McIntosh and Sarkeesian returned a month later to release part 2 of their series detailing this cliche. In it, they source the following information:

Wood reports that she conducted interviews with 20 heterosexual women who had been in violent relationships. She then asked them to make sense of their relationships. The women discussed relationships in romance narratives including fairy tale and dark versions to organize their relationships. They spoke of wanting or needing to please their partners, finding Prince Charming, making mistakes, and then being upset in that. She then says that this means we have to make new narratives of romance because the women discussed narratives that Western society provides — either Prince Charming or dark, malignant romance.

Every 9 seconds, a website that is about domestic abuse against women only. Facts about domestic violence from Wellspring, a counseling center. Women in Refrigerators by Gaile Simone. Game pages to promote Dear Esther, To the Moon, Passage. A blog about being edgy.

The following information was not sourced and must be: video games are pernicious, the trope is pervasive in the 80s and 90s, the Damsel has seen a resurgence in recent years, male power fantasies, Damsel in Distress is a plot device, there’s a moderate increase of female game characters, video game characters have agency, video game characters require empowerment, video game studios are desperately searching for alternatives, Damsel is a cliche, Damsel is a trope, trope vs cliche, death of women is prevalent and bad, a popular variation is to combine tropes, trope-combinations, trend of throwing women under the bus, developers are hoping to fool gamers, the violence depicted is due to a character’s gender, mercy killing of women goes back to Splatterhouse, the writers of GTA 3 wrote a character for a misogynist joke, mercy killing of women is uniquely gendered, how domestic violence applies to video game characters that aren’t related in any way, that video game violence is causally or correlated with real abuse, abuse against women is used to ratchet up the sexual stakes, any game developers are sitting around and twirling their mustaches, video games are contributing to institutional or systemic sexism, the cultivation effect is extant and demonstrated in research, women’s deaths are written with animus, violence against women is global, a chunk of the industry is building games on brutalized female bodies, the dude in distress is elusive.

As you can see, McIntosh and Sarkeesian did increase the sources they gave. They also increased the assertions that they did not bother to source.

Plot Devices, Cliches, and Tropes

McIntosh and Sarkeesian do provide us with some definitions at the onset of their video description unlike the first. In their definitions they state that the Damsel in Distress is a plot device.

A plot device is simply anything that moves the plot forward, sustains it, or moves it backward. Devices are typically, by their nature, objects of the narrative. They are typically not characters. The primary source of tropes for McIntosh and Sarkeesian, TVTropes, disagrees. It says that characters can be devices or objects by virtue of not being the consumer. For TVTropes, cliches, tropes, motifs, themes, and plot devices are all part of the same word meaning anything in a plot.

From resources that are of repute listed earlier, tropes are simply figures of speech and phrases typically used to deliver some sort of turnabout.

Cliches are overly used motifs or themes that have entered into the point of contrivance. They can be words. They can be characters. They can be anything both concrete and abstract. The point is they are contrived and thus bad.

Wikipedia and Changingminds give us some different plot devices including discovery, flashbacks, asides, back stories, Chekhov’s gun, death traps, Deus Ex Machinas, dream sequences, fables, flashforwards, exposition, in media res, MacGuffins, narration, red herrings, reversals, and twists. Notice these are all things characters can do or have. Sometimes, the character is imbued with the power of these things. Rarely is the person themselves, by their nature alone, these items. The power is the plot device.

One could argue, however, that characters work to progress the plot. That does not make the character an object. It merely makes the character part of the plot which is moved by a plot device.

The declaration that characters are plot devices, no matter how shallow their characterization, is tenuous at best. At worst, it is a continuation of the incredibly sexist statement that a damsel in these plots are mere objects in spite of potentially rich character development. Dismissing a character simply because they do not “do enough” is, well, dismissive.

The Nature of Recency and Edgy

When discussing the resurgence of the trope, McIntosh and Sarkeesian do not tell us the time frame in question. The previous video merely states “the 80s and 90s.” However, they show multiple games, including Super Mario Bros. Wii from 2009, in the first video. They state that Part 2 will deal with recent incarnations of the cliche by showing Outlaws from 1997, Medievil 2 and The Bouncer from 2000, and Duke Nukem 3D from 1996.

While this may seem like a minor issue at hand, it presents a problem in discussing the games in question. At the time of the publishing of the video, in 2013, these games were 17 to 14 years old. This is another instance where McIntosh and Sarkeesian should have conceptualized their scope of research prior to conducting it to make sure readers were well-oriented to the frame of time.

As it exists, it appears that McIntosh and Sarkeesian’s concept of older examples of the cliche include examples that were less than a decade old while newer examples include games that are over a decade old. This is where conceptualization and clear definition could help the reader and viewer orient themselves to the research. Definitions are vital to research at any level.

Another ill-defined concept is “edgy.” McIntosh and Sarkeesian never let us know what that is. Their linked resource on edgy does not either. It shows us what the author thinks is edgy, but the author never really defines it for us other than a quote from Daria:

“As far as I can make out, edgy occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are looking to suck the energy — not to mention the spending money — out of the “youth culture.”

It would appear that edgy is when people of a certain age try to make money by doing a certain collection of behaviors that are considered to be wrong. It should be noted that the video game development community is averaged at age 31.

Of note is that Anita Sarkeesian is around 29 to 30. Jonathan McIntosh’s age is unknown as he is not remarkable enough for a Wikipedia page and I won’t dig past that; he is likely around the same age if not older as Facebook research shows 2/3rds of heterosexual relationships involve an older male.