Taking a closer look at the roles and characterization of female characters in the games I've put to the Test, I figured I’d start with a game that I have more than a little familiarity; Thief: The Dark Project. I’ve had a long-standing obsession with this whole series and they’re usually my favorite place to start any sort of discussion.
Disclaimer: it’s nearly impossible to manage character analysis without getting deep into spoiler country, so I’m not going to bother to contain them. You’ve been warned. Besides, this game is thirteen years old, if you haven’t played it yet, you probably aren’t going to. Unless my glowing endorsement is enough encouragement, or you are my roommate, in which case I’ve been telling you to play it for years and I have no sympathy for you, sir.
For an entertaining and brief summary of the series, you could do much worse than Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation. The Thief series is pretty much as it sounds; you play Garrett, a self-professed master thief who runs around in a pseudo-medieval metropolis stealing things. Somewhere in there and completely against his better judgment he get roped into saving the world a couple times.
Despite being one of my all-time favorite games, Thief utterly fails the Bechdel 2.1; there is only one female character. While she does play a key role in the narrative, she is sadly underdeveloped. Posing as an independent fence, a woman named Viktoria hires the protagonist to steal an item from a wealthy noble named Constantine. So he does. It turns out that she is acting as an intermediary of said noble, who wanted a demonstration of Garrett’s skills. They hire him to steal another item. So he does. It THEN turns out that they were using him to obtain a powerful magical artifact that will bring about the destruction of the modern world as they know it and Constantine is in fact the pagan Trickster god and Viktoria his dryad companion. She brutally maims Garrett and leaves him for dead, and that’s the last we hear from her this game as the Trickster goes on to try to bring chaos back into the world.
Though necessarily mysterious and enigmatic, Viktoria is not an exceptionally complex nor does she have much overt characterization. We know what she hopes to accomplish, but not much about why. As with a lot of villains’ motivation, it's not exceptionally clear why she wants to help destroy the world. We learn in later games that she draws power from the forces of nature and chaos, but in the first game of the trilogy none of this is covered. We can only presume that she will gain power in some way, and that it will probably be bad.
Impressively, despite that fact that she approaches Garrett to ask for his help, then betrays him in the last act of the game, Viktoria manages to avoid the typical Femme Fatale trope, though apparently TV Tropes disagree with me. Maybe I've played this game way too many times, but I didn't notice any indication that she was appealing to anything outside of Garrett's greed. She doesn't use her feminine wiles to manipulate or befuddle him, she doesn't approach him from a position of vulnerability, when she double-crosses him it's not in a moment of weakness or against her better judgment, and she certainly isn't reformed by the end of the game nor does she get her comeuppance. She doesn't hit any of the hallmarks of a true Femme Fatale, and I'm ok with that. Tropes can make rather weak, if not predictable, villains.
So while her characterization is a bit thin, Viktoria'a role in the plot in an important one, as she shows up bearing the plot, helps to move the story forward and turns out to be a surprisingly trope-free antagonist. Not bad for a character that has a total of maybe twenty lines.
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