ABSTRACT
In the 2015 preface to Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover explains that within slasher movies the Final Girl is the character we follow and from whose vantage point we see the action and is ultimately the one who stops the killer. Writing from a point some 20 years after the first publication of her original 1992 thesis, Clover goes on to add that the Final Girl has, through further circulating discourses, become something of a ‘female avenger’ or ‘triumphant feminist hero’. Gladys L. Knight offers a slightly different approach within her discussion of female action heroes, suggesting the Final Girl can be now associated with any female lone survivor. This intertwined development is understandable, given that any female lone survivor in a media text who manifests their position through autonomous action is likely to be engaging with some form of power fantasy narrative, be that against the male killer in the slasher genre, or any other of the countless ways in which female power has been restricted. Significantly, these heroes can be disruptive to patriarchal structure, as noted by Amy Taubin, which causes masculine anxiety around gender norms. However, although this broadening the scope of the Final Girl, there is still often the same reliance on masculine power strategies, which rarely allows for female experiences to be viewed as heroic.
While Clover, in her preface, does not entirely disagree with the reformulated iteration of the Final Girl, and the new directions that the term has taken, she is keen to stress that critics and commentators engage with a process that decentres the successful dénouement of the story for a focus on the journey instead. Framed in this way, Clover suggests that ‘victim-hero’ or ‘Tortured survivor’ might be better terms to use than just ‘hero’ when describing the Final Girl, and that focusing only on the last-minute heroics misses the point.
The purpose of this chapter will be to apply this approach to the videogame medium. Clover refers to an understanding of the Final Girl through plotted action (the ‘surviving’ part of the ordeal), which culminates at the end of a film’s predetermined narrative, yet the functions and types of narrative in videogames differ significantly from that within film. This chapter will explore how these differences can create new ways to explore and comprehend the possibilities afforded by the recontextualised Final Girl.
