My girlfriend’s youngest sister came over to our apartment last weekend with her hair in a Katniss braid. She hadn’t been to a convention or a movie screening. That was just how she wanted to go out into the world that day. The Hunger Games has been consuming the majority of her brainpower lately. She’s been binging on the soundtrack, and she got through Catching Fire in seven hours. At a recent family dinner, she put up her hands and walked away from me when I said I preferred Gale to Peeta (I’m sorry, I do!). She gets like this about books and movies. She’s read The Silmarillion multiple (!) times. We have talked repeatedly about how much we’re both looking forward to The Avengers.

But while she was over the other day, she said something offhand that surprised me. She and her friends won’t go to our local comic book and SF/F store. Setting foot in there, apparently, makes you a geek.

If you go to the “Female Armor” page on the WoW Wiki, you’ll find a very silly statement. To quote:

Female armor tends to cover less than does male armor. Though there are many people who see this as mere fanservice, there are real, practical reasons behind it. First, females are statistically less muscular than males, and depend more on agility and cunning than raw strength in combat, thus lightweight armor makes more sense.

Now, the WoW Wiki knows that this argument is silly. It’s part of a series of satirical articles and says “This is a silly article” at the top. That got a smirk out of me when I saw it, but it also reminded me of the times that I’ve come across people actually trying to use this argument in a non-silly way. It comes up as a justification for why female characters shouldn’t get full armor or big weapons, or even as a counter-argument to those of us who would like to see more equal treatment for female player characters (and NPCs, too). To portray anything otherwise, these people say, is unrealistic.

Rather than dismissing this offhand, I’d like to take this opportunity to break down why this rationale doesn’t fly. It’s time to put a few dents in that idea’s armor. Unravel a few threads. Cut a few holes in the — okay, okay, I’ll stop.

Editor’s Note: Writer Mike Carey is best known for his comic book work on titles like Lucifer, Hellblazer, and the Eisner and Hugo Award nominated The Unwritten. His wife Linda Carey, and their daughter Louise Carey, are also authors and all three have collaborated on a new book called The Steel Seraglio from ChiZine Publications. Because the story revolves around a strong female heroine (an army of ex-harem members to be exact), the Carey’s decided to write a guest post for us about that popular trend. Read ahead for their thoughts on how The Hunger Games factors in, what they prefer to see in their heroines, and for a sneak preview of The Steel Seraglio. 

After twelve years since the Lord of Terror was unleashed, it’s finally official: Diablo III will be raising hell on May 15. All I’ve ever really wanted in life is a co-op hack-and-slash dungeon crawler, so I was excited for this game from the get-go. But after spending a little time poking around on Diablo III’s official website, I’m really excited. Like, super excited. I am downright stoked. And it’s for a very simple reason:

All of the female characters look like someone I’d like to play.

As I mentioned back in January, Diablo III will be the first game in the series to offer full gender customization for player characters. This on its own is a welcome addition, but the fact that the female character models are so good has earned Blizzard a stamp of approval in my book. To help explain why, I’m going to put these new ladies into the greater context of how Blizzard has portrayed women throughout their games.

Things aren’t going so well for graphic novel and manga publishing. In March of 2011, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund issued an advisory about transporting comics and graphic novels across international borders. Two months later a comics fan named Tom Neeley was detained at the Canadian border, and his copy of the comic anthology Black Eye confiscated by customs. CBR reported then that Canadian censorship seemed particularly aimed at Japanese comics and gay-themed material.

Last week Comics Alliance reported that criminal charges of child pornography possession had been dropped against U.S. citizen Ryan Matheson, who, in 2010, “entered Ottawa on vacation with a laptop that contained comics images that Matheson described as ‘anime illustrations from art books’ and ‘drawings of fictional anime and manga characters.’”

Last year I wrote about my frustration with the publishing industry, and discussed ways for fandom to make a space for itself in the world of publishing and beyond. As it happens, the Twilight fandom was already way ahead of me: 50 Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by E.L. James, is a NYT #1 bestseller and an e-book phenomenon that began its life as a hugely popular fanfic. With over 250,000 digital copies sold, the trilogy that opens with 50 Shades recently sold print rights for 7 figures in an astronomical bidding war.

But 50 Shades isn’t just “mommy porn,” as many have dismissively labeled it, purportedly due to its popularity with Manhattan wives and mothers. 50 Shades is a phenomenon within a phenomenon within a phenomenon: that is, it’s the mega-hit from a group of successful published pro-fics which have all come out of the immense Twilight fandom.

It’s funny, because I was just writing about Wonder Woman this week for an unrelated project, and talking about how I’m relatively unfamiliar with her, and why. My point was that I’ve never really been overly interested in her as character because she is inextricable from the idea of “women.” To quote Dwayne McDuffie “If you do [one] black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren’t just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can’t be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people.” The solution is to provide a spectrum of characters that represent that block, and Wonder Woman, in her origin both fictional and real, was intended not just to be “a female superhero,” but “the female superhero.” As McDuffie was trying to point out: it’s hard to make a character a person when they have to represent an entire demographic of people. My growing interest in Wonder Woman as a character has paralleled my reading of stories that present her as human (metaphorically).

But when I said that the difficulty of extricating Wonder Woman from her status as “a paragon of the feminine” lead to me to be less interested in her, what I didn’t mean was that she should be separated completely from her origins as “a paragon of the feminine.” Which is kind of what happened in this week’s issue of Wonder Woman. (Spoilers ahead.)

By now, you’ve likely heard that the endings to Mass Effect 3 have made people a little bit…upset. Fan backlashes to endings are hardly a new phenomenon in the geek community, but this goes beyond angry letters and wistful fanart. A significant chunk of the fanbase is petitioning BioWare to change the ending entirely via DLC.

If that sounds ridiculous to you, you’re not alone. Many gaming sites have scoffed at Mass Effect fans, throwing around words like “childish” or “entitled.” However, this fight is far more complicated than a few fans whining over the lack of a sunshine-and-rainbows ending. The way this thing plays out could have major ramifications not only for the gaming industry, but for how we define the concept of creative ownership. If you care about gaming, storytelling, or digital media, this is a story you should know about.

EDITOR UPDATE: Bioware has, uh, actually responded, sort of. Read Becky’s response here.

If you’ve been around any tech or gaming sites this week, you’ve already seen the big brouhaha surrounding Cross Assault, a fighting game reality show sponsored by Capcom. To sum up: The leader of the Tekken team, Aris Bakhtanians, made a number of rather jaw-dropping remarks concerning sexual harassment in the fighting game community, which he seems to view as a God-given right. Player Miranda Pakozdi later threw a match after Bakhtanians — her own teammate, mind you — continued to harass her (queries about her bra size were the just the tip of the iceberg).

The whole to-do has already been covered extensively elsewhere, and a significant portion of the fighting game community has loudly decried Bakhtanians’ actions, stating that his boorish behavior is not reflective of gaming culture as a whole. If you’re a gamer, you already know that. There are plenty of awesome gamer guys out there who would never even consider engaging in this kind of nonsense. The Cross Assault incident is yet another case of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch.

“We want to motivate them to learn about the world,” game show host Greg Lee once told the Associated Press, sometime in the past century (1992) Lee had just taken the helm at a children’s education show entitled Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, whose plot demanded the children observe the command of their boss at Interpol, The Chief (Lynne Thigpen), to capture the elusive monument thief. The premise of the show, based on a video game, at once was to maintain the audience of older children as they graduated from Sesame Street and morning shows meant for younger folk. No one in my generation doubts that it did just that. But what the creators of the Carmen Sandiego video game and program franchise could have never anticipated was the cultural impact Sandiego had on one particular demographic following the canon— Latin American girls.