Her monstrous arm used to penetrate victims and consume their energy.Īlong with the phallic mother, there is another theme in 1980s horror movies. With this as a backdrop in my mind, I started playing Tales of Berseria was greeted with the female lead and her arm. It’s literally the plot of the fourth movie in the series, Alien Resurrection, as Ripley-as-mother is thematically set against the alien queen-as-mother. The “evil” mother versus the “caring” one. It’s a common theme from many movies in the late 1980s into early 1990s.
It doesn’t “sit well” into the gender binary and, of course, kills people.
The “phallic” mother is this kind of threat. It’s both female and has the ability to penetrate its victims. Think the alien from the titular Alien series of movies. What I remember most from those works was the idea of the phallic mother.
I dug into abjection and was, for a brief window, even considering a future in film analysis and cultural critique. Books like Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Monstrous-Feminine, House of Psychotic Women, Powers of Horror helped me build up my theory knowledge. For a couple years, I read pretty voraciously across any theory and film books I could get. In what honestly feels like several lifetimes ago, I was interested in feminist film theory for the end of my Computer Science degree into the early part of my Masters degree. It’s a game with some good themes of horror, tragedy, and redemption often overshadowed by its JRPG presentation. I ended up playing through the whole thing, and doing a number of side quests. The fact it was both a JRPG and had a female lead character was worth trying out, even if I didn’t plan to finish it, I decided. I’ve played a large number of role-playing games and a fair number within the sub-genre of Japanese role-playing games. What caught my attention was the female lead. I didn’t know this games was a prequel to Tales of Zestiria, nor its placement as sixteenth in the series, when I first started playing it.
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