Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Bioshock Infinite's Elizabeth, and How to Make a Disney Princess Work

Kae's take on Elizabeth with Disney Princesses

***Everything that follows is a potential spoiler. Would you kindly finish the game and come back?***

There are approximately a hundred ways to get a female character wrong. Add another zero or two if that female character is a quest item, and another five or so if she's locked in a guarded tower and has at least one dead parent.

BioShock: Infinite's Elizabeth might check the majority of Disney Princess Trope boxes. She has no mother. She lives apart from the outside world. She has a giant (sort of) animal (sort of) friend in Songbird. She folk dances with strangers on sunlit beaches. She fusses and flits through the world with naive joy, remarking about things she'd only seen in books. She is undeniably special.



"Bring us the girl, wipe away the debt" is the mantra for a large chunk of the game. Elizabeth is a goal to be accomplished. As the one holding the controller, the player knows there's more than just that simple mission - because it's a game and because it's supposed to be a good game. There is another basic reason. We are trained as an audience to expect more. 

We see her picture before we even see Columbia. Elizabeth is a pretty female and Booker DeWitt is a man's man. Romance is easy, it's always a good B-plot. Everything was going right until he fell for the woman he was supposed to hand over... we know that story, it works. Maybe it's like that, but a twist. Booker has to reunite her with her true love/sibling/rightful place. He becomes the protector, the courier, and Elizabeth is the pretty blue-ribboned parcel. There are a few other possibilities, but these are the big two in a male-main, female-secondary story where the female isn't a child (I'm looking right at you, The Last of Us).

For a large part of the game, I couldn't decide how I felt about her as a character - as a female and as a goal. Columbia is not just beautifully rendered, but complex and interesting. I didn't not play through the world quickly. I visited every open door, listened to every NPC conversation, read every sign, and looked to extract meaning. I lived Columbia like everyone else had already done with Rapture; the world had a realness and a sense of wonder. The girl in the tower to be rescued was not nearly as interesting as the beautiful floating city. That feeling doubled with the creep-factor of the observation rooms. Elizabeth the victim, the prey of voyeurs, the innocent who danced alone and dreamed of Paris. This was exactly the character I did not want - a female who existed for the use and titillation of men both in and out of game.

Meeting Elizabeth, all the expectations were fulfilled - the good-hearted, spunky ingenue to soften up the big tough guy who saves her. After that, things got interesting.

I was prepared to see Elizabeth as a milquetoast burden on the fun-to-play and easy-to-like Booker. Clearly, I wasn't the only one who had these thoughts. Once Booker and Elizabeth arrive (land/splash/splat, whichever you prefer) on Battleship Bay to begin their adventure in earnest, an on-screen message appears: You don't need to protect Elizabeth in combat. She can take care of herself. 

The literal translation is "don't worry, this isn't an eight-hour escort mission" but there's more than that in there. The wording is so specific it has to be intentional. It's not "don't worry, enemies can't harm Elizabeth" or any other version that would suggest that she will be a simple NPC without much to do. The two assurances, "she doesn't need your protection" and "she can take care of herself" tell the player that Elizabeth will take care of Elizabeth. She does, and you as well.

Elizabeth proved useful, throwing ammo, salts, money, and medical kits, but that wasn't quite enough for me to approve of her. A female character reserved for a non-violent "helper" role while the male killed for her wasn't turning a convention far enough to be interesting to me. Solving ciphers and picking locks was cute, but amounted to "give her something useful to do". Did I want Elizabeth picking up a gun? Not really, because I wouldn't have believed it, and because she would have gone full-on Mary Sue if she'd become a crack shot.

The relationship between Booker and Elizabeth is convincingly complicated and amorphous. It was not will they/won't they, it was something like "should they?" or even "could they?". Would I think less of Booker for falling into bed with a young woman under his protection? That answer was easily yes, but it wasn't hard to see how they were good for each other, so that yes becomes a little less easy. In the Good Time Club in Finkton, I finally thought, "Okay, I've decided I like these two" - maybe not together, but at least I liked them both and wanted them both to be happy in the end, however unlikely that would probably be.

The narrative is careful to keep the character both true to her own continuity and aware of the shifting landscape of the world. She realizes Fitzroy is as bad as Comstock before the woman orders Booker's death. She figures out the ending before Booker and maybe before some of the players do. These are narrative decisions to keep the character from looking dumber than those around her, even if making her so would be easier as a storytelling devise. These are decisions that suggest someone cared enough to present multiple valid female characters in one video game (Elizabeth, Daisy Fitzroy, and Rosalind Lutece).
Elizabeth concept art by Claire Hummel

My opinion was formed in exactly one plot point - when Elizabeth kills Daisy Fitzroy. Why? Because it worked. Sure, allowing Elizabeth the action meant Booker would not have to 'kill a woman' who the narrative treated as an actual character and damage his hero-role, but Booker kills tons of enemies, including women, and his wartime horrors (war crimes?) were brought up without too much vagary. DeWitt would killed Daisy if he could have reached her, and any player knows that. Conveniently he couldn't fit through the grate to get to her, so Elizabeth takes agency to kill to save the life of a child. Then, she freaks the heck out, because that is something a normal person would do. Everything about the scenario works - a character with no taste for killing goes through with it because it would be out of character to NOT follow through. 

Her response to follow, "I guess it runs in the family," is an interesting choice. At that point in the game, she must mean Comstock. Depending on how many voxophones you listen to, you probably know he killed his wife and framed Fitzroy. What runs in the family here? Murder? Backstabbing? To a player reading into the plot, does that mean Booker, not Comstock? 


Elizabeth after her wardrobe change (screenshot ctsy of BioshockInfinite.com)



The shock reaction after triggers Elizabeth's "coming of age". She flees Booker, and changes into her womanly clothing. Interestingly, it's the outfit in all the promo materials. It's the outfit in the first trailer for the game. It was the look with the cleavage and the itty-bitty corseted waist. As someone who loves corsets and period clothing, I love the look. As someone who had come to care about Elizabeth, I loved it a lot less. How did she get such a tight lacing with bloody shaking fingers? Where did all that cleavage come from? I would have assumed the corset was just another Lutece invention if she hadn't needed Booker to relace her later. 

The choice is excused with her telling Booker the outfit was all the airship had. Fine, I'll deal. Her hair is short, bloody ponytail chopped off. This is not the school girl we spent the first half of the game with. Sparing a (possibly over-) critical look at how stabbing into a woman's body with a pointy object can be seen as a coming-of-age moment, Grown Up!Elizabeth has taken agency (by killing) and now has to live with it as an adult. That is a heavy move for a Disney Princess.

When Elizabeth puts Booker's hand around her neck and makes him promise to kill her rather than let the Songbird have her, she's so far out of the Disney Princess mold the comparison sounds silly. The guys I played the game with became increasingly uncomfortable with Elizabeth's screams echoed while Booker searches Comstock House for her. Lots of terrible things happen in the story and backstories of the game. There's death and killing and some pretty solid nightmare-inducing material. Given the weight of the plot, there's no sense these things don't matter or don't impact the characters. These parts of their lives never become oversimplified tragic pasts. Instead, as we see from how Elizabeth could turn out, clearly shape all of their potential futures.

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