Here’s an article where Lionhead mentions that Microsoft’s advertising team refused to let them put a black woman on the cover of Fable 2. Here’s an article where Shane Black mentions he wanted the villain of Iron Man 3 to be a woman but Marvel said the action figure wouldn’t sell and forced him to change it to a man. Here’s an article about how the focus testing for The Last of Us originally didn’t include any women, and here’s another about how the advertisers tried to force Ellie off the box cover for being a girl. And here’s one about how publishers disincentivize the use of female protagonists by giving those games less than half the advertising budget of male-led games.

But whenever these games and movies are critiqued for precisely these reasons, folks come out of the woodwork to insist they are the way they are because that’s the creative team’s vision, and to ask them to change it, to abandon their integrity, is profane and censorious.

So, like, could we stop pretending that the Video Game Boys Club is anything to do with what the designers want? And maybe remember who, exactly, has influence over their decisions?

K.