the blurred line between satire and reality in no more heroes’ treatment of women
travis, i'm starting to think that you may be for real.
no more heroes has a lot to say. well, maybe that’s not exactly true. it’s a game that says a lot. how much of that is truly saying something is another question.
as with perhaps all of grasshopper manufacture’s work, no more heroes can seem difficult to get. there’s a hell of a lot of ideas to deal with, both explicitly and implicitly, to the point that these deliberately irreverent games get (unfairly, i think) labelled as ‘insane’. it ostensibly sets out to be a satire on protagonist-focused action games of the time, which can be most explicitly seen and felt in its protagonist itself.
you are not supposed to like travis touchdown. he’s a miserable, jerkish and psychopathic otaku whose only interests seem to be the moe magical girl anime pure white lover bizarre jelly, incredibly violent murder and dreaming of sleeping with sylvia christel. repeatedly, characters call him out for being an absolute loser, and not in a way that is intended to imbue sympathy for him from the player — you’re given all the reason in the world to agree.
while he does experience a character arc throughout the game’s runtime, gradually realising that he doesn’t actually enjoy murder as much as he thought he did and there might be more to life than it, he’s fairly static as a character. as a parody of self-insert beloved-by-all male fantasy action game protagonists, this works. travis is a cynical take on grown men obsessed with media intended for children who never grew past it, who think they’re the coolest thing ever while everyone around them cringe in a mix of disgust and pity. he’s the worst possible reflection of the average ‘gamer’ audience.
befitting this, one of his worst traits is his flagrant misogyny. when interacting with the women of the game, his range of communication varies from quite enthusiastically calling them ‘bitch!’ to blatantly checking them out and being called out for it, even with the schoolgirl shinobu — but then, maybe the evidently childlike characters in his favourite anime make that less of a surprise than it should be. travis’ entire reason for making it up the assassin’s ranking, his motive for all of the blood he sheds, is sylvia’s clearly false promise to maybe sleep with him once he reaches rank 1.
being the perverted virgin he is, travis spends much of his interactions with sylvia leering over her. whether in a limo or on a minefield-laden beach, travis can’t help himself from trying to get a peek at her underwear or reaching his blood-soaked hands up her legs. sylvia, appropriately, threatens to end his life if he tries anything. everything points to this aspect of his character being just another valid reason to hate travis.
the complications arise when considering the way sylvia is often portrayed outside of travis. he’s not the only one leering at her — the game is very clearly in on it too. in quite a few scenes, sylvia is depicted barely clothed or even outright naked, with sultry lines appealing to travis and the player’s lowest impulses and the camera placing great importance on accentuating her body.
it’s noticeable that several of these are scenes of phone calls between the two: travis isn’t even in the room with her, there’s absolutely no one to see her in this sexualised manner — except, of course, the player. there’s also an incredibly out of character moment in which she threatens travis’ life and genitalia for daring to think of another woman. at some point, it becomes a question of if the game is criticising travis for leering at sylvia and seeing her as nothing but an irritating sex object, or joining in on it.
the inverse of this also rears its head with the dichotomy between the female assassins travis faces. in the cases of shinobu and holly summers, a samurai schoolgirl and a literal model, travis displays a twisted ‘honour code’ in sparing their lives, citing that he has a rule not to kill women. these moments are somewhat offset by his twisted promise to murder shinobu when she’s older and stronger, something even sylvia calls out as sick, and holly’s suicide-via-grenade-consumption shortly after, but it’s still an interesting quirk for his character.
is it due to him not seeing women as strong enough opponents to be worthy of killing, or some misguided hope that sparing their lives might somehow give him a chance to sleep with them too? his sudden pang of empathy towards holly, embracing her still-standing headless torso, asking for forgiveness and claiming that he “loved her soul” seems to hint at something more genuine, but we’ll never know.
what we do know, however, is that this rule is entirely conditional. in the case of bad girl, travis presumably feels content in killing her due to her level of psychopathy and sadism ranking above even his. presumably, the same applies to jeane, with the recent revelation of her being his long lost half-sister not doing much to stop him murdering the killer of his parents.
what muddies these waters is that prior to this encounter, travis faces speed buster, an overweight elderly woman who somehow hides a railgun inside a shopping cart and muses on the ignorance of men. after making his way through a barrage of lasers and destroying the railgun, travis is met with seemingly genuine praise from her, calling him “pretty good” and hoping he’ll turn out like his master thunder ryu (who she did, unfortunately, just murder). she follows this up with a grandmotherly kiss on the cheek, to which travis responds by immediately, without any gender-based hesitation, decapitating her.
unlike travis’ other interactions with the women of the game, this decision is not treated with any level of questioning or criticism, with the game just taking his sudden mean-spiritedness towards women as par for the course. it’s as if killing her is morally justified because she, unlike the rest of the female cast, isn’t an attractive young woman who travis could consider sleeping with, and is therefore inherently unworthy of being respected.
in truth, my feelings towards no more heroes’ writing of women are conflicted. it is genuinely difficult to see where the satire and criticism ends and the actual oversexualisation and misogyny begins. it’s a shame, because i think that the game actually does a fantastic job satirising other elements of the video game market without accidentally fulfilling what it intends to criticise, and is a largely enjoyable run and introduction to the library of goichi suda and grasshopper manufacture. i just really wish i was only disturbed by the way travis ‘sex pest’ touchdown treats women, and not also by how the game itself does.