The Princess Is In Another Castle, or How I Learned that I Should be Rescued

I’m going to be completely honest right up front. My knowledge of video games ends with Final Fantasy X for PlayStation 2. So as you can tell, it’s been a long time since I’ve played a video game consistently. It’s not that I am soured on them, but after the personal experiences with FFX, I just haven’t gotten a gaming system. It’s a long story that could really be its own post, so I’ll save that for another time. Instead, I want to look at my formative years of gaming and how they shaped my idea about the role of female characters in video games.

My earliest memory of gaming is playing Donkey Kong. For the unfamiliar, the premise of the game is that a lady has been kidnapped by a giant ape and Mario needs to scale the fire escapes to rescue her all while the ape hurls barrels at him. It’s a pretty simple story and premise. In the earliest forms of the game, she didn’t even have a name. Later versions named her Pauline. When you look at the game itself, there is really no purpose for the female character to even be in the game. She is simply a device to add a plot to pretty simple game. However, Donkey Kong was innovative in that it was the first example of a narrative arc being introduced in a game with cut scenes employed to advance the plot. There were also moments throughout the game when text bubbles would appear for Pauline in which she would yell, “Help.” This type of narrative would set the stage for future video games. 

The next game that would shape my ideas about video games was Super Mario Bros 3. Of course, I played the other two games, but this particular version was the one that I spent the most time on. Even when I played the game years back with a friend’s 8-year-old son, it was just like muscle memory. I still instinctually knew where every warp whistle or secret stash of coins was hidden. Like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros 1, this game involves the character of either Mario or his brother, Luigi, working to rescue the Princess from Bowser in order to bring peace back to Mushroom World. Throughout this game, you do encounter various kings who have been turned into creatures by the Bowser’s children (Larry, Morton, Wendy, Iggy, Roy, Lemmy, and Ludwig). In game play, you must defeat the Bowser child and return the magic wand to the king. Upon doing so, you finish the level of the game and receive a letter and gift from Princess Toadstool to continue on your journey to rescue her. 

As a pre-teen and teenager, I love to play more RPG-like games for the NES system like Dragon Warrior and the first Final Fantasy game to be released in the US. Although I played FF, I didn’t really become obsessed until Final Fantasy II (Final Fantasy IV in Japan) was released for Super NES (SNES). In this game, you play as a collection of characters, but the main focus was on Cecil. In true epic fashion, Cecil is a warrior and works to save the Blue Planet from total annihilation by Zemus and his agent, Golbez. The only two female characters in the party are Rydia and Rosa. Rosa is Cecil’s love interest and at one point a focus of the quest as Cecil and his group try to rescue her from Golbez. Rydia is a young girl, who Cecil protects after having been ordered to destroy her village as part of the Red Wings and inadvertently killing her mother. Of all of the female characters in the game, Rydia, has the most complex backstory and narrative arc within the game. While Cecil and his friends (including Rydia and Rosa) eventually defeat Zemus’ resurrected form, Zeromus, to save the planet, ultimately, the game ends with Rosa and Cecil marrying and becoming King and Queen of Baron. 

While FFII/IV’s female characters have more robust narrative arcs than previous games, they still are only part of the game as plot devices to serve the hero’s story. It’s a common theme in early video games. Hell, even Zelda is a subordinate character in most games within The Legend of Zelda series. The game is literally named after her, and she’s not a playable character in the first game. For that matter, she wasn’t a playable character until the 2009 Spirit Tracks, the 15^th game in the series. Female characters have long been subordinate in video gaming. Gaming has been part of the male domain for so much of its history. It’s not that video games couldn’t be played by girls and women. It’s just that they weren’t always designed with female stories at the center of the narrative.

Bad Ass Women of History: Hua Mulan

The Disney film, Mulan, tells the story of a young Chinese girl who pretends to be a boy and joins the Chinese army as they prepare to fight the Huns. It’s one of my favorite Disney films and was really the first time I watched a Disney movie with a girl power theme. Mulan wasn’t a typical Disney princess. She wanted more than to just be a wife. I remember when the film came out in high school how great it felt to have the main female character in a Disney film be a bad ass warrior.

The film itself is based on a Chinese legend, the “Ballad of Mulan.” In the poem, which takes place in the Northern Wei, Hua Mulan takes her father’s place in the army since he is old and her only brother is a child. She was also known for her skills in martial arts and use of a sword. The tale goes that she fought for twelve years with distinction but refused any reward, opting instead to simply retire to her hometown.

Yet, if this were the whole of the story, it would be pretty boring and definitely not qualify Hua Mulan as a bad ass. There is the story above, but there is another story about Mulan that doesn’t have quite the same happy ending. This is Chu Renhuo’s Romance of the Sui and Tang.

In this tale, Mulan lives under Heshana Khan who agrees to wage war against foreign invaders as an ally with the emergent Tang dynasty. Like in the other version of the story, Mulan takes her father’s place in the army because of his advanced age and her only male sibling is an infant. While crossdressing as a man, she is intercepted by the Xia king, Dou Jiande, and taken to his warrior princess daughter for questioning. This daughter, Xianniang, first tries to recruit Mulan to her father’s army thinking that she is a man. However, when she discovers that Mulan is also a women, the two become sworn sisters. 

This is where the story becomes more tragic. Ultimately, Xianniang’s father is defeated. Both Mulan and Xianniang surrender with knives in their mouths ready to be executed in Xianniang’s father stead. The Emperor grants them reprieve and the imperial consort rewards Mulan with money to provide for her parents and fund the princess’ wedding to the general Lu­­ō Chéng. She is then given leave and returns home with plans to relocate to the princess’ old capital of Leshou. There she finds that her father has died, and her mother had remarried. 

Still devastated by her father’s death, she is summoned to the palace to become the Khan’s concubine. However, instead of suffering this fate, Mulan commits suicide. Before she dies, she entrusts her younger sister, Youlan, with Xianniang’s letter to her fiancé. Her sister dresses as a man to deliver the message. After seeing through her disguise, Lu­­ō Chéng turns his amorous attentions to Mulan’s sister. 

Mulan’s final words are “I am a girl; I have been through war and have done enough. I now want to be with my father.” She would rather die than serve a foreign ruler as his concubine. There is an interesting attitude in Asian cultures towards the act of suicide. 

Ultimately, Mulan’s story is often regard as a legend rather than a historical person since her name does not appear in Exemplary Women, a compilation of biographies of women during the Northern Wei dynasty. That said, her story is included in Yan Xiyuan’s One Hundred Beauties, a compilation of various women in Chinese folklore.  While she existed in the Shang dynasty centuries earlier, there is also a possibility that this legend is based on Fu Hao, a Chinese female strategist.