Why Women Don’t Get Sympathetic Narratives About Stasis
Stasis gets confused for boredom, but women aren’t allowed to express discontent in their lives without getting backlash for it.
As I gear up to take my game in development out of hiatus after prioritizing other projects and clients, one of the cornerstones of its narrative is that the main character is depressed because she’s in stasis. It’s up to the player to determine how she’s going to combat this stasis and if she’ll be a passenger or in the driver’s seat for the crazy journey involving mega-conglomerates, a scientific development with amazing and frightening possibilities, a city in identity crisis, and just how much it sucks being a woman in tech.
But as I went through the changes I made to the original premise (initially, it centered the childfree experience then the whole “we thought the tech dystopia would have flying cars, not this crap, and WOAH life at 35 isn’t what you expected” thing grew legs) and how to structure the story, it got me thinking about the stasis part more thoroughly.
There’s tons of sympathetic stories about men in dead-end jobs who risk it all and become millionaires with the help of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl muse. We see romcoms where a woman’s in an unsatisfying relationship, but…
