Does Penny Arcade pass the Bechdel test?

[rax]

There are 1000 things I should be doing instead of this but it is the time of day where I've given up and am hopped up on cold medicine. So! First of all, some terms:

• Penny Arcade is a ten-year-old web comic about two men (Gabe and Tycho are their characters/aliases/whatever) who play video games that I'm actually rather fond of; it's periodically crass, periodically brilliant, and occasionally surreal. It would probably make more sense if I played many contemporary video games, but most of the time it's comprehensible, and it's actually often funny. (This is as distinct from the lesbian performance artist Penny Arcade, who used to have pennyarcade.com. I don't know much about her other than that Make/Shift magazine has reviewed her poorly and said she was offensive to trans men.) It's usually three times a week, and it's been going for 10 years, so at 52 weeks per year that's more than a thousand comics.
• Alison Bechdel is probably best known for Dykes to Watch Out For but has also done a number of other comic projects, including "Fun Home," which I really need to read, and probably some other non-comic projects that I'm not familiar with.
• The Bechdel test is a litmus test traditionally applied to film: At any point in the film, do two women speak with each other about something other than a man?
• Cold medicine should not need explanation. But just in case.

Recently, Penny Arcade decided to run three different concept comics to suggest alternate projects they might do: Lookouts, Automata, and Jim Darkmagic. [0] All of these look interesting, and Lookouts seems like it could be downright hilarious. Normally, I don't think about gender in Penny Arcade; I've been reading it for a long time and the main characters are male and that's never bothered me. In these three comics, though, there's one female character, who is accidentally burned and frozen to death on stage as part of a magic trick. I was like: Hold up, did they just propose three new ideas with no women except someone who gets murdered to further the plot? I mean, I accept that Penny Arcade is occasionally homophobic [1] and doesn't have many female characters, but I was sort of hoping the new concept comics would feature women. Why? Well, no good reason, admittedly. But the new comics totally fail the Bechdel test.

This got me to thinking. Would the whole ten years of comic archives pass the Bechdel test at all? A few people said yes, but I wasn't convinced, and so in the last couple of days of cold medicine haze I flipped through the archives. [2] I think the answer is that it does pass, but only just barely. Out of more than a thousand comics, here, in chronological order, are the ones that meet either two or three of the criteria:

• Now, Picture It Vicious: One of the main characters' wives speaks to the other about the main characters.
• Up On The Rooftop: The two wives decide to call 911, hearing noises that the reader knows are the two main characters falling off of a roof. Are they talking about a man or not?
• Red and Blue in... The Party: Two women talk about their husbands, who are enemies in a video game, at a cocktail party.
• The Speed of Thought: The two wives discuss killing their husbands.
• Probably Safer To Burn 'Em: Gabe's wife confronts a DiVX player who is in bed with a prostitute. Is she talking to the prostitute? Probably not, no.
• Fruit Saga, Part 2: The two wives discuss the "Fruit Fucker" robot who has been touching one of them in her sleep. They use the pronoun "he." Is the Fruit Fucker a man? It is a robot, but the jokes are basically just about the robot penetrating things sexually.
• Tormented, Science-Fiction Youth: A girl and her mother (and father) discuss the boy who impregnated her.
• The Scion, Part 2: A girl (Annarchy --- she's awesome) fights with her mother and father over whether or not she can go to a LAN party because there might be boys there. It's not directly about a man? Maybe?
• BFF!: Gabe and a group of young girls shout "Barbie Horse Adventures!" in unison. I don't know if that's really a conversation, but Barbie Horse Adventures is pretty clearly not a boy.
• The Turkey Trilogy, Episode Two: Annarchy and her mother discuss vegetarianism and the enslaving of indigenous peoples. This is the one point at which I can unequivocally say that Penny Arcade passes the Bechdel test.
• Perfectly Reasonable: Gabe, his wife, and a (female) realtor discuss whether or not a house might contain a "spectral bride." The wife and the realtor never actually speak to each other; they both talk, separately, to Gabe.
• The Breaking Point: Gabe, his wife, and their son are trick or treating; a woman answers the door and gets into an argument with Gabe about the Star Wars canon details of the son's costume. Never do the women speak to each other. Arguably they would be talking about the son anyway, though I would be inclined to count it if they spoke to each other.
• The Sussorous Sandwich: A woman and her daughter sit at the table. The daughter is playing a Game Boy, which says "ISLAM IS THE LIGHT." [3] The woman chides her daughter. Then the woman's sandwich says the same thing, and a variety of fantastic creatures show up and overtake the last panel. I guess this technically passes the test.

I probably missed one or two, but I doubt I missed a hundred. So, while I'd be comfortable just posting this and letting it sit, I'm hopped up on cold medicine, so I'm going to take a stab at actually discussing it. If you look at these and at some of the other comics, you're more likely to get multiple women or women talking to each other in longer plot arcs or non-three-panel-arranged comics. Why is this? Well, it's a comic about two guys who play video games. Usually the main characters are either the two guys or characters from video games. The characters from video games are basically all male --- or, when they're not, it's a single woman like Samus Aran or Lara Croft. So female characters show up in speaking roles most often when there's a longer plot arc or a panel with a large number of characters in it. (The Turkey Trilogy, Episode Two has both. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's the best Bechdel buster in the bunch.) This makes sense. Of course, if the rule were "Two men who talk to each other not about a woman," it would pass at least half the time. It is, after all, a comic about two men who talk about video games.

So, why do I care? I was spurred on to caring because the three different concept comics present three alternate ideas for story universes and tropes, one or all of which could have been constructed in such a way not to minimize female characters. Admittedly, we don't know too much about them, but from the teaser comics none of them seem like settings that would feature female characters. Lookouts is about a group of boys in a Boy Scouts-like organization in a fantasy universe --- no girls there. Automata is noir and it looks like basically everyone is a gruff and gritty man in a suit; maybe there are interesting women but not on the first page. The Robots in the role of Other have the potential to be interesting, though. Jim Darkmagic... well, he kills a woman and gets away with it and is apparently the protagonist? Uh, I guess it could work out to be uproariously funny, but the concept doesn't make me think Oh Wow How Awesome. (The fanbase didn't seem to like it as much either.)

It's not like it's Gabe and Tycho's responsibility to be out there making comics about awesome women who play or might be in video games. I mean, if they did, that'd be great, but they're doing their thing and for the most part I really enjoy that thing. I just think it's worth pointing out and thinking about: Hey, how come this is so gendered? Sure, fewer women than men play video games, but even the nerdcore games I play like NetHack and Crawl are more than 13 women per 1500. (Crawl actually has a very dedicated, if small, female and gender-variant playerbase.) I I think it's more that the choices Gabe and Tycho have made are representative of larger problems that I am totally too drugged out to try to explain cogently. I know there is also a larger dialogue about women in the webcomics community --- both in terms of authors and in terms of characters --- that I'm not really a part of. Still, other webcomics pass the Bechdel test much more easily, even blatantly sexist and sexualized ones. [4] So when the Penny Arcade guys have the chance to do something different and it doesn't change anything, it makes me kinda sad.

How could they change this if they wanted to?

• More second string female characters. The two wives appear periodically, as does Annarchy, as do a number of the characters' male friends. Add more women to the list, get more women in the comic in general.
• Make more gender-irrelevant characters female. Lots of characters in the comic are once-offs who are "a Warcraft player" or "a character in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance." Often there's one or more guys and one woman; those could have multiple women without any significant change to the comic storylines. (Of course, I don't know how much this actually matters. I guess if nothing else it would have made me feel better about the comic.)
• More longer plot arcs that explore secondary characters.
• When choosing to deviate from their standard form (Cardboard Tube Samurai, Twisp and Catsby, the current three concept comics), do something about women.

What do you think?


[0] Oh yeah, everyone in all three of the promos looks white, too, and that's probably true of most of the comic as well. If I'd not been hopped up on cold medicine, I would have taken notes on that too.

[1] Homophobic in the "fag discourse" sense (see Dude, You're A Fag by C. J. Pascoe) generally. I had totally forgotten about this issue until I skimmed through the archives. I don't know that I'd tolerate it if I hadn't been reading the comic for nine years, though I probably would, because I've seen much worse and tolerated that too. How I feel about that, both the homophobia and the tolerating it, is outside of the scope of this head cold.

[2] I sometimes clicked rapidly through when I saw that there weren't two women even in the comic, but I did at least look at every image. I may have missed 2; I probably didn't miss 20. (If I did miss two, I'm happy to add them to my list.)

[3] This merits some explanation so that it doesn't sound more bizarre and bad than it is.

[4] Just picking from things I read, I know Questionable Content does, say, and Order of the Stick (which is even a male-written gamer comic). I considered making every word in that sentence a link, but checking my work there would have been a bit much. And, of course, passing the Bechdel test doesn't mean it's full of strong female characters I'd like to emulate; I'd take Penny Arcade's treatment of women, however sparse, over something like Menage a 3, even though it totally passes the test. (Annarchy is more awesome than Zii and it only goes downhill from there.)

Comments

[jhonen-red.livejournal.com]

I liked Automata best, of the three; Lookouts didn't make much of an impression on me. Jim Darkmagic seemed a little gratuitous. My first thought when you mentioned the Jim Darkmagic comic was "women in refrigerators"; not actually a very good example of the phenomenon, but reminiscent.

It doesn't bother me that PA is essentially just about two male characters, given that the characters are the alter egos of the two male creators and they more or less never leave the house. That's most of what they're aiming for, I think. It's true that they could do something else, but I think it's important to recognize that they're not necessarily trying to write a comic that represents gamers in general. They seem to be trying to write a comic about their own lives that resonates with gamers in general.

Now that I actually read the other comics, it sounds like shatterstripes has already said this, and more clearly.

[jhonen-red.livejournal.com]

While I'm here: http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus37.html

That strip doesn't pass the Bechdel test, but I really can't imagine it matters. (Other strips in that series do, but the genders seem irrelevant to me, as they so often do.)

[rax.livejournal.com]

That's funny, because I love minus, but I consider it very relevant that she's a girl. I know that that paritcular comic is the one on the wall in my house without even having to click the link. :)