Reflections 6 – The female protagonist as shown in the art of Yoshitaka Amano

I’ve always found it odd that considering Japan’s sexist culture (in which it literally refers to career women as devil women), it overshadows western storytelling in many ways. First and foremost among them, in my opinion, is Japan’s ability to write female protagonists – most notably in the Final Fantasy series of Role Playing Games.

The truly inspiring thing is this series is that each game is effectively a movie that the player gets to experience, with normally 40+ hours of screen time. But my point is that their female protagonists are so well written, Especially those designed by the artist Yoshitaka Amano.

Each character is specifically designed to be feminine yet to exude the sort of self reliance that Western principles advocate in modern society, yet fail to promote in pop culture i.e. heroines such as Bella from the Twilight series, appear powerless and bystanders in their own story by comparison. All the more shocking that many of the writers creating such poor female leads are women, and feminists.

Yoshitaka Amano’s artwork which inspires the writers of the franchise and producers of the series often helps distill the characters, and it’s worth noting in the only picture featured with male characters in this blog (at the top) the female character is still given more prominence.

As I mentioned earlier, these characters are designed with femininity  in mind, however they all display a level of resilience not seen in the mainstream western pop culture. Each is armed and self reliant, displaying the level of development and growth the writer’s have them undergo in their respective stories. Not only that, these characters aren’t simply MacGuffins that we have to accept for diversity or quotas etc, they are meaningful to the plot, they aren’t damsels to be rescued but characters with their own dreams and desires and more often then not they have skillset that makes them unique and incredibly potent if not desired by the player.

I think the true success of these stories and artwork is in the way these female protagonists are treated by their designers and writers. They are treated with respect, they are treated like their male counterparts. They want, they try and they fail. They overcome odds and ultimately it makes them compelling, and I think each of those ideas comes across in each one of Yoshitaka Amano’s artworks.