Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccamwrites.bsky.social/post/3m6a62btty226
Here’s the dataset and their website if you are interested, there’s more games beyond Final Fantasy that they’ve looked at.
Main findings
- 35% of words were spoken by female characters.
- 29% of characters were female, which suggests the imbalance is driven by a lack of female characters.
- 94% of games had more male dialogue than female dialogue.
I agree the core issue is less female characters of course, but I also know that JRPGs tend to be plagued by long-winded male monologues, especially from villains.
EDIT: Was just thinking, I’d be curious to know how Chrono Trigger holds up regarding this. I remember the game having pretty great writing for the female characters and even had an openly
non-binarygender non-conforming character which was neat for a 90’s SNES game.Chrono Trigger is in their dataset, I was curious as well and went to check:
I thought it was interesting as well that 51 of the 226 characters were classified as neutral. Probably because of all the monsters and Nu? But I’m not sure.
Probably a combination of robots and monsters, in addition to Flea
Thanks for pulling this data btw! I guess 38% isn’t bad relative to other JRPGs but I would’ve thought it might be a bit higher given how many prominent female characters there are in that.
This is the next question I’ve got, maybe the bulk of the difference is in minor NPCs who have 1-3 lines of dialogue each.
My brain is not doing critical thinking right now. Does that mean women are overrepresented in dialogue because they speak more than the % of characters that are women? That can’t be right because you’d never expect all speaking roles to be equal. What can you interpret from that data point?
OK, so again I got curious and went to take another look, and there’s also a stats_by_character.csv file in their repo. So I just went and found the numbers for each of the party members and added it up to see how that changes the stats.
Women party members making up the majority of dialogue makes sense to me since Marle and Lucca are both introduced so early and make up a large share of the total. Again makes me curious what it would look like if we expanded the pool a bit to just exclude unnamed characters. I get the feeling it would shift back towards men making up the majority of dialogue, but that’s just vibes. Side note, I find it really strange that Crono has almost 10% of the lines, but the links to the scripts they used don’t appear to be working for me so I can’t check what they count as a Crono line. My guess is dialogue choices are attributed to Crono? But even then that seems surprisingly high. In any case, I figured I should include it to be consistent with their data. This is pretty interesting to me though so I might try setting their project up locally later so I can mess with the data some more.
There are still quite a few important non-party characters who are female I think. Queen Leene, Schala, Queen Zeal, Queen Azala, off the top of my head. The gurus and characters like The Chancellor, Ozzie have a lot of dialog too though from what I remember.
My guess? Among the minor characters who only get a handful of lines, most are men (pulling up the % male character average and pulling down the % words spoken by men average).
I don’t think I can answer with any confidence, but my guess is that most of the minor NPCs with only a little dialogue are men. So even though men make up an overwhelming share of all characters, the women that are in the game play a more prominent role on average. I’d be really curious to see this recalculated with just, say, named characters to see how much the data shifts and if my guess is on point at all.
Who was gender non-conforming? Lucca, or Robo?
Flea