Today I was all set to write a post giving my views on the possible inclusion of Nathan Drake’s father in the upcoming Uncharted. I asked a question on Twitter to get a sense of the views of the community, and one follower threw a question right back at me (the cheek! ;)) I embed his tweets here.
@AllUNCHARTED Can I ask you a question? After Bill in TLOU, do you think there’s room for a good gay character in Uncharted?
— Kyle Barrett (@lb003g0676) December 5, 2013
@AllUNCHARTED Because I kind of don’t think there is, unfortunately. It’s too pulpy to be able to handle that type of character.
— Kyle Barrett (@lb003g0676) December 5, 2013
My immediate response was that it was an excellent question, and one that couldn’t really be answered in a tweet. So the issue of Nathan’s dad got bumped down my list of things to be interested about. I will come back to it, though. Worry you not.
So, in response to Kyle; yes. I do think there is a place in the Uncharted narrative for a gay character, and also I do think it would be done well by Naughty Dog. And here is why. As Kyle mentioned; Bill from The Last of Us is gay. He isn’t gay because the narrative needs him to be gay; he is gay because he finds men more attractive than women. You may have seen Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women video series; one of her recent offerings discusses the ‘Ms Man’ trope. This is described as being the lazy character design of adding a pink bow (for example) to a character to show the audience that this is a WOMAN. Naughty Dog could have easily gone down the same path by signposting Bill’s sexuality with horrendous stereotypes that I do not want to refer to in words. But as it is you don’t even twig that he is gay until almost the moment that you part from him.
So we know that Naughty Dog have the capacity to design and write a character who likes people with the same parts as themselves with taste and respect, and to be honest that doesn’t come as a surprise. However, Kyle asks whether I think it would fit. And again I say ‘why not?’ Uncharted is a bit pulpy, and it certainly sits nicely in that adventurey type genre. On the other hand there are no hard and fast rules for any genre, and times change and things move on. I think it is also true that while Uncharted always has one foot firmly in the Indiana Jones all action heroy type story, it also has its other foot firmly planted… anywhere else it wants to put it. This was particularly highlighted for me when I started playing Deadfall Adventures recently. You may not know Deadfall Adventures, but it is a lower budget history mystery game which owes a lot more to Indiana Jones and co than Uncharted does.
The two areas that I believe this is especially evident are the character design and the level design. Uncharted isn’t about the traps and the swinging blades that you get in Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider and Deadfall Adventures, and if the floor crumbles beneath Nathan putting him in peril, it is because he was clumsy. There are of course a few exceptions; in Nepal, for example, but for the most part the areas that Nate navigates tend to be actually slightly more believable in their structure. More importantly; the character design in Uncharted is, in my opinion anyway, less focused on the constraints of the genre, and more progressive and dynamic. Much has been made of the depth that Naughty Dog give their female characters, and the same can be said of Nathan Drake. He is more than an adventurer out to get the gold and the girl. I think the most progressive and genre breaking character design is actually that of Charlie Cutter. In oh so many American made pulpy rompy adventure stories the role of the bad guy goes to the English guy. But Charlie Cutter is, mercifully, one of the good tough guys. With claustrophobia.
So the point is, that while Uncharted certainly is of a genre, it already has a tried and tested track record of subverting the tropes and stereotypes that can be associated with that genre. I honestly don’t see why we can’t add a gay character to that mix.
Anyway, many thanks to Kyle for posing the question; it was a lot of fun to think about.