Get to know: Titania
We’re going to start a new weekly feature here at Feminist Gamers, highlighting female game characters, both good and bad. Look for the articles to appear every Thursday!
The flagship entry into the Get to Know series may seem a bit obscure. She’s not the protagonist in the game she appears in, there’s not a lot of plot or character development around her, and she’s not a very well-known character overall. Still, it’s hard not to suffer a little love at first sight with Titania from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, as such it wasn’t a very difficult decision for me to put her into the mix. After all, she’s earned a place in the banner! But, since she appears to be the one most people couldn’t place, I decided to dedicate this entry to her.
A great character from a franchise with a long line of great characters
Fire Emblem has always had good female characters. The second game available in the US, The Sacred Stones (no jokes, pls) actually had a princess take up arms and charge into a war zone to save her brother. But that is nothing compared to the tableau of characters offered by the GameCube title Path of Radiance. And leading the pack as the first lieutenant and all-around asskicker is Titania.
You get an idea of how powerful she (and Ilyana) are.
It’s possible to have a beautiful, sexy character who isn’t objectified
Let’s start by looking at her appearance. You can see from the video that she isn’t dressed like your average female fantasy knight. To start off with, her armor actually covers her body, and doesn’t have a sexualized two-cup breastplate to accentuate her cleavage. Her heels are sensible — not eight-inch stilleto nightmares but actual riding-boot heels. Underneath her armor she wears a long riding coat which is both stylish and sexy, but not objectifying. Her long red hair is pulled back in a braid, rather than flying around totally out of control unlike certain other redheads. And while she does have the usual Barbie-long legs, it hardly matters because none of her fighting moves center around her showing them off–she spends every melee round seated on a horse.
Her weapon is another move away from the norm. Freud could have written volumes about the penchant to put swords in the hands of beautiful women in videogames. And while I don’t traffic too much in those theories (not seriously, anyway), I don’t entirely dismiss the phallic undertones of hot chicks + swords, either. There’s no room for that with this lieutenant, though — she uses an axe.
While she is extremely beautiful and sexy, that’s not the purpose of her character, which is such a fine distinction and it’s not surprising that a lot of developers and designers miss the boat.
A complex personality packed into a few short dialogs
Being a turn-based strategy game with a heavy emphasis on tactics, Path of Radiance doesn’t exactly have hours of plot and dialog and character development. However, it isn’t devoid of these features either–as characters spend time together in battle, they gain the ability to have “support” conversations with one another, wherein you learn a little more about the motivations and back stories of characters that you work to develop.
Between that and short cut sequences, we learn (small spoilers ahead) that Titania was a knight in the Crimean army, but was sent to neighboring Gallia on an officer-exchange program, where she met the protagonist’s father, and served as his loyal lieutenant as a mercenary ever since. While it’s pretty obvious after he dies that she had romantic feelings for him, there is never any indication that these feelings were returned. Usually, when presented with a woman dealing with unrequited love (particularly when her object of affection is married), simplistic storytelling will have her either a) become a scheming vixen
intent on stealing away her desire, or b) becoming sort of sad-sack, wreck of a human being who can barely cope with life because of her grief. Titiania fits neither of those descriptions. Accepting that Griel could never be available to her, she remains competant and practical, but she finds moments to allow herself to grieve and remember him after he is gone. Incredibly, this isn’t the only aspect of her that the game reveals to us. While training the young warrior Boyd, he develops a bit of a crush on her (leading to an awkward “do you know how old I am” moment), she reminisces about meeting the party healer and befriends Ike’s younger sister.
Ultimately, the qualities that Titania exhibits are so far removed from the typical videogame narrative on how women handle love that even given the brief snippits of character development offered in such a tactical game, it really stands out.
Drawbacks
The only problems with Titania is that she is so powerful she can be a bit of an experience-hog on the field. When the opposing army swarm at her, she will cut down each and every one of them with a few simple chop-chops, denying the kill experience for less powerful members in Ike’s army. However, there’s something kind of nice about being able to hold her in reserve until you’re on your third attempt trying to clear a scenario (in the Fire Emblem series, there are no resurrections. When someone dies, they’re gone), and you think “I’ll bring in Titania” and sure enough, you clear the level without any fatalities on your side. She will completely max out her levels by the end of the game given the sheer number of enemy troops who march to their death trying to take her on. Even if you only have her in a handful of maps, there are never any worries with her that you’re “leaving her behind” and she won’t be strong enough for the final battles.
Characters like Ilyana, Mia, Lethe, and Marcia add a number of robust personalities to Fire Emblem, and the men are just as dynamic. But it is my opinion that Titania sits easily as the most impressive female character I have yet encountered in the series.
September 6th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Wow - I can see why you put her in your header! She sounds like a really great character.
September 6th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
One more thing I like these pic of Titania: she doesn’t have on a skirt.
Mighty Ponygirl, great first choice of what is to be many more female characters to come.
September 7th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Oooh… definately leaning towards getting a Wii now as my next gaming console. (although I think I promised my older brother that I’d by a PS3 if he’d buy an Xbox360 - our little plan to have all the systems, bwahahahaha!!!)
September 7th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Rhiannon, I think you got the worst of that deal - you’re shelling out a couple hundred more than your brother.
September 7th, 2007 at 10:40 am
I’m agreeing with Stogoe here… make him pay for the more expensive system! Or, allow him to get the 360 and get the Wii…!
September 7th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Whenever someone attacks Titania, my wife’s battle cry is “S! M! R! T!” because the game is showing a great amount of tactical sense, throwing its valuable troops into that meat grinder there.
I did let her get away from me in the experience hogging early on in the game. Now I’ve got to the point where I use the same dozen or so characters over and over, because the others lag 20 levels behind them and I’d have to babysit them like crazy to get them up to par.
I was also irritated at the plot-based class change for Ike. He hit 20th level in Ranger long before he became a Lord in a cut scene; and since I couldn’t omit him from the battle lines, I took away his weapon and let him be the meatshield for Rolf or Ilyana or some other ranged fighter. There weren’t many things that could hurt him at that point.
I see you’ve added Jill Valentine to your banner since I was last here. Good!
September 7th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
yeah — but early on in the game it was so easy to lose characters — particularly after Shinon and Gatrie take off and before you meet Astrid, you only have Rolf for the archery. Ilyana and Soren are really powerful, but very frail, so it’s important to have the big heavies like Titania and Boyd and Ike to shield the kids.
I actually took it easy with Ike, and only barely made 20th level ranger before the cutscene.
September 7th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I love this feature! I’ve enjoyed video games for over 25 years now, but in a lot of ways my experience and knowledge are really limited. So I look forward to learning about some of the classic characters (especially from Ponygirl’s cultural perspective).
September 10th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Is Titania the game’s Jeigan character? I’ve played the GBA Fire Emblem games, but not Path of Radiance.
Jeigan was in the very first Fire Emblem game. He started out extremely powerful compared to everyone else because he was already promoted to the second tier of characters. However, his stat growth was awful and he got little EXP from winning fights. No matter what you did, he wouldn’t get much stronger than he was at the start of the game. Inexperienced players would often use him to kill everyone instead of developing the other characters, which would lead to disaster when the enemies finally got strong enough to take him down and the other characters were horribly underleveled and therefore useless.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:20 am
The original Fire Emblem for the GBA is almost impossible to find. I’d really like to get it sometime but there are so many titles that simply weren’t ported over that I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset about it.
Titania is a strong character all the way through — I’ve never felt like she was in danger later in the game. But she will hog experience if you aren’t careful with her. I used her pretty heavily at first while I was leveling up characters like Ike and Boyd and Rolf, but she’s definitely someone you want to use in moderation after you get your other characters on their own two feet.
September 10th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Jeigan was in the very first Fire Emblem game. It was Japan-only and I think it was on the Famicom. The first Fire Emblem released in the US was called Fire Emblem 7 in Japan.
I’m a perfectionist in my game playing, and when I played Fire Emblem, I made it a point to always rotate the characters I was using so they’d all be the same level. As a result, everybody was equally weak…
September 10th, 2007 at 10:06 am
heh. I’m happy if they all survive. I let my first character die a few days ago late-game, but she was a recent addition so I’m not particularly attached to her.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:17 am
I never let anyone stay dead, ever.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:43 am
I’m sooooo close to the end of the game — and I kept losing my long-term people. Normally, I would play for perfection, but I want to finish Path of Radiance before the next one comes out.