It’s quiet, but even, and he doesn’t have to elucidate.

“Yeah,” Charlie replies without pause.

Colin says nothing for a long moment and neither does she.

“Do you feel different?” he finally asks.

“Not at all,” Charlie replies.

He leans his head back and her fingers are in his hair. A zombie is mauling him on the screen, but neither of them does anything about it.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Sure,” she replies. She shotguns the zombie snacking on him.

She loses the rock-paper-scissors match and is forced to get sodas. She wanders down the stairs and through the halls, barely paying attention to where she’s going. She moves on muscle memory.

His mother sees her on her way back to the stairs.

“Charlotte,” she says and there’s a catch in her voice. Charlie looks at her, cold soda cans in each hand, and nods.

“Hi, Ms. Parker,” she says. Ms. Parker continues to stare at her bare feet, at Colin’s t-shirt and Colin’s pants, at Colin’s best friend as if seeing her for the first time.

Charlie doesn’t feel any different at all. She never lies to Colin. But this is still the day when everything changes.

© 2011 Rawles Marie Lumumba

A lot of people have already spoken on the depiction of Starfire in the DCnU, but I have some thoughts I wanted to add in response to the pushback against the outrage.

Specifically, I’d like to address the assertion that criticizing Kory’s portrayal in Red Hood and the Outlaws #1 is a form of slut-shaming and/or arises out of some sort of bitterness about the dismissal of her past relationship with Dick Grayson or general resistance to change.¹

The cover of Red Hood and the Outlaws #1

Two things to directly address the assertions above:

1) I don’t really care about Dick/Kory. I don’t dislike it or anything, but I have pretty much no emotional investment in it whatsoever. It wasn’t formative for me and that’s just how these things go. My only emotional investment as regards Dick/Kory is my general fury at a) the years the canon spent shitting on and dismissing both Kory and the significance and importance her relationship with Dick had to him, and b) the fact people were extremely intent for some time on just having Kory spend the rest of her existence pining hopelessly for Dick.

2) Seems obvious to say but: I have no problem with Kory having as much consensual sex as she wants with whomever she wants. Red Hood and the Outlaws was one of the few titles to which I was tentatively looking forward (and not with hateticipation for a delicious hateread, but genuine anticipation) because I thought it was an interesting combination of characters and, quite frankly, I wanted Kory, Jason, and Roy to be sexy ginger friends who maybe spent some of their time together having friendly ginger sex.

So why the problem with Kory being sexually involved with Roy and Jason in the actual comic?

Put simply: because it’s not about Kory. Someone out there in the wilds of the internet pointed out that the book treated her like a walking blow up doll and that’s not too far from the mark.

See, from the first moment that we have all of our primary players on stage, we begin to find out about how Roy and Jason feel about Kory. Literally the first thing Jason ever says about her is to talk about her breasts (in an erroneous fashion in the service of a not-at-all-clever wordplay, but still) and to boast to Roy about the fact that he’s had sex with her. Roy reacts to this with surprise and indignation and communicates that he feels that Kory is or should be out of Jason’s league.

Kory has no involvement in this conversation except to take instruction from Jason (while ignoring Roy), who then asserts that he’s all she thinks about.

Roy and Jason "greet" Kory.

Jason and Roy continue their discussion of Kory, in which she continues to have no part, as they ogle her on the beach. They discuss her past relationships and Jason’s confidence in her apathy about his many fallings out with her ex-boyfriend. They discuss how she perceives the world (Not that “see[ing] humans as [not] much more than sights and smells” really… means anything. I also perceive humans in sights and smells. Unless Kory has no sense of taste, touch, or hearing, which doesn’t seem to be the case, that description is extremely inefficient at communicating anything ~alien~ and makes no sense, but I digress.) and Jason, before heading off, even prods Roy to test out her lack of memory which Roy deems “interesting” while literally rubbing his chin. Then Kory asks Roy if he wants to have sex with her and he emphatically agrees after a brief bit of confusion about her relationship with Jason. (It should be said that this is the only time Kory expresses any type of agency in the book, when she declares that she can do whatever she wants with whomever she wants, but notably this happens in the context of presenting her sexual availability to Roy.)

So, we know that Roy and Jason both find Kory extremely sexually attractive. They make this explicitly clear and their perspectives, as additionally played out through the overwhelming blatant male gaze of the art, are fully apparent. In light of this we are made to understand quite clearly why they choose to have sex with her.

But… what about Kory? How does she feel about them or anyone else for that matter? Why does she want to have sex with them? What reason for it exists in her mind?

The motivations that any given real life person has for having consensual sex with whomever they want is no one’s damned business but whomever they decide to share their reasoning with, but Kory is a fictional character. Which means that for me to connect with her, for me to perceive as her a realized person instead of a blow up doll who does things just to play out male masturbatory fantasies, I have to understand her motivations for doing things or at least be able to intuit some inkling that she has them at all.

Kory has a short memory for “all things Earth” (whatever that encompasses or is supposed to mean) and can’t even reliably tell any given two humans apart. This results in her not only not remembering her loyal teammates, close friends, and lover (and almost-husband) of years, but not even caring that she doesn’t remember.

So…why then is she hanging out with Jason in the first place? Roy’s connection to Jason is a bit unclear as well, but we’re told that he actually hooked Roy up with a mission and then we see him helping to rescue Roy from it when it goes wrong.

With Kory we just see her being there. Just because, I guess. One very vague reference is made to the fact that aliens are unwelcome on Earth and she doesn’t have anywhere to go. So I guess any random human that she can’t tell apart from any other random human is as good as the next? She just likes melting soldiers and couldn’t find any other opportunities to do so? Did all of her other friends, acquaintances, etc. abandon her when her goldfish like attention span wandered?

Apparently, giving any reason as to why she even chooses to be present here, specifically, is just not important. This will be a theme.

Roy and Jason discuss Kory.

Then there’s the sex. This should be an easy one to tease out! Maybe Kory likes them!

Except, we’re never given much indication that Kory feels any particular way about Roy or Jason at all. There’s a brief moment when she seems at least interested in whether she’ll see Jason later, but a few pages after that she doesn’t seem to give a shit if she ever sees him again. We don’t even know that she finds them attractive or who or what she does find attractive. There are pages and pages of T&A cheesecake shots of her from Roy and/or Jason’s (and/or a random little boy’s) points of view. They explicitly address their attraction to and interest in her.

We’re not presented with Kory expressing any kind of actual attraction to anyone. The art certainly doesn’t frame a single shot from her point of view. She doesn’t interact with anyone but Jason and Roy, and the only opinion about them she ever expresses in her scant single page of monologue is that “they make [her] laugh.”

All right, she finds them amusing. You know, I could work with that! Except… no, we’re never actually shown them doing anything that makes her laugh or her laughing at all, in fact. She’s completely humorless in all of her (limited) dialogue and interactions. If they’ve been making her giggle her face off with their antics, it’s, again, just not important enough for us to see.

Kory whips her hair at the beach.

Okay well, anything about Roy and Jason particularly aside, presumably Kory just enjoys men and she enjoys sex. Boom. Done.

Except, in that case, why is the entire liaison that we’re shown so completely joyless?

We’ve already covered how she doesn’t laugh, but she doesn’t even smile at Roy. She doesn’t seem excited or predatory or anticipatory. Freewheeling liberated sex without deep (or any) emotional ties is fine. Freewheeling liberated sex wherein Kory doesn’t so much as seem interested, even in the prospect of her own imminent pleasure, is just bizarre. Her asking Roy if he wants to have sex is implicitly connected to her prior statement that she’s bored, but once he agrees she never seems any less bored. She’s not shown taking any joy from their presence, from her association with them, or even with the offer of sex whenever she wants it.

Maybe, she doesn’t actually want sex. Maybe another new facet of DCnU Tamaraneans is that they biologically HAVE to have heterosexual intercourse every six hours or so or their nervous systems will shut down and then they’ll turn into a platypus. Maybe Kory is just not into being a duck-billed semi-aquatic mammal, and who can blame her? And maybe that, just like everything else about Kory except her breasts and ass, is just not important enough for us to be given any insight on.

Or maybe her internal processes, her inner life, and her motivations for taking any actions that she takes in this comic aren’t important enough to be presented to us, or even conceived of, because much like in pornography aimed at heterosexual men, Kory doesn’t have to have any reason whatsoever, not even her own enjoyment, to want to have sex with them other than that they’re male and the presumed audience is also male, and it’s easier for them to jack off when the woman in question has no existence outside of being their sex toy.

In conclusion, the reason I personally don’t find this depiction of Starfire empowering and why I have an extremely hard time interpreting it as being an expression of her sexual freedom or agency or liberation is because it’s clearly framed in such a way that it’s not about her at all. She barely exists. It’s not about her feelings or her enjoyment or her desires, it’s about the heterosexual male characters’ enjoyment of her as a convenient sex prop and the presumed heterosexual male readers’ enjoyment of her as a prurient fantasy object.

¹An aside here: the problem isn’t, fundamentally, that the character changed — outside of the general problems of the DCnU in and of itself. It’s the fact that the story, as structured, is trying to pretend that she hasn’t. This Kory is completely unrecognizable as pre-reboot Kory, a character defined by her passions and her great capacity for love of all kinds, but Red Hood didn’t actually restart the character in order to enact this change in personality, outlook, and method of perceiving the human world. It simply went LOL NO MEMORY. Except, this Kory, by all logic and reason, would have had such a completely different experience throughout her time on Earth that it’s nearly impossible to imagine it intersecting with the experience of pre-reboot Kory. As such, going, “This is essentially the same character you remember as far as her history goes, she just doesn’t remember all that shit!” makes absolutely no sense.