Stacey Henley

Persona 5’s Ann Takamaki is Derailed By The Gender Politics Of Pop Music

Stacey Henley

Ann Takamaki is the only ‘band member’ who appears to resent the role given to her, and she is clearly cast as ‘the sexy one’. Often, ‘the sexy one’ translates to vacuousness or lack of intelligence. Being sexy and being a bimbo are often the same things when it comes to pop music, with the media of the early ‘00s depicting Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera especially as airheads. Imani Perry writes that “women are often presented as vacuous, doing nothing but swaying around seductively” (2004, p. 137) in music videos, but this is one stereotype that Ann Takamaki breaks. She is ditzy and bratty but has clear agency, demonstrated both through the fact she is a competent party member and through her actions and dialogue as the game progresses. Continue Reading →

Modern Masculinity In Red Dead Redemption 2’s Old West

How Arthur Morgan’s Vulnerability Is His Biggest Strength

Stacey Henley

By virtue of its thematic setting, Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2018; hereafter RDR2) is inherently anachronistic, in that video games are typically thought of as cutting-edge media technologies, while the Western genre has a more historical appeal. Not only historical in that the game takes place in 1899, but in that Western movies and TV shows had their boom in 1950s-1960s with a post-war “injection of violence” (Cook, 1999, p. 134) into popular media. The Western genre has in fact had several bursts of popularity, with a rich literary history beginning when the frontier still existed in the late 1800s. Red Dead Redemption (hereafter RDR), while not the first Western video game—Wild Arms, Call Of Juarez and RDR’s spiritual predecessor Red Dead Revolver all came first—was the first Western video game to have such a significant cultural impact. Continue Reading →