From object to human: The evolution of female video game characters

Atsu does not ask for your sympathy. She does not deliver monologues about empowerment. She is impaled on a sword, pinned to her family’s ginkgo tree, and set ablaze, and she survives. Sixteen years later, she returns to Ezo as a wandering mercenary with a sash listing six names, each to be crossed off in blood. The people of that frozen northern frontier call her onryō, a vengeful spirit from Japanese folklore, a ghost in woman’s form who bends the living world to her fury. In Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yōtei, released last year to considerable acclaim, there is no boyfriend or husband, no mentor dispensing wisdom, no trembling moment of self-doubt resolved by a male ally’s encouraging nod. There is only Atsu, her katana, and the primordial arithmetic of blood debt.

She is, I would argue, the most magnificently independent female character the video game medium has yet produced, and she arrives at the end of a long, fitful, frequently botched evolution that tells us as much about the anxieties of Western culture as it does about the maturation of the gaming art form.

From Rescue Object to Complex Character

Let’s be honest about where this started. The women of early video games were not characters at all. They were objectives. Princess Peach existed to be kidnapped; Princess Zelda existed to be rescued. Ms. Pac-Man was a yellow circle with a bow and lipstick, a cosmetic feminisation of an already sexless abstraction. These were not expressions of misogyny so much as expressions of indifference: the overwhelmingly male development workforce of the 1980s, simply did not think about female interiority because nobody demanded it of them.

The genuine exception was Samus Aran, the armoured bounty hunter of 1986’s Metroid, whose sex was revealed only to players who finished quickly enough, a sly subversion wrapped inside its own sexist reward, since the prize for speed was seeing Samus in a bikini. The Japanese designers understood, instinctively, something that Western feminists would take decades to articulate in the gaming context: that female power in popular culture has always been entangled with the erotic, and that disentangling the two is neither simple nor necessarily desirable.

Then came Lara Croft, and the entanglement became the entire story.

The Lara Phenomenon

Lara’s 1996 debut in Tomb Raider was an event of genuine cultural magnitude. Here was a wealthy, educated, independent woman driving an action narrative entirely by herself, an archaeological adventurer in the lineage of Indiana Jones, but smarter, richer, and British. She was a Riot Grrrl fantasy made polygonal, a one-woman declaration that femininity and lethal competence were not mutually exclusive.

And yet. Those famously exaggerated proportions, reportedly begun as a programmer’s joke and retained because the audience was predominantly male, became the character’s defining feature in the cultural imagination. The marketing apparatus seized on Lara’s body with carnivorous enthusiasm: the tight shorts, the provocative magazine poses, the reduction of an intelligent character to a pinup with pistols. Researchers at Indiana University would later coin the term “Lara Phenomenon” to describe this precise duality, the simultaneous proof that female-led games could generate billions in revenue, and the establishment of a template in which “strong” still meant “sexually available to the male gaze”. I even recall my 12-year-old son’s reaction to Angelina Jolie’s version of Lara, “I like her, I don’t know why I like her, I just really like her.” Lara tapped into a primal masculine fantasy of power and pleasure.

What the feminist critics of the era mostly missed, in my view, was that this tension was not a bug but a feature of how the female has always operated in Western art. From the Venus of Willendorf to Botticelli’s sheerly armoured Athene and the Centaur to even Madonna writhing on the MTV stage, the great female icons of civilisation have fused power with sexual display. The question was never whether Lara Croft was sexualised, of course she was, but whether that sexualization was hers or merely projected onto her by male creators and consumers. In the original games, the answer was unambiguous: it was projected. She was an object wearing the costume of a subject.

The Reboot and the Puritan Correction

The 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, written by Rhianna Pratchett, attempted to resolve this by stripping Lara down to something rawer and more human. Pratchett rebuilt her as “a typical London student fresh out of university” – vulnerable, frightened, earning her competence through visible suffering rather than arriving with it pre-installed. The exaggerated body was replaced with realistic proportions. The confident smirk became a grimace of pain.

This was genuinely important work, and it succeeded commercially and critically. But it also inaugurated what I would call the Puritan Correction in game character design, a widespread overcorrection in which female characters were systematically de-eroticised, their femininity dampened, their danger domesticated into something palatable to the anxious sensibilities of progressive cultural gatekeepers. The assumption, rarely examined, was that any acknowledgment of female sexuality was ipso facto objectification, a profoundly anti-feminist position masquerading as feminism.

Anita Sarkeesian’s influential Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, launched via Kickstarter in 2012 and funded to twenty-six times its goal, provided the theoretical scaffolding for this correction. Sarkeesian catalogued recurring patterns, Damsels in Distress, Women as Background Decoration, the Ms. Male Character, and her framework entered the mainstream vocabulary of game criticism. The series had genuine analytical merit. But its underlying optimism, the belief that if we simply removed “harmful” representations, healthier ones would naturally flourish, betrayed a naïveté about the deep, chthonic forces that drive artistic creation. You cannot legislate the Dionysian out of art. You can only drive it underground, where it festers.​

The Flowering

And yet, despite the ideological crosscurrents, the period from 2017 to the present has produced an extraordinary flowering of complex female protagonists, characters who are neither the old, sexualised pinups nor the new sanitised Girl Bosses, but something richer and stranger.

Guerrilla Games’ Aloy, the outcast heroine of Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), was designed with naturalistic body language and micro-expressions, her emotional arc rooted in abandonment and the hunger for belonging rather than romance. She was curious, stubborn, socially awkward – recognisably human in a way that previous action heroines were not.

Naughty Dog’s Ellie, the young lesbian protagonist of The Last of Us Part II (2020), was allowed to be morally repellent – consumed by vengeance, capable of extraordinary cruelty – without the narrative rushing to redeem her. This was revolutionary not because she was queer, but because she was permitted to be terrible and deeply flawed. The old template demanded that female characters be role models; Ellie was permitted to be human.

Since Ellie, we have seen even greater explorations in the female character’s human-ness. Remedy’s Saga Anderson in Alan Wake 2 (2023), the studio’s first Black protagonist, was built through extensive collaboration with actress Melanie Liburd, with her scenes tailored to Liburd’s performance rather than grafted onto a prefabricated archetype.  And Celeste’s Madeline, Hellblade’s Senua, and Returnal’s Selene – each of these characters from the indie to AAA sphere pushed further into psychological territory that the mainstream had traditionally reserved for male antiheroes.

Atsu and the Return of the Archaic

Which brings us back to Atsu, and to why she matters.

What Sucker Punch achieved with Ghost of Yōtei is something the progressive establishment and the reactionary backlash both failed to imagine: a female character who is frankly, unapologetically archaic. Atsu is not a modern feminist parable. She is not a corrective. She draws on the oldest mythological substrate available – the onryō, the female revenant of Japanese folklore, a figure of such primal terror that merely speaking her name invites catastrophe.

When Atsu is stabbed through the chest in the game’s prologue and gasps back to life before stunned onlookers, it is not a moment of “girl power”. It is a resurrection myth. It is the return of the repressed feminine in its most dangerous aspect, not nurturing, not empowering, not role-model-ready, but numinous. The people of Ezo do not admire Atsu. They fear her. And that fear is the source of her authority.​

Ultimately, Atsu’s story is classical tragedy, and it works precisely because the developers at Sucker Punch trusted the mythological archetype rather than filtering it through contemporary ideology, or worse still, through gender stereotype.​

The Frontier Ahead

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, this is both a moment to recognise women across the globe in all their experiences but also to understand the role of woman on the global stage. All of us in the gaming world have seen how gaming IP is pushing beyond video games and into the broader entertainment zeitgeist. Understanding the evolution of the female protagonist helps us to understand and benchmark the creator’s intention for female protagonists. Is this what the world wants? Not necessarily so, as we see in the US alone, with the emergence of tradwives, Mar-a-Lago Face, and girls paralyzed by ridiculous beauty standards set by social media.

But the coming years will test whether the gaming industry and by extension the entertainment industry, can sustain this creative momentum. Lucia, the first female protagonist in a mainline Grand Theft Auto title, will ask whether Rockstar, a studio that for twenty-five years treated women as “nags, pleasure providers, or shallow caricatures”, can actually write a woman as a full human being. Ciri will carry the next Witcher on her shoulders, transitioning from protected daughter to Witcher in her own right.

But the arc from Princess Peach’s tower to Atsu’s burning tree is unmistakable. The female protagonist in video games has evolved from decoration to icon to contested symbol to, finally, imperfectly, magnificently, character. Not a representative of her gender. Not a corrective to historical wrongs. Not a role model or a fantasy or a political statement. A character: flawed, dangerous, contradictory, and alive.