Super Princess Peach

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Recommended: Women's portrayal in the media

We live in the twenty first century. After three feminist movements at every turn we are assured that we have won this fight, we hear constantly that female depiction in media is articulate, balanced and empowering. S. E. Smith states “We live in a utopia where media has finally reached a state of perfection, where offensive content is non-existent, representation mirrors actual statistical distribution, and all characters are fully realized, complex, multidimensional human beings.”
So why is it, I feel like the damsel in distress trope still exists? And on a colossal scale why do I feel like none of that was true? When it comes to female representation in media we are continuously fighting the same battles over and over. The archaic stereotype …show more content…

A damselled woman, is shown as incapable of escaping the predicament of her own and then must come wait for her saviour to do it for her. In fourteen of the super mario bro games princess peach is captured or damseled by bowser in at least thirteen of them. *Pic* Look familiar? This is simply the same plot device recreated in various marketing contexts. However Peach finally hits the spotlight as a payable character in Super Princess Peach, released in 2006. This remake of Mario is what feminist Anita Sarkeesian, refers to as a ‘dude reversal’ which she describes as a ‘light-hearted joke or niche market novelty’. That’s because this game falls into a whole range of stereotypes when Peach has to pick between four different powers, and you know what those powers are? Her mood swings. That’s right, Peach's powers are her out of control, frantic female emotions. Essentially Nintendo has turned a PMS joke into their core gameplay mechanic. Damselled female characters tend to reinforce pre-existing regressive notions about women as a group being weak or in need of protection because of their gender. While stories with the occasional helpless male character do not perpetuate anything negative about men as a group since there is no longstanding stereotype of men being weak or incapable because of their

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