An artist has created some incredible art to imagine how some of gaming's biggest male protagonists would look if they were female instead. The work itself is a product of artist Hossein Kalantari and journalist Brittney Lin.
As for where the idea for the project came from, it had to do with the disparity between male and female protagonists in the games industry. A recent study found that last year 23% of video game main characters were male with 18% were female. While some series like Final Fantasy have featured female and male protagonists alike, and progress has been made across the industry, there is clearly still progress to be made.
Lin and Kalantari's work was posted to the website DiamondLobby and shows off their idea for female versions for a variety of different protagonists. The article includes female versions of Call of Duty's Captain Price, Grand Theft Auto 5's Michael De Santa, Halo's Master Chief, and Assassin's Creed's Ezio, as well as a few more. Lin says in the article that the art is meant to reimagine how the female protagonists would look in the games, so the new characters attempt to maintain the aesthetics and visual themes of the games they are theoretically from. Interestingly, some of the games featured in the article have never had a female protagonist, like the Grand Theft Auto series.
Of course, other games featured, like Gears of War, have had female protagonists while others, like Halo, Assassin's Creed, and Cyberpunk 2077, allow players to choose which gender they want to play as in some instances. Regardless, the art throughout the article is a fun thought experiment. There are a lot of interesting potential ways that changing the gender of the protagonists could impact their games' stories and characters, such as if the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana would be altered at all in Halo if Master Chief was a woman.
It is great that video games have started including more female protagonists across the games industry so that more people can find characters and stories within the art form that they can connect to emotionally. Hopefully, progress will continue to be made as developers continue to make new and more diverse protagonists for their games. Many series like Life is Strange have provided good examples of how games can incorporate more diverse protagonists to explore new stories, and it will be interesting to see how the industry grows to start exploring those stories more often.
Source: DiamondLobby