Writing Women as People: Arcane and the Female Gaze

Writing Women as People: An Analysis of the Female Gaze in Arcane: League of Legends

In November of 2021, Netflix released Arcane: League of Legends, a visually stunning animated dark fantasy series set in the world of long-standing multiplayer online battle arena video game League of Legends. The series is about sisters Vi and Jinx, chronicling Vi’s journey to find and reconcile with her sister after abandoning her as a child due to an accident Jinx made which killed their father. A thrilling premise: exactly the kind of show I’d enjoy. I avoided it for as long as possible. As the name slipped into conversations more and more often by my friends who were watching it fervently, I shrunk away. Most of my friends hadn’t ever encountered the League of Legends title before: most of my friends weren’t as acquainted with online multiplayer games as I was. It was a familiar name to me, carrying the game’s nasty reputation of misogynistic, homophobic, racist players ready to start slinging slurs at the sound of anyone who didn’t sound like a white heterosexual male in the chat. That, of course, was League of Legends’ intended audience: with a character roster consisting of fifty diversely bodied men, and forty eight slim, sexualized women, it was clear that League of Legends was never a game meant for a woman like me. The women were eye candy with as much personality as a cardboard cutout, and expecting the same from Arcane, I left it alone. To my surprise, however, a month later, everyone was still singing its praises online. Praises of its female characters. Shocked, I decided to give it a chance: it couldn’t be worse than the game, after all. I loaded up the series, and the first face on my screen was that of a young girl. Her chest is not in the camera. Arcane has made the women of League of Legends almost entirely unrecognizable by putting effort into giving them depth, flaws, and agency. Arcane took League’s cardboard cutouts, wrote them through the female gaze, and made them people.

The girl on the screen is Jinx, League’s happy go lucky pyromaniac mascot, and she, like the other female characters in Arcane, looks like a completely different person from her oversexualized League counterpart. Excessive objectification of female characters is a tale as old as time in the video game industry. In 2016 study “Sexy, Strong, and Secondary” conducted by Teresa Lynch, female characters in video games were analyzed for sexualization across 31 years, and a trend was identified where across all 31 years, “in comparison to male characters, games more frequently showed females in clothing that left them partially nude and inappropriately dressed for performed tasks” (Lynch, 567). League of Legends is certainly a contributor to this trend: Jinx, their manic Harley Quinn equivalent, is dressed scantily in what amounts to a bikini top, bright pink hotpants, and one singular pink thigh high stocking. She’s wearing so little clothing that it looks rather like she got out of bed after a bad night and then forgot to get dressed in the morning before walking out the door. Vi, her pink haired criminal-turned-vigilante sister, doesn’t fare much better: although she’s sporting both tight sleeves, even tighter pants, a choker the width of her hand and giant mechanical gloves meant for crushing heads, her Wonder Woman-esque top seems exactly engineered to leave her cleavage the only piece of exposed skin. The corset over the midsection of it just seems like an insult to her, trading the policewoman’s ability to breathe properly for an accentuated hourglass figure. These hypersexualized designs are completely impractical to the characters in the world of League, but ultimately it doesn’t matter: under the “male gaze” as described by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, women are as a norm displayed in the media firstly as objects of pleasure to be looked at by a male audience (Mulvey, 15). These designs flaunting breasts and buttocks certainly don’t disappoint when it comes to objectification, which is why it is such a surprise that Arcane’s designs of the exact same people do. In the series, Jinx is wearing a cropped halter top which maintains her silhouette while still providing her with modesty: she’s also, notably, wearing long pants as she darts around the screen almost as fast as her blown wide, deep-set eyes do. She’s still slim and feminine, but in an unhealthy rather than attractive way, where she is clearly malnourished and lacking proper rest. Her sister Vi has been completely overhauled. In place of her skin-tight pants and corset, she’s been given a hooded shirt with the sleeves torn off, and baggy patch-riddled pants. Half of her head of hot-pink short hair is shaved off during her time spent in prison in the show. The nicest piece of clothing she’s allowed is a red leather jacket that she roughs up another Zaunite for. All of these changes add to the legitimacy of her existence as a person in the world of Arcane by making her appearance reflect her rough environment, while still making for a visually striking design with a recognizable silhouette. Her scrappy, violent demeanor is accentuated by her design in Arcane in a way that a hypersexualized design could not convey. Arcane designs Vi and Jinx with its world in mind instead of its male audience, turning them from “passive objects” as women are supposed to be, to “active characters” that exist in and interact with the world around them in meaningful ways.

Under the male gaze, women are perfect exhibitions, intended to be the viewer’s fantasy to be viewed for his own pleasure. Women in Arcane dodge this lens by being flawed both physically and emotionally: no woman in Arcane is designed or written to be any man’s dream girl. Jinx is unhealthily thin in a way where it doesn’t feel sexual to look at her despite the fact that she is only wearing a halter top: rather, it serves to accentuate her wiry frame and make her feel as if she could be flung into a wall by a single punch. Vi is covered in scars and tattoos from her time in prison, her arms and knuckles are always wrapped in bandages, and she’s missing a tooth due to her everlasting hot-headedness and inability to solve problems without violence. In League of Legends, Vi’s motto is described as “punch first, then ask questions while punching” (League). It’s meant to give some insight into her personality, but ultimately, the motto is a throwaway line meant to be chuckled at by the player and then disregarded, as who she is as a person is unimportant to her gameplay. In Arcane, however, that recklessness has consequences, and it directly impacts Vi’s relationships with the people and world around her, resulting in scars from avoidable fights and strained relationships. Oftentimes women in films or shows can feel one-dimensional. According to Anastasya Lavenia of CXO Media, an Asian media journal in her article “The Paradox of Strong Female Characters”, this is not a new concept: historically, the film industry has always catered to its male audience, promoting misogynistic or objectified female characters as protagonists who only truly exist in relation to the men around them (Levinia). When a woman has as much depth as a cardboard cutout, it makes it much easier to objectify her. This is often why women are presented in the “damsel in distress” archetype, helpless and waiting to be saved as a fantasy object. However, this trend of cardboard women is not only limited to the damsel: a “strong female character” can have no depth if the writers decide to make her entire personality about how she doesn’t need help, or to be rescued, despite the fact that the intention was to make her more appealing to women (Levinia). The problem is, that woman who “doesn’t need a man” doesn’t feel like a person, as in the pursuit of female awesomeness, she is not allowed to be written as a person, to be flawed as a human being. Arcane’s Vi is an excellent example of a woman who has escaped the male gaze because she is both strong and flawed in believable ways. Vi’s overwhelming strength is only outweighed by her own hero complex, where anything bad that happens to her little sister Jinx is undeniably her fault, even when she has nothing to do with it. Thus, when fighting, she can make incredibly stupid decisions when it comes to Jinx, and it makes sense for her character– giving her an exploitable core character flaw, and stopping her from falling into the archetype of “strong female character” that is secretly one-dimensional when viewed through any kind of critical lens. It’s very clear to the viewer that Vi would do anything to help her little sister, even if she had to toss away all of her other morals in the process: on several occasions, the story forces her to, and always, her actions have consequences.

Women in Arcane have a stunning amount of character agency. Their actions matter, and that female agency is one of the defining marks of a text written in the female gaze. In her essay The Female Gaze in Documentary Film, film scholar Lisa French identifies the concept of the “female gaze” as a gaze shaped by a perspective where female agency is privileged (French, 54). In contrast, in the “male gaze”, between her duties as an object for the characters within the story to gawk and stare at and her duties as an object for the audience to view, the will of the female character is irrelevant. As Mulvey asserts,
“What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.” (Mulvey, 20)
In Arcane, the heroine is Vi. She influences the people around her and inspires love for her and fear of her, but ultimately her decisions and thoughts are placed at the forefront of the story. She doesn’t represent anything other than a woman desperate to find her own sister after previously abandoning her as a teenager, and the story doesn’t veer from this in order to needlessly sexualize her. Perhaps this increased amount of agency could be attributed to her strong build and aggressive demeanor, making her a character that is empowered because her character is of a woman who is “like a man” (Lavenia), further associating agency with masculinity and femininity with passivity. However, her sister Jinx, although the object of Vi’s search, has just as much of an impact on the story as she does. Jinx’s childhood decisions cause her father figure to die and her sister to abandon her, which results in her joining a completely different group of unruly people. A manic and demented criminal, she seeks to help Silco, her new adoptive father figure and drug lord ruling Zaun, free the city from the oppressive grasp of the nearby ruling city of Piltover. She kidnaps, bombs, tortures, and kills several people, but she also chooses to avoid Vi for fear of what she would think of her now. However, she also saves Vi from several dangerous situations throughout the story, proving that she still does care about her. She’s far from being just a static object that sits pretty waiting for Vi to come save her. Jinx’s choices directly impact the story more than any other character: she makes decisions throughout the show that kill her and Vi’s father figure, her new father figure Silco, and in the final episode, hundreds of people, as she makes the choice to bomb Piltover’s political council for Zaun’s freedom, directly starting a war between the two cities. It’s Jinx’s choices that drive the narrative. The focus on Jinx and Vi’s agency and choices in Arcane make them feel alive, fully emancipating them as objects. Like any person, Jinx and Vi are free to make any choice they want to in the story, and just like a male character’s would, their actions have long standing consequences for the future of the people and world around them.

For this entire essay, I have been talking about Vi and Jinx: two women depicted as white and underprivileged throughout the narrative. Media acclaimed for its subversions of the male gaze can often fall into the trap of only allowing heteronormative white women who express themself in a feminine demeanor to free themselves from objectification, raising the question of whether or not diversity is able to be well-represented in the female gaze, like Legally Blonde, or the 2019 remake of Charlie’s Angels. As Vi and Jinx are both white, it begs the question as to whether or not Arcane displays the same issue of only women of certain demographics being allowed to have agency within a narrative. However, although I have chosen to use two white, lower-class characters as a case study for the writing of the series, Arcane welcomes diversity across almost all identities; Vi is a masculinely presenting lesbian, Jinx is heavily implied to be suffering from a swath of mental disorders, and both of them are contrasted heavily by Mel Medarda, one of the head politicians of Piltover and an upper class heavily feminine presenting heterosexual black woman, protagonistic and navigating the intricacies of the ruling class’ political system, as well as Sevika, Silco’s right hand woman, a lower-class South Asian masculine woman missing her arm. The truly impressive thing about Arcane’s hyper-diverse cast is that no attention is ever called to the roster of identities of the characters– the series never feels like it is throwing in racial, sexual, gender, or class diversity for an audience stamp of approval. Yet, it manages to completely blow other series’ diversity inclusion attempts out of the water by featuring such a wide range of characters that no two characters have the same set of identities like it’s the standard, no big deal– because it isn’t a big deal in real life. Every person has a different set of identities from the next, and Arcane’s diversity is merely a byproduct of its women being written as people.

Arcane is a wonderful piece of media that takes great care to treat all of its characters equally, rejecting the male gaze by giving all its women decent clothing, crippling flaws and equal opportunity to mess the narrative up. It was a thrilling ride to watch, and a refreshing break from the objectification of female characters that is all too common still in the media– I couldn’t help thinking the entire time: if only its source material treated women like people too. League of Legends is just one video game in thousands that heavily sexualizes women, exaggerating their proportions and completely forgetting about their personality. However, with over 180 million active players per month, League of Legends is also one of the biggest video games in its genre out there, and it has possibly the worst reputation out of all multiplayer online video games for having an incredibly toxic and sexist community. Even worse, League of Legends is rated Teen – teenage boys and girls thirteen and up are the target audience for this festival full of scantily clad women, causing warped perceptions of women on both sides of the gender spectrum. Media which consists of heavily diverse men and objectified cardboard women teaches its audience that women in media are meant to be objectified, and exposure to objectification at an early age has been observed to cause “harmful cognitive outcomes” in women (Lynch, 567). There is a desperate need in the online multiplayer game space for female characters that are free of objectification: not only is it harmful to young boys and their perceptions of women in real life, depictions of women in media like those in League of Legends also harm young girls’ perceptions of themselves and their own bodies. So how can we begin to reverse this trend and push for a more equal depiction of men and women in the space of children’s video games? Arcane is a step in the right direction. In place of cartoonish caricatures of women, more media should make its characters like Arcane, which treats both male and female characters equally without sexualizing or idealizing either. In place of designing characters like men or women, characters should be designed as people first.




Works Cited
French, L. (2021). The ‘Female Gaze’. In: The Female Gaze in Documentary Film. Palgrave
Macmillan, Cham. https://doi-org.libproxy.smith.edu/10.1007/978-3-030-68094-7_3
French mainly talks about her experience with documentary film and her analysis of the female gaze within it, however she also describes exactly what the female gaze is quite extensively in a chapter within the book: a world where female agency is privileged, and shaped by a voice and perspective in relation to being in a “female” body. This is the lens that I will be analyzing Arcane: League of Legends through, and I will be analyzing the characters of Vi and Jinx and their relationship with agency, specifically about how their agency makes Arcane a feminist text.
Lavenia, Anastasya. “The Paradox of Strong Female Characters.” Interest, 22 Feb. 2023, www.cxomedia.id/art-and-culture/20220222152006-24-173856/the-paradox-of-strong-female-characters.
Lavenia argues that women who are considered “Strong Female Characters” in popular media are usually masculine, thus perpetuating a stereotype that women in media can only be strong if they are manlike. I will use this source to discuss how that assertion applies to Vi, but how Jinx manages to dodge the assertion, perpetuating Arcane’s diversity in its female leads whilst still giving all of them equal amounts of importance and agency. I will also use her assertions on how women in media are often one-dimensional to contrast against Vi’s character, showing off the depth of character flaws Arcane weaves into its characters, male and female alike.
Lynch, Teresa, et al. “Sexy, Strong, and Secondary: A Content Analysis of Female Characters in
Video Games across 31 Years.” Journal of Communication, vol. 66, no. 4, Aug. 2016, pp.
564–84. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.libproxy.smith.edu/10.1111/jcom.12237.
This is a study that tracks the sexualization of video game characters throughout the years and across different genres: however, it does an extremely good job of summarizing the typical tropes of female character design in video games under the male gaze. I will use this source in order to examine how League of Legends designs its female characters under the male gaze, and how Arcane shifts those designs into women who are women, not objects.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1989, pp. 14–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9_3.
Mulvey argues that women are cinematically reduced to passive objects in contrast to active men in what she refers to as the “male gaze”. She establishes three looks: the active look of the male protagonist, the look of the camera that objectifies women’s bodies, and the audience looking through the eyes of both). She argues that the male gaze is a norm for filmmaking. I will use this source in examination of the character design in League of Legends, and contrast her ideas with the filmmaking of Arcane: League of Legends in order to examine the male gaze in League of Legends, and how it is not present in Arcane.
Wiki Contributors to League of Legends. “Vi.” League of Legends Wiki,
leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Vi.
This is Vi’s page on the League of Legends wiki. I am using it briefly as a reference for Vi’s personal motto within the games, in order to discuss the implications of what she says in the game on her as a character.