After I bought an e-mail that Bratz: Flaunt Your Vogue, the primary official Bratz dolls online game since 2012, was popping out in November throughout most platforms, together with, remarkably, the PS5, I used to be intrigued and a bit amused. After I booted it up, I bought that acquainted hit of nostalgia, as every of the 4 foremost characters—Sasha, Yasmin, Jade, and Cloe—appeared precisely as plastic-smooth as I remembered their dolls being in 2001. They had been even wearing less complicated variations of the outfits the debut set wore that yr (I had the unique Cloe, and sometimes chewed on her arms). I used to be three then, and I are likely to romanticize my favourite childhood issues, however after taking part in Flaunt Your Vogue (stylized as Flaunt your trend), I’m prepared to maneuver on.
I didn’t essentially need to be. With my bonbon-sized child mind, I used to see one thing I wanted in Bratz dolls’ attribute tennis-ball-sized heads: flirty, jet-black eyelashes, plump lips, purple like two strawberries, all in a spread of pores and skin tones and indeterminate ethnic options that different, extra Anglo-Saxon dolls couldn’t provide me as a mixed-race child. To me, Bratz dolls confirmed me the worldwide femininity I ought to aspire to, a portal to my future. Or I acknowledged the Bratz women as “Little Hotties,” as a 2006 New Yorker article places it.
However the recreation is, to place it succinctly, not good. It’s a three-ish hour journey you play as one of many 4 Bratz women, finishing minigames and low-stakes missions on your very personal Bratz Journal, the place you achieve 1000’s of subscribers each time you submit. Your targets are at all times clear-cut and stereotypically female: do yoga within the park, take an excellent selfie, purchase new garments and make-up with the intention to take an excellent selfie and rack up further subscribers. To make every goal extra mind-numbing, you may by no means lose, even once you’re as unhealthy at working the sport’s clunky minigames (stroll in a trend present, play in a rock band) and quicktime occasions (the selfies, once more) as I used to be.
My skill to get pleasure from Flaunt Your Vogue was actually restricted as a result of I’m, regrettably, not three years previous, however extra gender impartial and male-centered kids’s titles like PokĂ©mon and Tremendous Mario not less than attempt to rouse my creativeness, which has no age restrict. It feels unfair that, even in 2022, video video games marketed towards younger women are nonetheless so myopic of their focus, so one-note, unthinking, and unfeeling. You get to journey the world in Flaunt Your Vogue, however builders ensure that Barcelona, Seoul, New York, and Bratz hometown Stilesville all function a shopping center as their central location. It hurts—we get a style of expansive online game actuality with quick journey, and the Bratz women stay alone and assist one another’s careers and pursuits as a style of 2022 freedom. However the whole lot they do sticks to typical gender roles like an annoying wad of gum. Finally, women like cute garments, proper?
I hoped, not less than, {that a} trend recreation would sometimes be fairly or spectacular, however I performed on PC with a 3080 GPU on the sport’s greatest accessible graphics setting, and nonetheless felt like I used to be looking for which means in pancake batter. There isn’t a strip of shadow or texture anyplace—each location is interchangeable and flat and pink. With not a lot to get pleasure from visually and probably the most creative gameplay coming right down to an occasional added type of transportation, like curler skates or a hoverboard you may hire, I don’t suppose there was any level in reviving a 10-year-old franchise with a $40 recreation about as intriguing as a cement mixer churning chunky glitter. It makes a degree of retaining women’ video video games as unadventurous as they had been 20 years in the past in my childhood. So the entire level of Flaunt Your Vogue, I understand, is to money in on the 2000’s nostalgia at present trapping my technology in amber.
“There are, in fact, some ways to look backward,” College of Toronto professor Linda Hutcheon writes in her dialogue from 2000, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” “You may look and reject. Or you may look and linger longingly.” We’re on the high of the Y2K revival rollercoaster (although the 2010’s are praying for a flip), and so women my age see Bratz dolls with Saint Laurent hearts in our eyes. We’re keen to suck in for Maroske Peech micro-mini skirts, or in order that Poster Woman clothes can cling to our little our bodies just like the Little Hotties, their unique slogan “the women with a ardour for trend,” taught us to. We’ve already mastered their ambiguous, glossed faces for Instagram, as Jia Tolentino famous in 2019.
We’re turning ourselves into Bratz dolls as a result of, for girls, browsing a tidal wave of nostalgia wasn’t at all times doable. In her dialogue, Hutcheon references anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer, who wrote in 1994 that feminism has “no tendency towards nostalgia, no phantasm of a golden age previously.” However that’s modified 20 years later—our particular days began within the late 90’s and early 2000’s, when lady’s sexual company and wonder was reframed from one thing for males to worry or take to one thing ladies may and may use as an emancipatory device.
“That is about woman energy,” Scary Spice says within the Spice Ladies’ 1997 VHS One Hour of Woman Energy, “this isn’t about choosing up guys.”
Laura Mulvey descendants would possibly argue the identical, that new feminist nostalgia just isn’t a response to males, however a model of the “feminine gaze”—which The Miseducation of Cameron Put up director Ashley Connor describes as “a state of mind, the place method to topic and materials is extra emotional and respectful.” However I don’t suppose the feminine gaze has an opportunity if it’s solely ever made to stare at what conventional gender roles instruct us to need, Victoria’s Secret baggage and unconvincing pop stars.
Whereas exercising our new nostalgia, I believe we’ve gotten a bit bit misguided. I don’t suppose each lady ought to disappear herself in a pillar of salt, or like a TreeChangeDoll, a well-liked doll rehab on Etsy the place previously glamorous Bratz go to lose their make-up and achieve pigtails. There’s nothing fallacious with magnificence, and there’s nothing fallacious with a girl who has her personal sense of it. However women deserve the possibility to be fascinating, not simply given video video games whose sole objective appear to be pushing capitalism and a restricted model of femininity as a false sense of empowerment. We’ve already turned ourselves into Bratz dolls—that type of nostalgia has nothing left to provide. Subsequent yr, perhaps, we will strive once more.
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