![]() Princess Peach stands for what is traditionally wrong with female representation in games: she's submissive, helpless, fragile, and has no personality of her own. In the video, Holmes compares Bayonetta to Princess Peach as her diametric opposite. Of the many arguments posed about Bayonetta, one of a handful to adequately approach this duality is that of Jonathan Holmes in his third instalment of video column Constructoid. Is she also a strong character? Arguably: she is not only the game's heroine, but a witty and courageous one at that- saved only once by her arch-nemesis-turned-ally, Jeanne. My cynical side finds it probable that Kamiya re-skinned his ever-smarmy "Dante" persona with ungodly female proportions. Kamiya is quite explicit about the emphasis placed on this aspect of her character. Is Bayonetta a sexual figure? Well, yeah. Bayonetta, if exposed to deconstructionist analysis, demonstrates an amalgam of not only Western and Eastern connotations, but of so many role reversals, subversions of binary meanings, and ambiguous motivations that Derrida may very well have had a field day. For instance, the concepts of dark and light possess particular binary meanings for various Western and Eastern peoples. Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstructionism, recognized that language tends to reflect societal hierarchies, largely through sets of oppositions. But these simplifications are also what allow us to make sense of the world the complexity of the universe being what it is, we like to dilute information into something digestible. Of course the problem with all this is that our world- and most of the people in it- doesn't split neatly into binary oppositions. The internet almost immediately polarized itself: Is Bayonetta a strong female protagonist who owns her sexuality? Or is she no more than a virtual male plaything, another unattainable sexual ideal? From the moment of pre-release hype up until several weeks after game director Hideki Kamiya made a rather indefensible quote about his favorite metaphor in the game, bloggers, commenters, and professional critics and journalists began to weigh in on the integrity of the busty protagonist, seeking easy answers rather than engaging with the complexities the game proposes. This profound misinterpretation is no more obvious than in much of the conversation spawned by SEGA's Bayonetta. It's a class too few people take, and is largely dismissed by outliers as a bunch of hooey which overvalues opinion and disregards objective truth. And we can never, ever assume that even when we've studied our hardest, the meaning we derive from our own analysis will necessarily be the correct or only meaning. Most importantly, we must not form our opinions based on personal or modern social biases. We must try to understand intimacy and loss, and to empathize with the unlikely friendship of a young boy and an old man. We must learn the religious and literary symbolism, understand the historical implications of the Ireland Joyce was writing about. ![]() It's up to us to study the text- and to then draw our own educated, but subjective, conclusions. But what really happened? Why does this matter so much? Yet it's central to the plot- and to Flynn's relationship with the boy. Who was the man known as James Flynn? A past mistake- Flynn's accidental breaking of a chalice during Mass- is enshrouded in shame, bitterness, and mystery it's never deeply discussed. These moments are where the story trades in its restricted tone for passionate emotion. In that signature, subdued Joyce style, the story's meaning cannot be extracted directly from the actual text, but through its subtext: the way the boy is curiously concerned with the religious symbolism of the Catholic church the way adults, particularly his aunts and uncles, prattle about the late Reverend either shallowly, dismissively, or disdainfully the way these conversations and his reminiscences about the Reverend's lessons expose awkward and undefined feelings of anger, wistfulness, and mourning. Our narrator, an unnamed boy, struggles to express exactly what it was that his tutor meant to him. It's a first-person narrative recounting the death of the fictional Reverend James Flynn. Take his short story, " The Sisters," which appeared as the first story in his 1914 collection Dubliners. Upon request for a plan of his novel Ulysses, James Joyce answered, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." The man had a sensibility for nuance and subtlety. "Arise, my child! Arise to realize your true potential!" - Father Balder, Bayonetta By Lana Polansky Illustration by Daniel Purvis
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