Curator's Note
I’ve been thinking a lot about “my” Clementine lately. Which is what Telltale Games wants, having sanctioned the #MyClementine hashtag to encourage players to share via social media who “their” version of the scrappy 11-year-old has become through the moral choices and gameplay actions players have made on her behalf. The trailer released prior to the Season 2 finale, however, seems to have a clear opinion about who “my” Clementine should be, bracketing its depiction of Clementine as battleworn, ruthless survivor with reminders of the naïve little girl she once was, fetishizing this prelapsarian innocence as a quality to be preserved at all cost, even if returning to it proves impossible.
Clementine's voiceover stitches together flashbacks of her rescue and self-defense training by Lee, the adoptive father figure/playable character in Season 1, whose paternal approval tacitly legitimates the violence Clementine commits as our playable character in Season 2. The recap suggests Clementine faces an impossible decision, when a sudden dissolve to video of sweet little Clem at home with her babysitter before the apocalypse pointedly reminds players of their obligation to preserving Clem’s innocence. We cut back to bloodied, gun-clutching present day Clementine, before the question “Who Will You Become?” flashes up, followed by the #MyClementine hashtag. For all the promise of crafting our own, unique version of Clementine via the game’s affordances (which I've tried to use to make "my" Clementine one that subverts the conventions of childhood femininity to cold heartedly kick all kinds of human and zombie ass), the game's paratextual materials privilege the Clementine that remains connected to that innocence.
One could argue, as the game’s creators have, that this desire to preserve Clementine’s innocence has everything to do with her age, and little to do with her gender. While executive producer Kevin Doyle insists that “we certainly haven't set up the game to make it about race or gender or sex,” one must only think of Carl, Clementine’s male analogue in AMC’s The Walking Dead television series, and how the series repeatedly validates Carl’s premature launch into protective, and often ultra-violent, masculinity. Have we ever flashed back to the sight of little Carl, playing with LEGO in a blanket fort, and been nostalgic for boyhood innocence lost? Why must we wish Clementine back to her treehouse, when she’s proven so capable and kickass now that she’s out of it?
Comments
Intertexts
Jessica, this is thought-provoking for me as a fan of The Walking Dead in its many forms (I have been a long-time reader of the comic, and have engaged in all of the other media produced from it as they've come along). I have yet to play any of Season Two from Telltale, so I can't speak to the game's portrayal of Clementine at this moment (and no, I didn't watch the spoiler video), but the relationship between her and Carl in the comics and TV is an interesting dynamic to explore. I didn't know that the game designers, for instance, have attributed her innocence to ager more than gender, but it's interesting to note that the universe(s) of The Walking Dead differ significantly in their portrayals of Carl's aging as well as in who else is considered powerful within the group. While in the show Carol (a new character) is positioned as more than capable of handling herself and making tough decisions, in the comics it is Andrea who becomes not only a constant strength of the group, but also a core member of its identity, not unlike Rick or Glenn. I've always found it interesting that in the show the strong female character was ostracized from the group in both instances, though for different reasons. I also find it intriguing that the innocence the developers seem to be wanting Clementine to hang on to as one of age rather than gender is in direct correlation to Carl in the comics, who really has a tough go of coming into his own and is certainly treated by his father and everyone else in the group (as well as the comic's plotting) as an innocent child for far longer than he has been on TV. What I guess I'm getting at is that the gameplay dynamic here, the choice to be innocent or not, seems to be the way around either portrayal of age and gender, though the plot and story certainly retain the emotional elements of traditional relationships between them no matter what your actions are during gameplay as a means of character building. What does it mean to you or other players, then, when the game's mechanics of choice are actively undone by the emotionality of the narrative?
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