What Is Woke?

Examining the Fight Over Representation in Video Games and Beyond

I like to frequent message boards that revolve around people complaining about how games and media are too woke. It started as a way for me to read and laugh about posts that I thought were stupid, but the more I read, the more interested I became in what these people were saying. They kept throwing around the word woke with no inherent meaning. Even when I found a post of someone asking what woke meant, a lot of the responses were either someone calling the poster a troll, or multiple different variations of what people think woke means. They themselves didn't have one unified definition of what woke is.

Woke is a term that was originally taken from AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) which means being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination. Woke can be traced back to the 1930s in AAVE referring to political and social issues affecting African Americans. By the 2010s, when the term really started to emerge, it started to include being alert to prejudice and discrimination of gender and other discriminated identities. The term was popularized in 2014 during the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement and eventually added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. However, in 2020 and beyond, the political right wing started to use woke ironically, turning it into an insult to use against progressives and political leftists as anything woke was insincere and used to get votes from minorities. The term has now gained an increasingly negative connotation to it where conservatives will now avoid anything they deem woke and will often use the term 'go woke go broke'.

So what is media being woke? I'm going to list as many examples as I can remember of what being woke is to these message posters. I am not posting this to twist anyone’s words or to try to make anyone look bad, these are actual reasons I've seen people use for saying something is woke.

• Race-swapping original characters is woke.

• Changing the sexual orientation of original characters is woke.

• Reducing the breast size of women in remakes is woke.

• Adding peach fuzz to women is woke.

• Giving women less revealing clothing is woke.

• Not being able to look up a woman's skirt by giving her tights is woke.

• Having an LGBT person who mentions how they are LGBT is woke.

• A woman with short or colored hair is woke.

• Lesbians are woke.

• Muscular women are woke.

• Women that look like normal everyday women are woke.

• Women in positions of power are woke.

• Trans women and trans men are woke.

• A man being wrong is woke.

• A man who was once strong was made weaker so his usually weak female sidekick can be stronger is woke.

• A woman talking back to a man is woke.

• Empowering a woman who was once a damsel in distress trope is woke.

• Censoring a flirtatious relationship you can have with a child character is woke.

As I said before, I'm not trying to twist any words and I'm not changing how people posted things. The above examples are all real examples from posts or comments I've seen of reasons people gave for media being woke. Let's look at this list and talk about this stuff by starting with a reoccurring theme.

Women.

One of the widest range of complaints I've seen revolves around how media is making women less attractive. One of the more controversial games around being woke that I've seen is Street Fighter 6, the next installment of the Street Fighter series. There were a lot of early complaints that said Capcom is censoring Cammy by giving her a different outfit. Below is Cammy's original outfit.

In this outfit, Cammy is wearing a green, skintight leotard with a strap wrapped around her chest as well as one around her thigh. The leotard covers the chest completely, but fully shows the entirety of her legs and barely covers her crotch. She has extremely long hair braided into two braids with a perfect face, besides one little scar on her left cheek. As you can probably guess, the back of her outfit shows some booty as well. Most people who enjoy games know who Cammy is and knows this is her signature look. Here is the new Cammy in Street Fighter 6.

Her new outfit now comes in three pieces instead of one. She is wearing skintight yet styled pants, as well as a sports bra and a small jacket. This is what people were complaining about. This new Cammy was censored and woke. Let's break down the full list of changes. She is showing just about as much skin as before, but instead of her legs, it's a lot of her body. Her hair has been cut and lost the braids, and the scar on her face has been accentuated to look like an actual scar instead of a beauty mark. Her face is still perfect and pouty and she still has an amazing hourglass figure with wide hips and thick thighs. This is the Cammy that has apparently been censored according to the people calling her woke.

Women in video games and new-age media have been a popular talking point with certain arguments, especially since video gaming started becoming mainstream. And let me tell you, women can't win any of these arguments. As stated above, a big argument against woke is how they want their women to be hyper-sexualized and anything not super feminine or sexual is being woke. Which, that argument on its own has its merits. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting attractive figures in video games. It's everything else that follows which is a problem.

When women enjoy these characters, some will like to cosplay as them. However, when women cosplay as these characters, they will get harassed for being fake gamers, for being sluts, and for being attention whores. Men who complain about things being woke will generally be the same men who hate popular streamers like Amouranth who became popular because of their bodies. Amouranth uses her body as a marketing tool because she is conventionally attractive, but she gets mass amounts of hate and is labeled a titty streamer* or attention whore because of that. Then following that, the same men will complain she's not working a real job or doesn't deserve anything she has because of how she does it. There's apparently nothing wrong when video game characters are extremely attractive, but when real-life women use it to their advantage it's the end of the fucking world.

Let's now look at competitive video games and women. The example we will use is League of Legends. LoL is very notorious for having extremely attractive characters on both sides of the gender fence, but their female characters early on were all thin and busty models with cute faces and sexy outfits. Exactly what anti-woke people wanted.

In an interview with Riot Reav3, a lead gameplay producer for LoL, he stated that around 97% of female-identifying players played primarily female characters. A lot of the most popular female LoL characters can be played in the support role, a role that is generally weaker and is made to make other characters stronger. There is nothing wrong with women playing female characters or women playing those female characters in the support role. The problem is the abuse they get. If the player is really good, they are accused of being boosted by their boyfriend. If they play with high-level players they are accused of sleeping with them to carry them. Shockingly enough, women are still told to “go back to the kitchen” or “go play support” just because they are women.

One of the reasons for wokeness I mentioned at the start of this piece was women in positions of power. The comment I am referring to is talking about how Blizzard went woke with its new expansion Dragonflight. In Dragonflight, the main character and protagonist is a female dragon named Alexstrasza. When she is not appearing as a giant red dragon, she takes the form of a very attractive woman. In the past, she looked like this.

As you can see, it's a generic female character design. Hourglass figure, large chest, very attractive while wearing a bikini and thong armor combination. She was recently re-designed for this new game and now she looks like this.

Here, she is much more covered up but still comes off as extremely attractive. She still shows cleavage and she's not wearing pants, just thigh-high armor socks that still show her thighs. The design is still attractive without making her come off as strict eye candy. Besides the obvious 'oh my god they censored her!' complaints that happened, I saw complaints that Dragonflight was woke because she was the strong main character of this expansion. No other reason, just 'Oh of course the woman has to be in charge' kind of complaints. It's good to see more strong female characters in games. There is nothing wrong with that. People like to see themselves represented in their media.

All of these double standards lead me to believe that some of the people who are anti-woke are just anti-women. It's a lose-lose situation if you are a woman in gaming trying to talk about what it means to be woke. You can have sexy characters in video games, but only for the guys to enjoy. Women can play video games, but only to support guys. There can be female characters in video games, but only if they are not stronger or more important than male characters.

There are woke arguments I have seen that have genuine merit and that I can understand. Race swapping and sexuality swapping for remakes is something that I can understand. It doesn't make me upset to the extent that other people can get, but I understand. They like and enjoy the original and they don't want it to change or don’t think it makes sense. On the other side, you have people making arguments that just because a character is gay or just because a character isn't a stick-thin model with big breasts, the game is super woke. When Tracer in Overwatch was first revealed to be a lesbian, it was revealed in a side comic that you had to go to the Overwatch website to see. People were yelling about how Blizzard was shoving gayness down their throats and that they don't need lesbians or politics in their video games. In a comic that you had to go out of your way to read. It's ridiculous.

The term woke has become so muddled in its 2020 twisting that it can mean anything from being aware of prejudice to a game featuring strong female characters. People can use it to mean something simple like changing characters for remakes, or people can use it to show their horrid and blatant sexism. Most recently, when Bud Light sponsored a transgender influencer named Dylan Mulvaney, people posted videos of themselves throwing away their beer, with Kid Rock posting a video of him shooting up some cases of Bud Light. The Los Angeles Police Department also reported that Anheuser-Busch facilities (the makers of Bud Light) had bomb threats against them. The people calling for a boycott of Bud Light would use the phrase they often do, go woke go broke.

When people use the term woke negatively, it’s hard to take it seriously. Are they trying to express their concerns over a remake of a past piece of media, or are they upset that a woman doesn’t look like a walking wet dream? Are they expressing concerns about discrimination, or are they attempting to hide their sexism and transphobia behind a term that they themselves aren’t sure what it means? The next time you use the word woke in a negative way or to complain about a new piece of media, maybe take a second and think about what you are saying.

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