Do Horror Game Stars Need to be Girls? (Also on Xeawn’s Gaming Corner)

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*DISCLAIMER!: This is part 2 in a 3 part series of articles that are more mature than the XGC norm; please exercise your own discretion when reading! Regular articles will resume after Tuesday’s Tomb Raider review!*

Maybe not just games either. I was thinking about that this morning (about a week ago now), or maybe it was last night (about a week ago now) because they both sorta ran together for me (about…well, no, that’s pretty normal for me…), as I began laying out plans for a few new horror novels that I’ll be writing. The star of the first pure horror story I started working on is a girl trapped in a castle she’s desperately trying to escape while a number of unsavory characters are stalking her for unknown reasons. Why did I specifically choose a girl? I unno’, I just did. Amelia was just right for the part.

A different story with strong horror elements stars a father trying to protect a little girl in a hellish nightmare realm where he’s unable to tell fantasy from reality and has a number of frightening demons to contend with. Why did Roy work for this story? I felt a father trying to protect his daughter worked better in this scenario than a mother and daughter; I wanted to hit fear on a different level. I wanted to work with taking away from men the largest thing that makes us feel like men, and that’s a sense of power and the capacity to protect what we care for. I wanted to force the man to be in a situation where not only was he helpless, not only was he helpless to protect a child, he was helpless to protect a daughter.
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