Recently, I’ve seen quite a lot of horror media that features young children playing roles that a child should never play. Thankfully I can say that the worst instances of said roles have been in video games, such as Bioshock and F.E.A.R, both of which use little girls as horror devices. F.E.A.R has a character called er, Martha or something, who’s this wee girl that your character keeps having disturbing visions of. My friend tells me it’s because she’s psychic.. and is the mother of a clone army. I didn’t get that into it though. Bioshock on the other hand has what the developers call ‘Little Sisters’, genetically enslaved girl-children who are conditioned to mutilate the corpses of dead ‘Splicers’ in order to harvest their super-power fuel, called ‘Adam’.. or ‘Eve’, I don’t remember. I think it’s Adam.
But why children? Oh, it’s because the idea of a child playing such a role.. no, not playing a role; actually being that thing which is depicted, is reprehensible to the human heart. Children, who we try to keep as innocent as possible for as long as we can – to protect them from the harshness of reality – invoke such powerful feelings in adults as to immediately terrify them when a child fills the role of villain. Not just villain though, the children in these two games are veritable psychopaths. Fair enough, the Little Sisters are engineered that way and Agatha from F.E.A.R is something beyond the realms of morality and indeed reality, so the children cannot be blamed for their actions. I think that though, is what the designers of these stories want though. They want their audience to feel torn between hatred for these vile individuals and sympathy for their poor shredded souls.
This method of horror-telling is, I believe, underhand and devious to the extent that these devices are being employed for no reason other than to give the story weight that it otherwise lacks. Bioshock in particular would have had literally nothing going for it if it didn’t have these creepy little girls running around sucking the God-knows-what out of dead peoples’ torsos. Remove the Little Sisters and you have a closed environment with a linear plotline with the occaisional boss fight. Oh and some power upgrades. It’s basically Sonic for the new generation.
The reason I post this is because I was reading Kotaku and noticed this picture, look at the print at the very back:
See what I mean? It’s a giant monster and an innocent little girl. Oh no wait! She’s not innocent at all ’cause she’s in league with a monster, but is she in league? Oh God I don’t know what to feel, I’m so emotionally challenged by this game!
Give me a break.
