There’s a version of this essay that spends three paragraphs establishing the problem with strong female characters (in games) before getting to the point. But you’ve probably read that version seventeen times. I’m going to skip it and tell you what I actually think is happening, because I think the discourse has been looking at the right evidence and drawing the wrong conclusion.
The conclusion usually drawn is this: de-feminisation works.
Give a female character the same script as the male protagonist, don’t put her in a chain mail bikini, let her be competent without constantly explaining that she’s competent, and you get a character who works.
That’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough.
Because Alexios has the same script as Kassandra. BroShep has the same script as FemShep. And neither of them are iconic in the way their female counterparts are. Something else is happening — and I think that something is sitting in a recording booth making cold decisions about who a person is.
And it’s a woman doing it.
The studios certainly didn’t plan this. One of them actively tried to prevent it.
BioWare didn’t particularly want to make FemShep. They provided a female option because one was expected.
So, they gender swapped the script. Ran her on male mo-cap data. Recorded a couple of romance scenes, swapped the pronouns, and called it done.
Jennifer Hale — one of the most decorated voice performers in the history of the medium — walked into those sessions and cold-read every single line. The entirety of Mass Effect. No preparation. No script previews. On the spot, a couple of passes and it ships.
What she did with that was not performing femininity. Because when you’re sight-reading sci-fi technobabble and making snap decisions about who this person is in real time, it’s character first.
What Hale did was bring herself. Her emotional library, her instincts, her specific way of inhabiting a body that moves through the world doing things. She played a person. The character happened to be a woman. That ordering matters. A lot.
Ubisoft’s relationship with Kassandra is a different and uglier story.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was originally designed to star Kassandra as the sole playable character. Ubisoft’s Chief Creative Officer Serge Hascoët shut it down. His reasoning: women don’t sell.
The character who would go on to become one of the most beloved protagonists in the franchise’s history — the one Ubisoft has since made functionally immortal and is threading as a connecting figure through their entire mythology — was nearly deleted before the game shipped because the man at the top didn’t believe anyone would want to play her.
So Melissanthi Mahut — RADA-trained, native Greek speaker, doing her first mo-capture role — walked into that recording booth to voice a character the studio had tried to make optional, for a game that had almost erased her entirely.
And she made the same instinctive choice Hale had made: don’t perform a woman warrior. Don’t make Kassandra legible as specifically female.
She researched female video game protagonists extensively and then set all of it aside. The best way to play Kassandra, she decided, was to simply be herself. To be Melissanthi Mahut in ancient Greece, making decisions, cracking jokes, feeling things — a person who happened to be a woman rather than a woman who was being permitted to do things.
Ubisoft has spent every year since trying to keep Kassandra alive. She’s in Valhalla. She’s in the novelisation. She’s canonical. She’s immortal. The executive who said women don’t sell is no longer at the company. But the character he tried to make optional is the spine of the franchise.
Now play both games as the male character and you’ll feel what’s missing.
Alexios isn’t a bad performance. Michael Antonakos is a competent actor and there are players who genuinely prefer him — the intensity, the Spartan-warrior energy, the brute register that reads as historically legible to some people.
But the discourse around Alexios tells you something: he’s a meathead. He’s from the Batman school of acting. He’s hired muscle. The characters around him feel like they’re working for him rather than with him, because there’s no interior to orient toward — just presence and competence and the forward momentum of the plot as it was written.
Mark Meer’s BroShep is a perfectly functional player avatar. You can spend a hundred hours inside him and feel like you got your money’s worth.
But Jennifer Hale got nominated for Best Performance by a Human Female at the Spike Video Game Awards — twice (2010 and 2012) — for the same role, the same lines, the same story. And when the Legendary Edition trailer came out and FemShep finally got equal screen time, Hale posted a video of herself “ugly crying because it’s so cool” ❤️ Because she knew what it had taken to build something real inside a role nobody was particularly invested in.
Melissanthi Mahut received widespread critical acclaim and major nominations for her performance as Kassandra in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018). Key nominations include Best Performance at The Game Awards 2018 and Best Performer at the 2019 BAFTA Games Awards.
Just like what Hale did with FemShep, Mahut brought a warmth and charm to Kassandra – and playing both these characters endears them to you in a way that is absent from their male counterparts.
That’s not de-feminisation doing the work. That’s a woman doing the work.
The frame produced something nobody planned for either.
Here’s where it gets interesting — because the soul Hale and Mahut brought to the characters wasn’t the only thing the male frame produced that the studios didn’t intend.
When BioWare took BroShep’s heterosexual romance architecture and dropped it onto a female character, the mathematics did something nobody apparently thought through. The asari romance options existed for BroShep as heterosexual content. When FemShep inherited them, they became same-sex content — not because anyone made a deliberate creative choice about her sexuality, but because the frame flipped and the options came with it. FemShep was canonically bisexual by default. Not by design. By accident of inheritance.
BioWare’s response to this is one of the more revealing institutional panics in gaming history. In Mass Effect 2, when pressed on why the game didn’t offer gay relationship options equivalent to Dragon Age 2, the studio’s answer was that Shepard is heterosexual by design — while simultaneously leaving the asari options intact, because removing them would have meant admitting they’d been same-sex content all along. They’d accidentally built a queer protagonist and didn’t know what to do about it. Mass Effect 3 eventually gave both Shepards full bisexual options — the studio finally catching up to what its own frame had already produced.
This isn’t fan queering of a straight character. This is a studio discovering their character’s sexuality after the fact — because they’d built her on a foundation that didn’t have compulsory heterosexuality engineered into it. Female characters designed as woman-first, available-to-men-first, get that presumption baked into their architecture at every level, including who they’re allowed to want.
FemShep escaped it because she was never built that way. The male frame didn’t have a slot for it. And into that absence — just like into the absence of femininity performance instructions in the recording booth — something truer got in.
Kassandra follows the same pattern. Mahut herself said she found it completely natural to romance anyone. The bisexual playthrough is widely considered the most coherent characterisation of who Kassandra actually is — not because the writers planned her that way, but because a character built without compulsory heterosexuality in her foundations turns out to be most fully herself when she’s not constrained by it.
The structural claim.
Female characters are rarely iconic, not because writers can’t imagine them, but because the industry almost universally hands women roles that require them to perform femininity first, be human second.
I’ve written about what that performance does to a character — how it flattens her, how it turns her strength into decoration, how it routes everything through the question of how she reads to the room rather than who she actually is. And the demand for that performance doesn’t just exist in the writing. It exists in the recording booth. It exists in the direction. It exists in the brief an actress gets about who her character is and what she’s there to do.
Hale didn’t get that brief because BioWare didn’t think hard enough about what they were handing her to bother writing one. Mahut didn’t get it because the character she was voicing had nearly been cancelled by an executive who didn’t believe women were worth the effort. Two different flavours of institutional failure. The same result: a gap where the femininity performance instruction would usually have been, and an exceptionally skilled woman who walked through it and put a soul in instead.
The queerness got in the same way the soul did. Through the gap. Because the architecture didn’t have the usual locks on the doors.
What this means.
The male heroes I spent years inhabiting felt more like me than most of the female characters I was offered, because male characters were built on the assumption that a body is for doing things, and female characters kept being built on the assumption that a body is for being looked at.
What FemShep and Kassandra proved is that the assumption is the problem, and that when you remove it — even accidentally, even through indifference, even over the active objections of a senior executive who thought women didn’t sell — something true can get in.
The industry keeps treating these characters as diversity wins. Representation milestones. Proof of concept that female protagonists can sell 🙄
What they actually are is evidence. Evidence that when you stop asking women to perform being women, they make better characters than anyone planned for. Evidence that the soul was always available, and the queerness was always possible. The door just kept being shut before either could enter.
Hale and Mahut didn’t find a loophole. They found what was always going to be there if someone would just get out of the way.
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One snake bite. One moment of clarity she really didn’t ask for. Sasha Barrett has survived two years at the Praetorian Academy — turns out her captain was always going to be the most dangerous thing in the field.
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