Portal 2

[janegray]

Five days ago, the videogame Company Valve released free Portal 2 downloadable content titled "Perpetual Testing Initiative." Basically, it's a free in-game map editor, which allows players to create and share maps with other player.

Everybody knows the "the cake is a lie" meme, but not everybody knows where it's from. Well, the answer is Portal.

The new maps reminded me that I really, really, really love the Portal games. So I've decided it's about time I shared my love for them by posting some scans from the comic "Lab Rat."

I love the art in this comic. The main character suffers from schizophrenia, and the art reflects his state of mind: when he is off his medication, it's all sketchy, but in flashbacks the pictures are clear.

16 pages out of a free 27-pages comic. At the end of this post you can find the link to the full comic.


WARNING: Lab Rat takes place between Portal and Portal 2, and as such is full of spoilers for the first game.

Of course, Portal is a 5-year-old game, so you might say that anybody who wanted to play it already has. But I got it 5 months ago, so I think it's always best to put spoiler warnings :P





Doug Rattmann, also known as "the Ratman," is the person who wrote all those "the cake is a lie" warnings in the first game. He is the only survivor (excluding the frozen test subjects) of GLaDOS's initial mass murder at the Aperture Science Enrichment Center; as GLaDOS locked the facility down, he couldn't escape, so he has been hiding from her and leaving clues for Chell, the playable character of the games.





Yes, that's a Companion Cube. When Rattmann is off his medication, he can hear the CC speak as if it was sentient. The CC actually gives him good advice.

Even so, Rattmann figures that he'll have better chances of survival if he has a clear head when the time comes to take out GLaDOS. So, he has saved the last of his medication until now.



Now, flashback time!



Back to the present, Chell has defeated GLaDOS!





This is where Portal ends, with Chell captured and dragged back to the facility.





Rattmann to the rescue!

I really love him. He has gone through a mass murder and spent a long time (months?) locked in a dark and cold prison, without his medication and with the sole company of an inanimate object, running away from a murderous AI and countless death-traps. Then, he finally, finally gets away and sees the sun, sweet freedom awaiting him... and he chooses to go back to save Chell!

He is not an action hero or anything. He has no military training, no equipment. But he is a genuinely kind guy, and he wants to help.







Flashback again! Right after GLaDOS' flooding of the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin.










You can read the conclusion, as well as all the pages I cut, here:

http://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/#1

Comments

[janegray]

Agreed with "passive" and "comatose", but to be fair, the whole point of make-up is to beautify, so I don't think it's messed up that the most beautiful portrayal of a woman would look as if she is wearing make up.

Even bishounen in anime wear make-up, and fangirls love them.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/d/d3/Sesshomaru.png ♥

[whitesycamore]

I think my real point is that why should the most idealized portrayal of a woman be the most beautiful?

Chell is a great character. She isn't beautiful--at least, not this kind of beautiful. Definitely not in the first Portal, and not really in Portal 2, although they'd already modified her features a great deal by then (and made her look much younger as well as more conventionally attractive).

And what does she symbolise to Rattmann here? Hope, and strength. I think they could have communicated that in better ways than making her look like a glossy teenage cover girl to his eyes.

I can't imagine Freeman morphing into a seventeen year-old Abercrombie & Fitch model under these circumstances, so I don't see why Chell should either.

[janegray]

To be fair, the most idealized portrayal of a person is the most beautiful. Prince Charming has always been portrayed as a hottie.

Humans prize beauty, and associate it with good things. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" makes beauty subjective, but the underlying message is still that people seek out that which looks beautiful to them. There is even an Italian saying that is roughly translated as "even a cockroach looks beautiful to its mom," meaning that when you love somebody you'll see them as beautiful no matter how ugly they really are, because beauty is intrinsically tied with appreciation.

A possible explanation is that stereotypical beauty traits (soft and shiny hair, smooth skin, good teeth, slender body) are signs of youth and good health, which are desirable in a mate. In times and places afflicted by famine, fat people are considered the prettiest, as a fat person is healthier than a skeletal one.

So, if you ask me, the real question is not "why should the most idealized portrayal of a woman be the most beautiful?" but rather "why is the most beautiful woman stereotypically white?"

[whitesycamore]

I sincerely hope he's not looking to mate with Chell here.

By the way, I associate taut abs, nice biceps, and big eyes with good things in a man. Rattmann doesn't seem to have *any* of those features, so you know, fuck that guy. He's clearly not someone the creators intend me to care about. If he was, then surely they'd have idealized him!

[janegray]

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

Flashback!Ratty has got a tall and slender body, and soft-looking, shiny hair; I find him plenty cute :P

Even so, he is not the hero, he is just a secondary character. One who is never seen in the games, at that.

Furthermore, while the Portal games have plenty of fangirls, they are not specifically aimed at a female audience (see, there is no pink anywhere!). And in our society, "gender neutral" = "default" = "male." And if the Portal games are meant for men (due to their not being specifically meant for women), why would it matter if the male characters don't look fuckable?

Compare and contrast shoujo manga and other obviously-meant-for-girls stuff, where every single male character (with the possible exception of the protagonist's father, the male best friend who is never even remotely presented as boyfriend material, and the usual Dirty Old Man) looks like a supermodel.

[whitesycamore]

And I think the original Chell was plenty cute too. Pity the artist doing this comic doesn't seem to agree, and has substituted a white teenager instead.

I'm glad you've cut to the chase though, and just admitted that this was made for dudes, so who cares what women think. Very refreshing.

[janegray]

Duh, admitting the problem is the first step towards fixing it.

Valve is actually pretty cool about their female customers. I've been playing TF2 a lot, and I never got any of the abuse that it constantly getting thrown at women who play other multi-player FPSs like Call of Duty (plus, TF2 features one of the most competent and badass World-Ruling Evil Overlords in fiction, who happens to be an old lady). Chell was beautified for the sequel, but she wears sensible clothes and is never oversexualized. And I'm not really a Half-Life fan, but I heard that the heroine of the series is smart and never oversexualized either.

So, really, I wouldn't blame the game developers for the problem, but rather society as a whole. "Gender neutral" = "default" = "male" is our society's standard, it's shoved down our throats since we are born.

[whitesycamore]

This discussion reminds me of the Mirror's edge character designer responding to a fan's photoshop 'makeover' of Faith. He said "I remember when I first had that image sent to me. To be honest, I found it kind of sad. We've spent time in developing Faith. And the important thing for us was that she was human, that she was more real...We wanted her to be attractive, but we didn't want her to be a supermodel. We wanted her to be approachable and far more real. It was just kind of depressing that someone thinks it would be better if Faith was a 12-year-old with a boob job. That was kind of what that image looked to me."

Chell was supposed to be an everywoman, not eyecandy. She was an average, everyday person who got swept up into something bigger, just like Gordon Freeman. I get that people like pretty people, but come on, she already *was* pretty. Just not perfect.

Why is a woman who's not perfect treated like a broken object that needs to be fixed?

[janegray]

Uh... Mirror's Edge...

Sorry, out of topic, it's just... This very morning I heard of that game for the very first time. I thought it sounded very interesting, and went to its Steam page to buy it.

Then I saw this:
INTERNET CONNECTION, ONLINE AUTHENTICATION AND ACCEPTANCE OF END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT REQUIRED TO PLAY. TO ACCESS ONLINE FEATURES, YOU MUST REGISTER ONLINE. ONLY ONE REGISTRATION IS AVAILABLE PER GAME. EA ONLINE TERMS & CONDITIONS AND FEATURE UPDATES CAN BE FOUND AT www.ea.com. YOU MUST BE 13+ TO REGISTER WITH EA ONLINE.

I immediately closed the page. Bullshit DRM pisses me off, and I vote with my wallet.

It upsets me, because I'm sure if a game about a female character who wants to rescue her sister fails, they will say "OF COURSE FEMALE LEADS DON'T SELL! UNLESS THEY ARE NAKED!" (like with superhero movies... Catwoman and Elektra failed? Clearly it's because they are women, and not because the movies sucked!). But I just can't support bullshit DRM.

And now, seeing that its character designer cared so much, it's saddening :/

[janegray]

Also, even when a character is not meant to look beautiful, if fans like him/her enough they'll see him/her as beautiful anyway (which might lead to canon beautification, it's what happened with Chell).

Engineer (official art):
http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/engineer_back.jpg

Engineer (fanart):
http://lintufriikki.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=72#/d3e2c9a

[whitesycamore]

The engineer in the fanart still looks like the same guy in the official art though! Just with his shirt off. He doesn't look any more beautiful, just more sexualised--and the person who drew it isn't deviating massively from the character design to do so.