DiD(iD) - Obnoxious habits of female characters

As a female gamer, few things gall me as much as watching a female character parade around like some Disney Princess. You know the type -- pretty, talented, and ultimately just a victim. She talks the talk, but when it comes right down to it, she's bound and gagged and in desperate need of a rescue.

Thus the tag "Damsel in Distress," or as I like to call them, "DiD"s. Your typical DiD is a younger woman, either late teens or early 20s, who seems fairly run of the mill. She may be powered, she may be normal, she may have some kind of paranormal talents. She may be a Mary Sue (a topic for another time), but one thing for sure about this character, she gets into trouble too damn easy.

She may simply be at a club, chatting with people when suddenly --! Kidnapping. The perp changes dependent on the genre of RP, but it's generally a dude, and he's usually the sort who like pretending he's a dominant. The DiD goes along with it. What choice does she have? (Yet another topic for another time.)

She'll get rescued, eventually, and everything will return to normal. Until the same sort of situation crops up again. And again. And again.

Mind you, the distress could also be any number of things, aside from kidnapping. She could be a super-empath, stuck feeling all the awful things around her. She could be a scrappy fighter who just has the worst luck in the world and forever loses. The ground point is that she needs to be rescued from whatever scrape she gets herself into, and after a few instances, it gets to be fucking annoying.

One would assume that in our modern feminist-powered environment, players would like to gallivant with a female character who can get herself out of trouble. What gives with the constant victimization?

It could be the attention it garners the character. I'd say that takes main stage, given the proclivity of distresses said damsel immerses herself in.

What's worse than a DiD? The DiD(iD) -- the Damsel in Distress (in Disguise). These sorts you see just as much, and they're just as cloying. They give all the impressions of being an empowered woman who can handle herself, but she's really not. At the end of the day, for all her super powers or paramilitary training, she's going to get captured and require a rescue. She talks the talk, and she walks it, but then she trips onto her ass and stares imploringly at her significant other to come do the daring-dos and make with the saving.

There is only one character I can think of who can give off the DiD vibe, and not be totally obnoxious. This (dubious) honor belongs to Empowered, of Adam Warren's graphic novel series of the same name (find it at your local comic store, or other purveyors of illustrated awesome).

I love Emp. I enjoy this series with all the girly delight that can come from the satirical adventures of a girl who just wanted to be a superhero. The origins of the character may be nefarious (she began life as a series of bondage pin-ups for a client Warren was working for), but over the course of the books, Warren has turned her into more than just a DiD.

Emp is, at the end of the day, just a normal young woman. Her powers, when they function, come from her woefully delicate super-suit. One of the running gags is that the thing can tear at the tiniest provocation. When it's intact, though, it grants her several powers that qualify her as super. 

As you can see from the picture above, she gets tied up a lot. It's part of the charm of the series. But didn't you just ramble for several paragraphs about how much you hate damsels in distress? Yeah, I did. The difference here, between Emp and other frequently-captured heroines, is that Emp grows out of it. Through her own ingenuity and intelligence, she can find ways out. And she continues to have the pluck to put on her super-suit (which often in the cause of her frequent bindings) and fight the good fight. 

Emp is a fantastic character because she is realistic (inasmuch as one can be in a comic book), and her situations are not based on the want of attention. She is a neophyte superhero trying her very damnedest to make it in a world full of Sistah Spookies and Major Havocs and Willy Petes. She is a fettered heroine who finds a way to succeed, when all the odds are stacked against her.

While the role-playing world may teem with DiD(iD)s, we can only hope that the future brings fewer of them. That for every so-called plucky heroine who can't seem to keep her fucking mouth shut and gets herself into clinches she can't get herself out of, there will be women who don't let that sort of shit deter them.

Hopefully, for every stupid bitch who Disney Princesses her way through her character life-span, we can get some balls-out chicks who rescue themselves, and likely the male protagonist. Like so: