Friday, 3 July 2015

Reproduction and (re)Birth: The Uncertain Future of the Bayonetta Series





'Yes, no more boob window! What an amazing outfit, the stars and the shoulder pads and the cape and the...diamond butt cleavage? *sigh*' 


Should I really have spent £200 on a Wii U specifically to subject myself to yet more internal conflict with Bayonetta? In attempting to achieve any kind of stability or justification for my financially and emotionally expensive commitment to playing Bayonetta 2, I first discovered that it's humanly possible to lament it's continually exploitative gameplay and cinematography that have passed from the first game with not one sign of reconsideration. Still, this possibility doesn’t provide the certainty I was hoping for, since critical reactions to the series as a whole is as conflicted as I am. If you ask Polygon reviewer Arthur Gies, I'm struggling to make the 'mental compromise' to enjoy the game despite the egregious sexualisation of it's female lead for an assumed audience of horny mid-adolescent men. If you ask Ria Jenkins in The Guardian, my fragile masculinity is being threatened by an image of a self-loving, hyper-feminine ideal that is ‘presented as about and for women'. As much as I want the series to change to definitively be one of these, I still want it to stay exactly how it is and not to fit into either.

Bayonetta herself comes up against just such a desperate and unresolvable duality and becomes a more balanced individual over the course of the story. Seeing her take this strain with characteristic swagger, I realise the closest I can get to a clear, certain reaction to this series of games is how close I feel to her as a character. However, if I and other male players are expected to find some level of maturity alongside Bayonetta, the developers need to fully commit to these joyously flawed creations in all their convoluted, baffling glory to maintain their dissonant chaos and relevance to their changing audience.


*spoilers to follow*


Bayonetta's Christmas shopping is interrupted when air show jet fighters are set upon by flying angel horses with dual sabres and gigantic, golden, razor taloned sky serpents. Even paying them in kind for cutting her out of her dress with her quadruple, jewel spangled pistols (one in each hand and one on each high heel), she is then confronted with a baby faced stone colossi with a solitary spiked tentacle on it's left side. Thankfully, the beast falls before her glamorous guns before being sent careering into a high rise tower block and being eaten alive by a dragon demon summoned by her magical hair. Then things get weird.

There's barely enough time for Bayonetta's hair outfit to re-cover her (yes, that's still a thing) as the ‘Gomorrah’ breaks free of it's trans-dimensional portal and claws at it's conjurer. Out of nowhere, Jeanne, Bayonetta's sister-in-witchiness, takes the hit instead. The blow separates her body from her soul, leaving her essence to be dragged away by the opportunistic and hands-y demons of Inferno. As Bayonetta quests to save Jeanne's spirit before it is completely absorbed into the mires of hell, she is joined by Loki, a young androgynous amnesiac wielding a magical deck of cards and one of the least convincing performances by a voice actor I've witnessed in recent memory. Promising each other co-operation on their journey to the revered arctic mountain of Fimbulventr that grants access to either Paradiso or Inferno to whoever scales it's heights, the snarky distance between them slowly levels into a respectful unity as they set about saving Jeanne and, eventually, THE WORLD ITSELF!!!!1!

The supposedly unprecedented change in the balance of power between the angel controlled Paradiso, the human world of chaos and Inferno that caused Bayonetta’s summon  to go out of control has surprisingly little impact on the early gameplay, which is almost identical to that of the original Bayonetta. Even four years of production and the massive unlikelihood of a sequel even being funded hasn't dulled the inspiration of the game's heroine from those  pens you turn upside down to make the cartoon woman’s clothes fall off. Even with the addition of the Umbran Climax special moves that can bring screen filling, sin coloured griffons and demonic toad gods into your battles with the heavenly hordes and hellish hosts, completed combos always end on a close up of a scantily clad Bayonetta. Frustrated with this and the off-putting proximity of the in-game camera to Bayonetta’s ass outside fight sequences, Gies notes that 'the on-screen chaos you can wreak through skilled play is infinitely more satisfying' than these 'prurient rewards'. He remains at a loss about why this feature (that I have expediently dubbed 'strip summons') have found their way into this sequel. Gies begrudgingly recommends the game after committing to a 'mental compromise' on the basis of this distracting appeal to the male gaze throughout Bayonetta 2.

More of this shit?

However, talk of this 'mental compromise' is also an analytical compromise on Gies' part which devalues or ignores the humanising aspects of Bayonetta that have been achieved, as I wrote not too long ago, by her appeal to a female viewer being not only a defining aspect of the first game but also an inherent part of her character. While Gies sees no reason to think about strip summons beyond their appeal to an assumed male-only audience, Jenkins’ perspective would diagnose his compromise as Bayonetta's 'overt sexuality, her acceptance and love of her own body' making Gies and many of the men playing ‘uncomfortable’. With the agency afforded to Bayonetta in the series previous instalment, such overt expressions of sexuality can be seen as serving her gratification. With this in mind, just as the sexualised gameplay is carried across from Bayonetta and into Bayonetta 2 so is her body positivity in the story cutscenes. At one point early in the story, she poses  to admire the reflection of her butt, that she is presented as enjoying as much as the assumed male audience is supposed to, in a shop window. Her self-admiration is treated less like a subversion than in the original game but remains completely in character.

Considering Jenkins perspective, the positive representation of sexual agency in Bayonetta 2 makes the position of Scott Nichols at The Daily Dot that Bayonetta's attitude is diluted for the younger demographic of Wii U users in a way that leaves her overshadowed by Loki's story utterly baseless. In their first meeting, Bayonetta sneaks up behind Loki after he dispatches a small group of angels so that once he jumps aside, as Jenkins identified was the case in Bayonetta, the camera is left to linger on her crotch and leave her defiantly 'thrusting her vagina into the face of the player'. From there, Bayonetta constantly holds her own against Loki's chides by refusing to call him by name and justifiably mocking him for being a bratty, annoying kid. As Loki fails to defend himself from angel attacks and a masked, homicidal ‘Lumen Sage’, Bayonetta then negotiates their co-operation deal and commits to protecting him as she did Cereza, her surrogate daughter and past self from the first game. Later, as her strength and support in pursuing his lost memories gain his respect, Loki eventually puts his own quest on hold to help save Jeanne from Inferno. Pairing her sexual self-assuredness and heroics, Bayonetta is dominant once more. Here, the mental compromise and perceived passivity of Bayonetta 2's heroine is contradicted by humanising attitudes that are carried over from the story of the original game.

Your parachute pants impress no-one!

While Jenkins' perspective renders Bayonetta's characterisation in a more nuanced way than merely serving the gratification of the straight male player, she gives near total agency to a fictional character as to her own depiction, ascribing agency only fleetingly to the developers. Not only does this potentially undermine the defiance she assigns to the many crotch, ass and boob shots that litter the story sections of Bayonetta 2, this chaotic meeting of real world and fictional agency reveals a frustrating division of purpose, especially in how contradictorily certain narrative events are framed. Accompanied by the removal of agency from Jeanne and other female characters, these choices make Bayonetta’s ambiguously positive sexualisation an agonisingly visible limit on Platinum Games’ claim to subversion that Jenkins credits them.

As Bayonetta frees Jeanne from the glass womb of hell queen Alaruna's spider boss-form, she loses more and more of her aloof attitude. Progressively unable to treat the rescue as repayment for Jeanne's rescue of her in the first game, Bayonetta begs that she isn't too late to revive her sister. Realising the strength of their relationship only when she thinks she has lost it and showing her vulnerability rewards her as Jeanne reawakens. Expressing this sensitive side in opposition to her domineering throughout both games gives Bayonetta enough dimension to dispel some claim that her sexualised power that leads many to dismiss her as a sexualised object for male consumption is definitive.  

In a dauntingly contradictory twist, Alaruna is punished for attempting to rid Bayonetta of Jeanne and the opportunity to be more vulnerable by being reborn as a whip, a literal sexualised object, by Bayonetta's demon arms dealer Rodin. With this almost painful swerve from rewarding Bayonetta’s vulnerability with humanising value and punishing Alaruna’s vulnerability with sexual objectification, we get an insight into the unique dissonance that is the source of my obsession with the Bayonetta series. This confusion as to how aware PlatinumGames are to the criticisms of objectification levied against them  take on a new tension as Jeanne’s role as the damsel in distress, her rescue from a hostile womb and Alaruna’s punishment brings out Bayonetta 2’s central themes of disempowerment and rebirth.
Punished for sharing Bayonetta's stage?

When the thematic concerns and sexualising gaze of Bayonetta 2 meet in the game’s finale, how and if Bayonetta herself will be reborn turns the wheel of mutually detracting tension that we’ve come to expect. As clunky and convolutedly as in the last quarter of Bayonetta, it is revealed that Loki is one half of the god Aesir, the god of chaos who created the magical Eyes of The World that allowed humans free will. His evil doppleganger Loptr, jealous of the Sovereign Power to be reborn into the future that Loki stole when he divided their identity, set a plan in motion to reclaim this power as well as the Eyes. Murdering Bayonetta’s mother in the Witch Hunts and sending her father, the Lumen Sage and keeper of the Right Eye of The World Balder after Loki and Left Eye of the World Bayonetta, he succeeds in getting all the power he needs in one place as they arrive at his palace on Fimbulventr. Draining Bayonetta of her power as Left Eye and casting her aside, his monologue continues as Bayonetta looks shocked while lying on her side at an angle to give another completley jarring ass shot. In another sadistic display of dissonance, the audience is expected to take as much pleasure in Bayonetta’s disempowerment as we did her  sexualised dominance early on. If Loptr is to be believed, this anachronism represents the ‘chaos’ that humans (ie. the audience) desire and so must be regimented under the consistent regime of divine subjugation. A good part of me, frustrated with the suggestion I need to see yet more of Bayonetta’s butt to stay engaged with the story, was inclined to let him win.

Save us, Doctor Manhattan!

As disempowerment in the context of Bayonetta 2 is accompanied by some kind of rebirth, though, Bayonetta and Balder settle on the idea they have been made more human by the loss of their special status as Eyes of The World and their true power is that of being able to choose free of Aesir’s direction. Since it’s still a video game, the two exercise their power of choice by punching, kicking, slashing and stabbing the shit out of the second God allegory the Bayonetta series has offered us. Loki then disempowers Aesir by using his control over ‘nothingness’, the core of chaos, to delete the Eyes of the World from existence. Aesir is then left powerless and naked enough to be sent flying off the mountain and eaten alive by a Gomorrah summoned by Jeanne (fully clothed) on a nearby fighter jet. Gratifyingly, Jeanne’s inclusion and lack of strip-summon points towards an inclusion of more introverted sexual expression. This final blow leaves the ending to Bayonetta 2 free of the need for equivocation or compromise and utterly satisfying as a result. 

Further positive potential for a future Bayonetta game flourishes as the room made for Jeanne is again expanded to include Bayonetta’s vulnerability free from sexualisation or contradiction  As Aesir’s spirit attempts to escape his ruined body, be reborn into a new time period and keep on his megalomaniacal rampage, Balder dives in front of the escaping ghoul and becomes possessed by it, weakening Aesir in the process. Although Nichols believes that this self sacrifice and Bayonetta’s agreement to refer to Balder for the first time as ‘Daddy’ as he is cast back in time to the events of the original Bayonetta infantilises her, it is in fact the beginning of her maturation. Having rejected Balder as the cartoonish patriarchal villain he was in the first game, she has over the course of Bayonetta 2 learned more about him, realised she cares for him and then loses him as she feared she would Jeanne. This development closely mirrors the move past a kind of adolescent angst and into the sobering growth that grief brings. 

As Balder is reborn as a throwaway villain, Bayonetta is reborn as a vulnerable but more mature heroine. After Loki’s spirit returns to the aether to be reborn as someone new and Bayonetta returns to the New Years sales, one of Loki’s magic cards drops from a baby’s pram. She stops, contemplates and smiles just as another horde of angels sets upon her and Jeanne as the credits roll. Here, she recognises that her need to protect children and her vulnerability outside her standing as a sexualised power fantasy for the audience (and perhaps herself) will invariably resurface and prepares to face it in the same way she does the physical threat of the angels.

*Casablanca reference*

As much as I’ve now come to appreciate the fragmented, convoluted dissonance that Platinum Games seems to value in the series, I’d happily have taken any damage to the story’s pace that having Jeanne’s adventures in Inferno could have offered here. What was Alaruna’s plan in digesting Jeanne? Why did she turn up in Alaruna’s lair instead of some other hellscape? PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.

Not only would a future inclusion such as this show an allowance for Bayonetta’s welcoming Jeanne into her newly secure vulnerability by sharing the spotlight and practicing what Platinum preaches about the value of choice, it would give an even greater contrast since Jeanne’s sexuality is expressed less overtly. This would help the series to gain appeal while and remain relevant to a developing audience along with showcasing Bayonetta’s transition from ‘strong female character’ archetype into a more mature, developed heroine and by instructing that dividing her sexualisation as ‘for men’ and her humanisation as ‘for women’ weakens her as much as Loki did Aesir. 

As with all my reactions to this series, though, my faith is divided. Considering the inconsistency in Bayonetta 2’s presentation of vulnerability and Jeanne’s sidelining being perhaps motivated by her introversion in comparison to her ‘sister’, the possibility of returning to drooling over Bayonetta’s distancing, limiting sexualisation remains. This choice would diminish Platinum Games’ claim to depicting chaos if the audience can always expect the same. 

My demand in short is thus: give me a baffling, insulting, exploitative mess of a game with more resonant, gratifying and creative developments in it’s characters and world that I’ll continually fail to properly express my feelings about.




More of this shit!




References and research: http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/13/6957677/bayonetta-2-review-wii-u - Arthur Gies 'Bayonetta 2 review: Heaven and Hell'


http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/05/lara-croft-bayonetta-female-games Ria Jenkins 'From Tomb Raider to Bayonetta: what is a strong female character?'


http://www.dailydot.com/geek/bayonetta-2-review/ Scott Nichols 'Gameplay shines in Bayonetta 2 but it's heroine falls flat'


Some blogs I looked at concerning a woman character saving a damsel or 'badass in distress':


http://maybegenius.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/damsels-in-distress-legend-of-korra.html Damsels in Distress: Legend of Korra and Tomb Raider by published author S.E Sinkhorn


https://girlslikegiants.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/a-survivor-is-re-born-or-playing-tomb-raider-after-anita-sarkeesian/ A Survivor is (Re)Born or Playing Tomb Raider after Anita Sarkeesian by Brian Psiropolous


http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points/10266-Lara-s-Damsel-in-Distress 'Lara's Damsel in Distress' by Shamus Young at The Escapist








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