Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Abject Female Monstrosity in Roleplaying Games

Monstrous creatures have always been featured in fantasy games, both tabletop and digital, as enemies for the player to fight. Many of these monsters are overtly or symbolically coded as female and portrayed in ways that reinforce harmful, misogynistic ideologies. While gender representation has long been a crucial area of inquiry in game studies, few scholars have focused on the ways in which monstrosity is interwoven with issues of representation in games. With the understanding that gender representations in games can have deep cultural ramifications, especially as they intersect with representations of sexuality, queerness, body size, disability, mental illness, and age, this dissertation examines the ways that several mainstream AAA video games remediate harmful tropes of female monstrosity derived from or inspired by monsters found in mythology, folklore, fairy tales, literature, and popular culture.

Utilizing a close reading methodology employing visual and textual analysis, a thorough critical examination of female monstrosity in several games was conducted focusing on visual design, narrative role, developer commentary, and player reception. Specifically, this dissertation analyzes monsters such as the succubus, siren, broodmother, banshee, harpy, hag, and crone in games which were chosen because they are considered exemplars of the roleplaying game genre, are commercially successful, and have received extensive critical acclaim.

Through an application of key theoretical concepts related to female transgression, non-normativity, and monstrosity, such as the abject, the monstrous-feminine, the femme fatale, and the grotesque, this dissertation demonstrates how mainstream games promote misogynistic beliefs via the design of female monsters and how this practice relates to the sexism that is deeply entrenched in mythology, popular culture, the game industry, and gaming culture. The conclusion from this work is that mainstream games re-entrench harmful beliefs about womens bodies and behaviours through their portrayal of female monsters and provide a symbolic enactment of gender-based violence and persecution by positioning the player as a (usually) heterosexual white male hero who must slay transgressive monstrous women in order to restore normative patriarchal order and win the game.