Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

When Sadie Green plays video games as a young woman, she notes that “she often had to put herself into a male point of view to even understand a game at all” (44). Understanding this point of view is important for Sadie since she is a game-maker. However, adopting this point of view means she has to pretend to be okay with sexist depictions of women. In the late 1990s, when Sadie starts making games, “girls like Sadie were conditioned to ignore the sexist generally, not just in gaming—it wasn’t cool to point such things out” (44). Therefore, Sadie has to ignore female NPCs in various states of undress and hypersexualized main female characters in games, as well as sexist and insensitive behaviors in the real world. People like Dov, and sometimes even Samson Masur, tend to minimize the stress such willful ignorance produces. However, it has an enormous psychological cost for Sadie and other women like her. Sadie learns to become complicit in her own erasure to be successful, but that makes her bitter toward Sam, and facilitates her falling into an unhealthy relationship with Dov. When Sam agrees for Ichigo to be a boy, he simply doesn’t factor how important Ichigo’s lack of gender is for Sadie, a woman constantly boxed in by her gender.