Even from an early age, I think I've had a pretty clear feminist bent: I can remember that in 3rd grade, when once a week we had to write FIVE SENTENCES on any subject and read them to the class, I wrote an (eloquent, powerful, and remarkably well composed) paragraph explaining that two of my best friends were girls and that I didn't care that people made fun of me because of it.
What I don't know is how I managed to arrive at that point, given that my earliest feminine ideal was Princess Peach (or, as we called her back then before the Japanese revealed her first name to the West, Princess Toadstool). Because, love her as I do, I can hardly deny that she's a ridiculously sexist character. It almost seems pointless to develop an argument for such an obvious proposition, but let's just take a look at her:
The outrageously pink dress. The dainty white gloves. The even more dainty posture. The vacuously cheerful stare. I'm not going to post a sound clip of her voice, but would you believe me if I told you that it's high-pitched and bubbly? This is not a lady who's at all likely to grace the cover of Ms. And we haven't even gotten into the fact that she's constantly getting kidnapped and passively waiting for Mario to come save her. Or that the one time that Mario and Luigi got kidnapped and Peach got to come to the rescue, she did so by...
...summoning her incredible emotion powers, like the ability to cry on command. But really, using primary evidence isn't even necessary. Instead I'll just point you to this Gamespy article. I'm not prepared to endorse every word in the article, but let's just face the facts: when a staff writer for an online video game magazine sets aside his latest draft of "Epic Boobage: The Top 15 Shots of Tifa's Chest in Final Fantasy VII" to complain that a video game character is setting the clock back on feminism, you know that you're representing some pretty retrograde gender ideals. Hell, even when she ditches the damsel-in-distress, whiny spoiled rich girl persona to, say, play some extreme soccer, she chooses to dress like this:
And when I was five, Princess Peach did that little floaty jump of hers right into my heart. This was the girl. The girl worth charging through eight crazy worlds filled with obstacles for; the girl worth learning how to do running jumps across the narrow platforms of world 4-2 when my cousin Andrew refused to continue doing it for me. It's really quite amazing that I never developed any sort of complex about pretty, spoiled rich girls. Ahem.
And, even now that I'm older and I can peer through the lens of my liberal arts education to see that Peach represents some pretty retrograde gender norms, I still love her. I play as her in Super Smash Bros, and any other game where she's playable (and I firmly believe she should have been playable in New Super Mario Bros). Hell, it's entirely possible that it was the degree to which I wanted to go to the Mushroom Kingdom and hang out with Peach's court that made me so comfortable at a young age with having girls for friends, even if the other kids made fun of me, and laid the groundwork for my later feminist outlook. That's a bit paradoxical, but I've never claimed to be anything less than a complicated and deeply fascinating man.
Anyways, I say all this so that, a little later on, when I write a post defending the other major Nintendo princess (that's Zelda, of course... I don't have much to say about Daisy) from feminist criticism, I have something to point to to establish that I'm capable of acknowledging the problematic elements of characters that I retain a nostalgia-tinted fondness for.
[Edited February 18, 2010 to make the Tifa joke funnier.]
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