To continue off of my last blog post I wanted to talk about some of the specifics of Pokemon Black, while relating it directly to some of the themes and ideas I’m exploring in my paper. Pokemon Black has a whole host of female characters, but I wanted to take a second to talk about Hilda and Hilbert specifically. Now, firstly, I do plan on analyzing most of the player characters before Hilda first in my paper, and have done so with Red and Gold to begin with, but seeing as I’ve had the most experience with Hilda and Hilbert I wanted to focus on them for a moment, as it directly mirrors many of the things I’ve noticed of player characters in general. 

Hilda (left) and Hilbert (right) are the player characters of Pokemon Black and White specifically, and both are pretty different from a design perspective. Seeing as though both characters have no actual character to them, or dialogue at all for the most part, they are both vessels for the player to reflect themselves onto. However, the difference in design here is interesting. Hilbert here has plain sneakers with baggy pants, a blue sweatshirt, a blue watch, a red hat and a blue satchel. His hair is cut pretty short, as well, whereas Hilda’s is long and stylized. We see here some of the major differences in how Game Freak portrays women and men, and how at the most basic of levels these “vessels” are already preordained with some designs that seem to link directly to the stereotyped “fashions” of male and females. Despite Hilbert’s covered appearance, and most blue and red color scheme we see Hilda with short shorts, bare legs, boots with heels, pink laces, a pink hat, a pink purse and a pink watch. Thank you Game Freak, I don’t know how I would know this character is a girl if she didn’t radiate pink energy and show off her arms and legs as no boy could ever do. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Hilda. In fact, she’s my favorite player character and protagonist, and her style is amazing in various ways, but when set against the style of Hilbert, something is off. Both of these characters have little detail to them outside of their respective styles, so male and female choices should impact little in the span of your journey, and yet you need to decide between wearing baggy multilayered clothing or very little clothing at all. I feel that Game Freak designing Hilda specifically with less covering her body is meant to show us what most girls would relate to, which reinforces the stereotypes that women’s fashion sets and the pre-existing stereotype that female characters in games are meant to be some sort of “eye candy” for the male gamers. 

This trend continues with the other protagonists, and can be seen pretty early on in the series, excluding only one girl protagonist, the first girl protagonist. In the next blog post I’ll talk about Kris and how Game Freak apparently needed four years and the development of four games to create a female playable character.