Feminist adventures?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Some of the things we are talking about (rape, body image issues, emotional abuse) are things some of your players may have experienced personally*. If you put a psychic rapist in the game, you may hit a landmine when you freak out the person in your group you didn't know was a rape survivor...

Which is why I put in that caveat about knowing your players...even with Nazis.

I had the pleasure of gaming with 2 different Jewish gamers in supers games that featured Nazi or neo-Nazi villains. Both had relatives who were survivors. One guy took to it like a duck to water, getting jazzed about classic golden age, 4-color Nazi-busting. The other had to take a hiatus from the group because he kept getting agitated- it dredged up memories of his grandmother's stories. A single neo-Nazi villain was OK, but a Boys from Brazil-esque storyline was too much. (The GM cut that story arc shorter than he had intended once he realized what was going on.)

I've run into stuff like this in a lot of campaigns- homosexual PCs or NPCs, racism, religious fanatic types in modern games, etc.- game long enough and you'll see someone's feelings get hurt.

Heck, I know GMs who get antsy if you play a PC of a different gender than your own. REALLY antsy.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I like the women's shelter idea a lot. It's worth remembering that, in real life, they already do a great deal to conceal who's living in them, so that scumbags don't track down the women inside.

Now pretend that said scumbag is actually a supervillain, or gets superpowers and becomes an abuser who can throw a car when he loses his cool.

 

[Wik]

Ask your other playes, too. Because sometimes, what one player wants is a deal breaker for another. Your feminist player might want to have a bunch of feminist-themed adventures, and would be fine busting up rapists and date-rape drug dealers... but I can tell you that, even as a guy, I would not play in that game. I would politely leave the table.

Ditto for abortion clinics, or sharia law, or anything else like that. It might be perfectly fine for one player to be on the heroes' side of the argument, while another player might feel far too uncomfortable "playing" around a theme that is very important to his or her personal life.

Your feminist player might have a ball beating up a serial rapist villain - another player (male or female) might find that this just brings up incredibly painful memories that they haven't shared with the rest of the group.

Short answer? Make sure you talk to the entire group about subplots that ostensibly only focus on one PC.

 

[GSHamster]

Depending on the nature of the supers campaign, you can also do an extra-planetary adventure. Going to another planet might give you enough freedom to make the conflict much more stark and immediate (and amenable to superhero intervention).

But your player who wants this might not want this type of defense of feminism, or may see it as a caricature of her desires.

 

[Diamond Cross]

 

[DumbPaladin]

Actually ...

I really want to listen to players, so I need to think of something related to feminism as a cause for superhero adventure. My head is bit empty with this one, give me something to grasp please :-/

I'm going to approach this from an entirely different angle than anyone else so far, not because there haven't been decent ideas, but because I like to get extra creative with ideas. I also agree with Wik, who noted that you must make sure everyone else in the group is interested in the plot as well: I think my suggestion has a possibility of giving everyone an angle to be involved.

Religion is both too easy and too boring a target, not to mention potentially problematic.

In one of the major cities in your campaign, have a woman with the resources to get her message out appear on the scene, suddenly covered by local news media and holding rallies and the like. She's a modern-day Phyllis Schlafly type, but with dangerously more charisma. Wrapping her message in things that sound comforting and un-threatening, our villainess exhorts people to a return to "simpler times", when women were less interested in getting ahead in the workplace and more interested in making sure their children were being raised properly and their spouses and significant others happy. Every household needs a breadwinner, sure -- and that can even be a woman -- but according to her "research", men can't be entrusted with tasks like raising children due to their more militant natures. Her message seems to be strangely entrancing to both women AND men within the civilian population.

Unfortunately, not only does our villainess believe that women don't belong in the superhero business -- she has the means to make her vision a reality via two different super abilities: while she comes off as just a normal human being, she is in fact a supervillain.

People without abilities are susceptible to her speeches, beginning to adopt some of her messages in their own lives, and are more susceptible to it the more they run into her talking on their TVs and in their neighborhoods. And people WITH superpowers can have them temporarily turned off by the supervillainess' touch -- or nearby presence -- and the longer you're around her, the longer it takes for those powers to come back.

This villainess is essentially the most dangerous anti-feminist: a woman with an agenda to make superwomen un-super, and to sway non-supers to support her cause.

The men in the party can be given ample reasons to be interested in stopping her: she can target a hero ally of theirs, rendering him powerless Stepford husband ... or brainwash a civilian friend under their protection. Or, she can just turn one of their powers off for a limited time.

 

[Tanstaafl_au]

Maybe that the heroine needs to ensure a good PR image to be making the PSAs so that any normal heroing that gets done, she needs to make sure of doing plenty of good to stay in the media light to keep her activist career active. Concetrate the fem issues on the hero downtime more than the fisticuffs side.

 

[PoorHobo]

I'm with the earlier poster who said you should just ask the player. I think playing the guessing game is going to lead to bad bad things. Or at least an uncomfortable misunderstanding.

 

[GSHamster]

One plot that might be interesting, and not too controversial, is a Stepford Wives style plot.

The way I'd do it, though it would take a bit of lead time, is to introduce a likeable, spunky, young teenage girl who is a bit of a hellion as an NPC. Maybe one just coming into her powers. Have the PCs interact with her, maybe rescue her from someone. If you wanted to, you could use an abusive father/mother/guardian, like one who wants to "absorb" her powers, as a red herring for the feminist plot your player expects.

Anyways, once the PCs get her settled, set things up so that she is sent to a boarding school, one for young girls with powers, and the PCs go off for another set of adventures.

After those adventures, have a contact ask the PCs about the boarding school. Have him tell the PCs that his daughter went there and came back behaving somewhat differently. Ask the PCs if they've heard anything about the school.

The PCs will probably check in on hellion from the first adventure. Only this time, she's a completely proper, demure young girl who doesn't have the same spark she had last time. She also no longer uses her powers, claiming it's too dangerous or similar.

This pushes the PCs to investigate the school (undercover, maybe?). Of course, the headmaster/headmistress is a mad supervillain brainwashing the young girls, and various shenanigans occur from that point on.

And of course, at the end, the PCs have to figure out what to do with a school full of no-longer-docile teenage girls just coming into their power, which should be a suitably terrifying prospect.

This should work nicely because it's feminist, in that the girls are being molded into an archaic female image, but it's also coercion of liberty, vaguely-anti-school/authority that the rest of the group should be able to get behind, while not being as sensitive a topic as rape or slavery or mutilation.

Also, lots of comedic potential in the school investigation part.

 

[Starfox]

Depending on the type of feminism though, some feminists really hate "all female villains are really just victims of male oppression". They would much rather see a strong, empowered, self-starting female villain who kicks some butt.

Well, would a "strong, empowered, self-starting female villain" highlight gender issues? I am all for including such characters - I use them a lot myself - but this is more of a kind of equal-gender utopia type character. Not a gender problem (unless you have a problem with female authority).

Of course, a gender-themed campaign should include some such characters to highlight what women can be, but they're unlikely to be seen as problems. They can be adversaries without raising gender issues. In fact, this is more or less the default female role in superhero comics, which is often way ahead of its time gender-wise.

This can take a sinister twist. In the MMO City of Heroes there is a character, Ms. Liberty, that is pretty much this strong female lead type. She is the granddaughter of the super-man of this world (known as Statesman) and leads her own super team which has a strong female presence in it. So far so good. But she also leads the private law-enforcement army Longbow, and that is much more controversial. In the villain side of the game, Longbow actually has a fortress in an occupied part of a sovereign nation. It is the main enemy group for villain players. It might all be for the good, but private armies occupying sovereign nations are certainly not uncontroversial. In some ways this strong female heroine comes across as a bit of a fascist. This in contrast to her grandfather who is very hands-off when it comes to assuming power. Her role really has nothing to do with being a woman - a male grandchild of Statesman could have the exact same role - but it highlights how being a woman will not save you from the consequences of throwing your weight around.