[Editor's note: Sophie Prell will be contributing original features for Destructoid from time to time. She is an Iowa farm girl turned award-winning gaming journalist, and is also a contributor at Dorkly.com and G4TV.com. She is also pretty awesome. Let's give her a warm Destructoid welcome! -Chad]
In the long-gone era known as June 2011, when a tweet from BioWare Director of Marketing David Silverman announced that, “there will be a #FemShep trailer,” and “we are working on the look now,” fans were ecstatic and the Internet lit up like the Milky Way. If you're wondering why, look no further than a few months prior to that, when a Mass Effect 2 fact sheet made its way around the Interwebs, declaring that “18 percent of everyone who plays Mass Effect plays it with a female character.” And while that's not a huge number like most of us gamers are used to (47,860 Gamerscore, 100,000 XP to LVL 3, etc.), in truth it's just shy of one in five, a statistically significant portion of the proverbial pie.
And here's where that pie gets juicy: As voting results from the Facebook “'Like' the one you want in game” for the official FemShep look contest have flooded in, there is a sizable number of people who are, quite frankly, a little pissed.
Kim Richards of PC Gamer wrote an editorial titled “Mass Effect 3: Death to Blonde Shepard” in response to the vote, which has itself spurned another wave of disgruntled gamers. If you've somehow avoided this issue up to now, let me catch you up to speed: The FemShep with the most votes is the blonde bombshell known collectively as FemShep 5, her number in the Facebook album. But her appearance, with the tousled locks of gold and shimmering eyes of blue, call out to a distinctly stereotypical portrayal of beauty. Specifically, Western world Caucasian beauty.
It is the deconstruction of FemShep 5's appearance and the association/accusation of stupidity and novice skill with blonde hair that leads the debate you can find cropping up around the Internet, but I feel there is a certain angle lacking from the discussion. Of course, while FemShep 5's appearance and what it has come to represent certainly plays a large role in the argument, what I'm here to critique is the manner in which she was chosen.
Yup, this is an assault on the democratic voting process itself. Brace yourselves.
Don't get me wrong. What BioWare has done with the FemShep vote is, either on purpose or serendipity, pure brilliance. With one simple contest, they've absolved themselves of any responsibility for perceived prejudice for FemShep's appearance, i.e. Hey, don't blame BioWare for the Aryan nation's collective fantasy that walks upright on your Mass Effect 3 cover, it's what the fans wanted.
Not only that, but the manner in which they presented the contest was so subversive we didn't seem to notice just what had happened until the stale, heavy whiff of hairspray and fake nail glue stung our nostrils. See, the FemShep vote was a beauty pageant all along. And I don't know about you, but that's what pisses me off. BioWare took one of the small handful of non-sexualized female heroes in gaming and put her on stage for the world to judge on appearances alone, aka a f**king beauty pageant.
I understand the drive for open-world gameplay, as well as customization of everything from hairstyle to nostril width in today's games, but I find myself unable to comprehend the unprecedented level of control BioWare has handed over to fans from a design perspective with this contest.
Think about it. When was the last time a main character's design -- the essential artistic representation of who they are -- was up for grabs like this? Cole McGrath with his X-games wannabe redesign in inFamous 2? Sorry, not the same. In that particular situation, developers Sucker Punch had already constructed their vision, and only after extremely negative fan reaction did they plant heel and turn back. FemShep 5 on the other hand was born of positive fan reaction, and there has been no prior appearance in any of the Mass Effect series marketing to default back to.
Forgetting any ideas regarding misogyny or sexism, it's just plain inconsistent to allow fans to choose, democratically or not, the look of FemShep that will be used for marketing. The world of Mass Effect was constructed and designed. Garrus, Miranda, and all of our Normandy crewmates were constructed and designed. Despite being based off Dutch model Mark Vanderloo, the face of John Shepard, whom we've come to associate with BioWare's epic space opera, is constructed and designed. BioWare chose Vanderloo's face. They picked him specifically and without fan help, presumably because they felt his look would best represent the sci-fi hero saving us all from ancient machines which lurk beyond the dark void of knowable space.
That's why the choice to have FemShep's public appearance voted on is so grand, so affecting. All of the above are internal decisions, made by people who, you know, do this shit for a living. But this particular design wasn't. Sure, each of the contestants was brushed to life by an artist, but BioWare isn't having the final say as they have with the other elements. Not only that, but there has been no reason given as to why. Why now? Why FemShep? It's a line of questioning that leads only to dead end debates about patriarchy and the inevitable declaration that whoever doesn't like it is just some feminist with their panties in a twist.
Which, by the way, I am. And yes, they are.
It's not because FemShep 5 is blonde and therefore perceived as stupid and incapable of being a badass. It's not even that she upholds the stereotypical Caucasian beauty ideals of a long blonde-haired, blue-eyed buxom babe; that's merely an aside, a symptom of the larger problem, which was the construction of the vote itself. No male hero has ever been or ever would be dragged into the limelight and forced to defend himself like this. Hell, even if he was, there's no justification that could possibly be truthful to his nature as the idolized protagonist, and that's why FemShep 5 is so wrong.
We can, as Gabriel and Tycho over at Penny Arcade have, ask this new Shepard how she responds to accusations that her hair color and blue eyes have softened her. But far from defending her honor by threatening an orbital strike, the only honest justification FemShep 5 can offer is to look back at us and ask, her robin's egg eyes begging for acceptance.
“But isn't that what you wanted?”
Contest:
4:00 PM on 08.12.2011 | 
At the end of the day it's the boxart of a videogame. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Whiners gonna whine.
But yeah, why all of the pre-sets couldn't be put in so we have some choice? Hardly massively difficult I imagine, and I agree with the rest BLONDE Shephard is easily one of the more dull ones.
And for the record, I'm married to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman :)
2. It takes ten seconds to change the hair color. Quit the pity train and get the fuck over it
Also: why does it even matter? Guess what, you can customize Shepard's look in-game, so you'll never have to deal with girl #5 anyway.
Perhaps we can bitch about how fucked it is we didn't get to vote on how male-shep looks seeing as he looks like a douche straight from an aftershave advert.
We won't bitch about that tho because male-shep is a male and we can't apply the same tired arguments about sexual stereotyping to him that we can to a blonde woman.
Being a black man it's kind of sad to see it but it's been in so much media for decades from Hollywood or just advertising. I hope this will go away one day.
Great post, I really enjoyed it. Two good posts in one week, not bad Destructoid.
Why is it the female characters that get trotted out for the fanbase to vote on? We never voted on ManShep, even though the first ME game also had a huge amount of advertising and press coverage for the year before its release. It just seems like cheap misogynistic (and heteronormative) fanservice.
"Wahhh Shepard is prettier than me"
And the best part is that your character doesn't have to look like her.
I honestly don't understand what the problem is. Is it that we got to vote on it? Is it the selection that won the vote? Is it jealousy over the stereotypical image of beauty in America? What is the problem here?
But it's the internet, let's be outraged as much as possible.
BioWare, going into the third entry in their smash hit series, recognizes the fan enthusiasm for "FemShep" and wishes to promote her in the official artwork, commercials and other promo material.
They, however, quickly realize that they have backed themselves into a corner by basing Male Shepard on a real person; if they did the same for FemShep by, say, hiring a model or an actress to base her likeness on, the players would have no way to represent her in their previous games short of some sort of official patch or DLC, which they probably don't want to do.
The only solution to this would seem to be basing a Shepard off of the female face types that have been creatable in the previous games, which the FemShep models they presented to us to vote on clearly are. They then felt that this might be something the fans would like to vote on, because everyone has their own take on her.
A significantly less sensational and nefarious explanation, I know, but I'm guessing it's closer to what happened. What do you think?
Oh boy, here we go. Prepare for the stupid comments, Sophie.
Also the irony of women complaining about how they're perceived and than giving the author an insult concerning her appearance that is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT just further proves we still have so many damn problems.
Oh boy, here we go. Prepare for the stupid comments, Sophie.
Also the irony of women "complaining" about how they're perceived and than giving the author an insult concerning her appearance that is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT just further proves we still have so many damn problems.
Eitherway, Male PC Shepard masterrace
TL;DR People voted, game over. And they said Jim was a troll?
I do see where you're coming from, though I doubt that that was their intention. The first Shep probably didn't get any kind of vote because it wasn't an established franchise. I saw this vote as more of a way to involve the fan base in the creative process.
But I've never really cared for dehumanizing things like beauty pageants. I've also never considered women to be anything less than equal, and at times I'm still baffled by our society's continuing trend of sexism.
Most of the time we just get what we get. Do we bitch then? No. Be glad we had one in the first place. This story is so tired.
Oh and...don't want to hear about the "but it's the principle!" either. It really...doesn't matter. All the designs sucked anyway. She just happened to be the least sucky because she was the most different or not completely horrible like the other ones. I'm not really that fond of it myself, but I certainly haven't lost sleep let alone put much thought to it.
Bioware was screwed whatever they chose to do. If they created a new femShep on their own they would still have people complaining that she wasn't right... that there was something wrong with their choice. You're quite right that this way they have absolved themselves of that decision, but additionally they may have gained insight into the way gamers think and what gamers want in female characters. A better way may have been to gather input from female gamers (we tend to be the ones who care most about what our avatar looks like) but that too would have been a decision fraught with controversy because many men also enjoy playing as a female lead in Mass Effect (just as some women will choose a male character).
All in all, I'm just happy to see gamer input on some of these decisions and while I may not be happy with the outcome, I certainly don't hold it against Bioware.
some of you are acting as if 9/10 video game females aren't designed to be as attractive as possible in the first place.
and why complain that something is beautiful? i suppose you people go out and buy ugly furniture for your ugly house, and ugly clothes for your ugly wife right?
This is why no feminist should be respected. You are the most privileged entitled whiners on the internet. No one, NO ONE besides other radical feminists takes you seriously. Thank you for further illustrating why women should not have equal rights.
By the way, the next default shepherd needs to be a tranny omnisexual black midget with a peg leg. If you disagree you're an anti-handicapable heteronormative racist bigot!