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Monthly Archive:June, 2012
When the Saints Come Marchin’ In: Sexism in Hitman
So I've thought a bit more about that Hitman trailer. Read around a bit about it. Saw what the haps was.
It is really disheartening to read comments from guys on this subject because they are so goddamn clueless. I mean, I really want to just be all "Well, they don't know any better". 'Cause they don't. But at the same time, they're so dismissive and rude about it. "Bitches making a mountain out of a molehill" essentially. If it's a molehill, it's still there and needs to be addressed.
But let's talk a little about what the social justice warriors are saying about it.
The predominant thing I saw people complaining about about was why those columnists who objected to the trailer seemed so reluctant to say outright that it was sexist to have 47 beat up all these sexualized women and why people were so focused on the trailer not being reflective of the gameplay.
It's sort of a tangled subject, but I'mma try and sort it out.
Agent Smith
One of the things I think makes Blood Money neat in respect to Hitman as a whole is the way they use Agent Smith.
Agent Smith is a CIA agent who finds himself stripped down to his boxers and needing to be rescued in every Hitman game. (As a sidenote, I find the amount of male bondage and torture in Hitman games inordinately great. I am sure there is some psychological angle of interest to that, given their target audience of STRAIGHT MALE GAMER.) They don't really go into how these things happen in the narrative, so Agent Smith comes off as a hapless failure of a spy and 47 treats him as such. I personally like to think that this is his specialty, though. I can't see why the CIA wouldn't get rid of him otherwise. Perhaps his allowing himself to be captured so often is a part of his missions. He’s obviously very hardy and can take a beating, although he starts to break down from it in Silent Assassin, taking to drinking on the job and becoming even more of an apparent liability.
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