Negotiated Empowerment and Split Performance: Female Representation in Chinese Video Games

The paradox of empowerment: female representation and commercial imperatives

A foundational critique within feminist game studies has centered on the visual objectification of female characters. Scholars have long argued that game design has historically catered to a presumed male audience, resulting in the hyper sexualization of female bodies (Dietz, 1998; Lynch et al., 2016). This is often framed through the lens of the male gaze, wherein female characters are designed not as subjects of their own stories but as objects for visual consumption, characterized by unrealistic proportions and revealing attire incongruous with their narrative roles (Downs and Smith, 2010; Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997; Mulvey, 1975). Crucially, this male-centric approach extends beyond game content to the very construction of the gamer identity itself (Kivijärvi and Katila, 2022; Shaw, 2015). Cote's (2018) analysis of Nintendo Power (1994–1999) reveals how gaming media systematically reinforced a male-dominated gamer culture through editorial choices, visual presentation, and authorial practices, demonstrating how media portrayals shape the ability of girls to identify as gamers and access gaming communities. This insight provides essential context for understanding why, despite decades of development, visual representation remains a contested site of gender negotiation.

However, third-wave and postfeminist theoretical frameworks had already begun to complicate this critical picture when such platform-specific analyses were undertaken. The emergence of strong, agentic heroines, epitomized by Lara Croft, introduced a paradox: a character could be both a capable protagonist and a sexualized object (Jansz and Martis, 2007; Kennedy, 2002). This paradox exemplifies what Gill (2007) critically terms postfeminist sensibility, wherein sexual objectification is insidiously repackaged as a woman's autonomous “choice” and “empowerment.” Building on this critique, Genz and Brabon (2017) argue that these figures exist in a paradoxical space, embodying feminist ideals while simultaneously participating in their own commodification. This creates a critical tension between narrative empowerment and visual objectification. While the analysis of the “New Lara” phenomenon by Engelbrecht (2020) shows a conscious shift towards more realistic and less sexualized designs, indicating industry awareness of these critiques, the commercial logic of the postfeminist sensibility persists (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill, 2016).

Recent scholarship suggests that China's digital game market functions by reinforcing traditional gender norms, effectively creating a social order structured by game mechanics that mirrors traditional patriarchy, where women are positioned either as subordinate participants in male-dominated genres or as consumers of idealized romance in female-oriented ones (Liao, 2024; Liu and Lai, 2022). This structural reality manifests in character design, creating a similar cognitive dissonance for players who see a character's narrative agency undermined by their sexualized visual design (Cao and Liu, 2023). For instance, Lai and Liu (2024) confirm this tension, showing how female players critique “industrial candy” designs and tracing the issue to the institutional division of labor that separates narrative from market-driven visual design. While such work is vital for understanding player resistance, its findings also reveal the need for an analytical framework that moves beyond direct applications of Western feminist theory to address China's specific cultural and commercial context (Cui, 2024; Wallis, 2013).

The architecture of compromise: agency, negotiation, and postfeminism in digital games

The initial wave of feminist game studies often focused on identifying the prevalence of passive female characters, most notably the damsel in distress trope, who functioned primarily as plot devices for male heroes (Lynch et al., 2016). Subsequently, the emergence of strong female protagonists like Lara Croft was hailed as a significant turning point, marking a shift from victimhood to subjectivity (Jansz and Martis, 2007). This character model, however, was soon complicated by a more critical turn in feminist media studies. Scholars began to question whether the mere creation of singular, powerful female characters was sufficient for genuine empowerment (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Kennedy, 2002). As Chess (2017) argues in Ready Player Two, the feminist potential of games lies not only in character representation but in designing systems and narratives that allow for complex explorations of gender performance. Empirical research further illuminated the limitations of female character agency. A quantitative study of award-winning games by Perreault et al. (2018) found that while the rare female protagonists were depicted as active heroes, their agency was overwhelmingly expressed through masculinized forms of violence, and they were afforded little emotional or relational complexity. The agency of female characters often remained narrowly defined by pre-existing templates of masculine heroism (Kennedy, 2002; Perreault et al., 2018). This global scholarly conversation thus shifted focus from mere strength to the quality and complexity of agency afforded to characters.

This move toward a more nuanced understanding of agency is particularly vital when examining China's digital gaming landscape, where the dynamics of agency are shaped not only by local culture and commerce but also by the systemic tensions inherent in China's platform ecosystem, where the competing pressures among state power, market forces, and networked publics that together condition what cultural content can be produced, circulated, and consumed (de Kloet et al., 2019; Jiang and Fung, 2019; Yuan and Zhang, 2025). As Wang (2026) demonstrates, feminist content producers on Xiaohongshu must simultaneously navigate the commercial logic of platform visibility, state censorship, and public-value imperatives. This structural condition extends to game developers operating within the same ecosystem. A powerful framework for understanding this complexity is the concept of “platformed post-feminist negotiation” (Cui, 2024: 14). This concept, which builds on foundational postfeminist critiques (Genz and Brabon, 2017), posits that Chinese games create a unique gender politics by blending empowerment narratives with localized strategies to navigate patriarchal norms and a complex regulatory environment (Cheung and Fung, 2016). This framework helps to explain the compromised reality observed in prior scholarship. For example, the concept of negotiated resistance described by Liu and Cheng (2024) serves as a precise illustration of the compromises inherent in this platformed negotiation: female characters are often visually designed to adhere to traditional aesthetic standards, frequently require a male savior to resolve key conflicts, and see their most rebellious traits displaced onto supporting characters rather than the player-avatar protagonist. Agency, in this context, is not a direct confrontation but a continuous negotiation, a dynamic shaped and constrained by the very platform on which it unfolds (Liu and Cheng, 2024). As Lai and Liu (2024) powerfully argue, this compromise is structurally embedded, stemming from an institutional division of labor where market-driven visual design operates separately from narrative development.

Taken together, the global and local scholarship reveals a crucial progression: from an initial focus on identifying a lack of female agency and objectification (Downs and Smith, 2010), to a celebratory but ambivalent recognition of its presence in media (Lynch et al., 2016), and finally, to a critical examination of the quality and limitations of its negotiated forms (Liu and Cheng, 2024). It is at this third stage that platform negotiation becomes a useful analytical concept: it describes a conditioned practice through which cultural producers work within, and across, competing commercial, regulatory, and socio-cultural demands to produce representations that are at once compromised and culturally legible (de Kloet et al., 2019; Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Wang, 2026). While recent frameworks such as Cui's (2024) provide a crucial theoretical lens for why this dynamic exists, a gap remains in systematically identifying the specific narrative and visual strategies through which this negotiation is executed at a micro-level. In other words, how do game developers use dialogue, character design, and plot structures to perform this delicate balancing act? Therefore, this study employs the concept of negotiation as a central analytical lens to empirically investigate and categorize the precise techniques by which female characters strategically exert agency within these documented constraints.

Theoretical framework: locating negotiated empowerment in the Chinese context

The preceding literature review has established a core tension: a global postfeminist paradox manifesting as a unique compromised reality within the Chinese game industry, where narrative agency frequently coexists with visual objectification (Cao and Liu, 2023), and progressive themes are carefully negotiated against overlapping structural pressures (Liu and Lai, 2022). While recent work, particularly from Cui (2024) and Lai and Liu (2024), perceptively connects macro-level production pressures with micro-level textual outcomes, these analyses are predominantly situated within the specific genre of female-oriented love simulation (otome) games. This study, therefore, extends this inquiry into a different but underexplored field: the representation of female characters in general-audience mobile games.

What makes this field distinct is that the dynamics of platformed negotiation shift significantly. Unlike the otome genre, which addresses a relatively homogeneous female audience within a stable romantic fantasy framework, general-audience mobile games must simultaneously navigate contradictory demands from a mixed-gender player base, a diversified commercial logic, and a socio-cultural landscape where competing gender expectations are more directly in tension (Jiang and Fung, 2019; Liao, 2024; Srnicek, 2017). Therefore, a specific theoretical lens is needed not only to move beyond a sociological diagnosis and analyze the process of identity construction, but also to adapt the concept of negotiation to this new empirical field.

To address this, this study constructs a two-tiered analytical model: a performative analysis of platformed negotiation. The foundational tier of our model adopts and operationalizes Cui's (2024) concept of platformed post-feminist negotiation. Cui's framework offers a powerful macro-level explanation for why these compromises occur, identifying the core structural pressures on developers. We operationalize this context by synthesizing existing scholarship into three distinct platforms:

The Commercial Platform refers to the subordination of creative work to the political economy of the free-to-play model, a monetization structure in which games is distributed at no upfront cost and generate revenue through in-app purchases and microtransactions (Nieborg, 2015). Central to this model is the Gacha system, a randomized reward mechanic in which players spend real money for probabilistic chances to obtain rare characters or items (Woods, 2024). Within this system, the visual design of female characters functions as a primary commercial asset, as data-driven optimization pressures developers to maximize the monetization potential of character aesthetics (Banet-Weiser, 2018). This logic is further reinforced by dominant platform conglomerates such as Tencent, which controls both distribution infrastructure and algorithmic recommendation systems, leaving individual studios with limited creative autonomy (Coe and Yang, 2022; Yuan and Zhang, 2025). This dynamic exemplifies what Nieborg and Poell (2018) identify as the platformization of cultural production, in which monetization logics structurally shape representational choices available to cultural producers. In the context of Chinese mobile gaming, gendered aesthetics function as one of its most visible and commercially exploitable dimensions.

The Regulatory Platform refers to the structural constraints imposed by the state's content licensing and censorship mechanisms, including review and approval procedures administered by multiple governmental bodies with concurrent jurisdiction over the game industry (Jiang and Fung, 2019). Within this framework, game companies are compelled to align with politically sanctioned norms as a condition of long-term market access (Liu and Lai, 2022). In the domain of gender representation, this regulatory pressure discourages content deemed socially destabilizing, incentivizing pre-emptive self-censorship (Cheung and Fung, 2016). However, the persistence of borderline sexualized female character designs across major platforms suggests that regulatory enforcement remains selective and negotiated rather than absolute (Lai and Liu, 2024), creating operational space in which commercial visual logics continue to function alongside formal content restrictions. Notably, this regulatory environment also shapes how cultural nationalism is expressed through game content, as developers strategically incorporate state-endorsed narratives of technological progress and national identity into their products as a means of securing operating legitimacy (Jiang and Fung, 2019). These systemic tensions reflect a broader characteristic of China's platform ecosystem, in which the state's governance logic operates not through simple autocratic control but through ongoing negotiation with market-based forces, corporate self-regulation, and the evolving demands of networked publics, as Tencent's institutional chameleon strategy of aligning with governmental agendas while capitalizing on emerging business opportunities exemplifies (Yuan and Zhang, 2025).

The Socio-Cultural Platform signifies the game's embeddedness within China's algorithmically fragmented digital public sphere, in which platform architectures amplify and polarize competing cultural discourses (Tompkins and Guajardo, 2024). In the domain of gender, this produces a structurally contradictory pressure. The growing visibility of popular feminism among younger female consumers constitutes a commercially significant force that developers cannot ignore, as evidenced by the proliferation of feminist reading practices in user-generated content on Chinese social media platforms (Wang, 2026). At the same time, a vocal anti-feminist backlash, frequently framed in nationalist terms that position feminist demands as Western ideological imports, exerts countervailing pressure against progressive female representation (Liao, 2024). These opposing user communities do not merely hold different preferences; they actively mobilize platform mechanisms—from reporting tools to public discourse—to pressure developers toward incompatible content directions, creating a governance dilemma in which any design decision is inevitably read as taking sides (Gillespie, 2018). Together with state regulatory power, this tripartite tension constitutes a contested governance space in which gender discourse, amplified and polarized by algorithmic systems, becomes a site where competing social forces negotiate the boundaries of acceptable cultural expression.

While this foundational tier explains the context of negotiation, it naturally opens the door for a deeper inquiry into the process. This leads to the second tier of our model, which seeks to understand how these negotiations are enacted and embodied at the micro-level of identity construction. To achieve this, we turn to gender performativity theory (Butler, 1990, 1993), which central insight is that gender is not a stable internal essence expressed outwards, but rather an illusion of essence produced on the surface of the body through the compelled, citational repetition of norms, providing the micro-analytical lens for the performance itself in the context of game study (Kivijärvi and Katila, 2022).

By integrating these two tiers, this study proposes a synthesized framework that redefines negotiated empowerment not as a binary outcome, but as a dynamic process inscribed in game characters. Characters become the site where three converging platform pressures—commercial, regulatory, and socio-cultural—leave distinct, analyzable traces. Commercial imperatives manifest primarily in visual design and Gacha systems, commodifying characters through aestheticized female bodies, rarity hierarchies, and promotional imagery. Regulatory constraints operate mainly through narrative and dialogue, shaping characters’ moral attributes, ideological boundaries, and sanctioned forms of agency. Socio-cultural pressures inflect both registers, mediating how gender identities are constructed in relation to discourses of feminism and ideal womanhood. Thus, the visual and narrative construction of game characters provides a precise analytical lens to investigate the techniques—in dialogue, character design, and plot—through which developers perform this delicate balancing act.

Our central research question is thus refined:

How are the structural demands of platformed negotiation translated into specific visual and narrative performative strategies to construct female characters in contemporary Chinese video games?

Qualitative content analysis

This study employs qualitative content analysis (QCA) to answer its central research question. This method is uniquely suited for this inquiry for two primary reasons.

First, where our theoretical framework defines negotiated empowerment as a fluid state, QCA allows for the deep, interpretive analysis required to deconstruct the subtleties (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006; Mayring, 2021). Building on the tradition of treating games as complex expressive texts (Murray, 1997), we analyze elements like character design and narrative as outputs of the game's underlying procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007; Carr, 2019), which are systematically shaped by the game's technical and commercial systems (e.g., Gacha mechanics). This textual and systemic focus provides a nuanced window into platformed negotiation, avoiding the limitations of large-scale surveys which often miss such subtleties (Cui, 2024; Lynch et al., 2016). Second, informed by Haraway's (1988) concept of situated knowledges and Carr's (2019) critique of decontextualized readings, we recognize that a game's meaning unfolds over the player's specific, embodied experience. To achieve this situated perspective and grasp the characters’ developmental arcs as they negotiate platform demands, this study involved extended, immersive gameplay over a one-year period.

Sample selection

To construct a representative portfolio of cases, this study used a two-stage purposive sampling strategy, guided by our theoretical framework on platformed negotiation.

The first stage involved a systematic market scan to create a broad candidate pool. Between June and July 2024, drawing on major Chinese game distribution platforms, content hubs, and player communities. Initial selection criteria were: (1) inclusion of ≥15 female characters, ensuring sufficient internal diversity to identify variation in negotiation strategies; (2) significant market presence and active player discussion; (3) genre diversity; and (4) public released between 2016 and 2024. This generated a list of 25 candidate games which was then validated with experienced female players to confirm mainstream choices and identify niche titles overlooked by purely metric-driven sampling (Suri, 2011).

In the second stage, we selected a final corpus of five games—Onmyoji (NetEase Games, 2016), Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), Path to Nowhere (AISNO Games, 2022), Code: Kite (Lingxi Games, 2023), and Morimens (B.I.A.V. Studio, 2023). The selection was guided by our theoretical framework to exemplify the intersection of key platform pressures. Genshin Impact and Onmyoji were selected as top-tier commercial successes whose high-profile status places them at the center where commercial, regulatory, and socio-cultural pressures converge. Path to Nowhere was chosen as a site of contested representation, celebrated for its narrative agency yet controversial for its character visuals, making it a prime example of representational tension. Code: Kite provides a crucial comparative case: as a female-oriented game, it shifts the focus of public discourse around its strong protagonist. Morimens was included as a niche artistic case to analyze how platform pressures manifest in a less commercially saturated environment.

From the full playable female roster of each game, a final corpus of 16 characters was identified following the character inclusion criteria of Downs and Smith (2010): only primary and secondary characters—those central to gameplay and narrative progression—were retained. Characters were further required to meet three criteria: (1) substantial story content, such as a dedicated story chapter or character profile; (2) a visually distinct design representing an identifiable type within the game's aesthetic system; and (3) visible tension between empowerment and platform-driven constraint in either narrative or visual presentation. All 16 characters meeting these criteria were included; no further sub-sampling was conducted. This multi-case approach explores the varied manifestations of platformed negotiation across a strategic cross-section of the contemporary Chinese gaming landscape (Lai and Liu, 2024).

Data collection and units of analysis

The primary unit of analysis is the individual female character (n = 16 across five games). (See Supplemental material) Observations focused on two interrelated dimensions: narrative representation, encompassing character dialogue, story arcs, and in-game decision-making moments; and visual representation, covering character design, in-game imagery, and promotional artwork. These two dimensions were selected because negotiated empowerment operates simultaneously through what characters are permitted to say and do, and through how they are made to look.

Data were generated primarily through the researchers’ own extended gameplay across all five titles, documented via play-session notes and in-game screenshots. This was supplemented by official materials such as character artwork and promotional imagery from developers’ websites and social media, as well as community-produced resources including player-maintained databases (e.g., Fandom Wiki) and gameplay recordings on Bilibili. All supplementary materials were cross-referenced against direct gameplay experience to preserve the situated perspective central to this study's methodology.

Process

The qualitative analysis followed an iterative, inductively-driven approach wherein categories emerged from sustained engagement with the data rather than being predetermined (Mayring, 2021). To ensure analytical rigor, coding was conducted independently by two researchers across all 16 characters, after which the resulting codes were cross-checked for inconsistencies; notably, none were identified. This dual-coder approach constitutes investigator triangulation (Denzin, 1978), establishing the validity of the three analytical cycles described below.

Open Coding and Initial Pattern Recognition. The first cycle involved systematic close readings of all 16 characters’ dialogues, narrative arcs, and gameplay moments. Descriptive in vivo codes were generated directly from the data (e.g., critique is placed in the past). As coding progressed, a pattern emerged: characters consistently asserted agency, yet this agency was systematically bounded—displaced temporally (e.g., resistance situated in historical flashbacks) or confined spatially (e.g., activism limited to private, domestic realms). This emergent pattern was termed contained resistance.

Comparative Analysis and Theme Development. The second cycle focused on how characters construct identity amid contradictory demands. A consistent strategy is revealed here: characters perform contradictions rather than resolving them. For instance, a single character might be coded as both “authoritative leader” and “traumatized victim”. This led to the identification of citational split as a core theme, wherein characters cite multiple, conflicting gender scripts at once to maintain legibility across fragmented audiences.

Visual-Narrative Disjuncture Analysis. The final cycle examined the relationship between narrative and visuals. By systematically comparing empowering storylines with character artwork and promotional imagery, a conspicuous disjuncture surfaced: narratives grant agency, while visuals emphasize sexualized poses or aestheticized trauma. This observation crystallized into the theme of split performativity—a strategic decoupling where different representational registers serve divergent platform demands.

Theoretical Conceptualization. Finally, in an abductive move, these empirically-derived patterns were brought into dialogue with existing theory to elevate them to conceptual claims (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). Butler's (1990, 1993) work on performativity helped frame the identified strategies as constrained yet generative performances, while Cui's (2024) framework contextualized them as responses to platform pressures. This iterative process between data and theory ensured both empirical grounding and conceptual rigor.

Contained resistance

Across the 16 characters analyzed, a recurrent pattern emerged early in the coding process: narrative moments of feminist assertion were consistently accompanied by mechanisms that delimited their political reach. Characters voiced critique, claimed autonomy, or defied gender convention, yet these gestures were systematically displaced, privatized, or aestheticized in ways that rendered them legible within China's commercial environment and, more importantly, safe within China's regulatory environment. This convergent pattern, observed across games, character types, and narrative patterns, forms into the first conceptual tool: contained resistance, defined as the strategic displacement of feminist critique into spatial or temporal margins, rendering it simultaneously visible and ideologically safe (McRobbie, 2008). The following analysis traces this mechanism through three sub-mechanisms—temporal displacement and ideological tempering, the re-politicization of feminine roles, and the subversive deployment of authority—each illustrated through the most analytically representative cases.

The clearest expression of contained resistance operates through temporal displacement: situating feminist critique within a historicized or aestheticized past, thereby severing it from present political stands. Code: Kite, a strategy role-playing game set in the Three Kingdoms period, offers a particularly productive site for examining this sub-mechanism. Its historical framing is not incidental. By anchoring narratives in dynastic antiquity, the game negotiates a productive ambiguity between feminist legibility and regulatory safety, a balance characteristic of Chinese platform content strategies under intensified scrutiny (Liao, 2024).

Xiao Qiao's characterization illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. Her dialogues and narrative arc center on an unresolved tension between filial obligation and personal desire: she neither openly challenges her prescribed domestic role nor fully accepts it, framing her dissatisfaction as a privatized crisis of self-fulfillment. What is analytically striking is not the content of her critique but its structural form: her resistance is systematically interiorized, displaced from collective grievance into individual affect. This privatization corresponds to what post-feminist scholarship identifies as the depoliticization of feminist discourse through its translation into personal choice and emotional interiority (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Genz and Brabon, 2017).

The same process was also detected in the case of Ah Chun, who, in her final words, chooses to reclaim her own name rather than the one assigned to her under patriarchal convention. That choice survives on her tombstone: her desire is acknowledged and simultaneously sealed. The critique is not suppressed but displaced temporally, relocated to a moment beyond political consequence.

This operation performs a dual function: it sustains feminist legibility for audiences attuned to such discourse while evacuating the systemic critique that might render the content controversial across regulatory and socio-cultural platforms (Cheung and Fung, 2016; Liao, 2024). This renders the narrative ideologically palatable for regulatory platforms while generating emotional investment for commercial ones (Srnicek, 2017).

A second sub-mechanism of contained resistance works through the resignification of feminine roles. The most representative case is Raven from Path to Nowhere. In the source material, Raven's relationship with displaced children is framed as mentorship, but the content of that mentorship departs significantly from conventional nurturing scripts. Her dialogues and gameplay interactions focus on equipping vulnerable individuals with the tools for future self-determination, rather than providing emotional support or reinforcing dependency. The key empirical observation is that the nurturing archetype is preserved in form but transformed in function: care becomes a vehicle for what hooks (2000) theorizes as liberatory pedagogy. By maintaining the socially acceptable surface of feminine care, the narrative is able to embed more radical pedagogical content in a form that remains commercially viable across diverse audience segments (Chess, 2017, 2020). In this way, the cultural expectation of feminine nurturance is converted into a space for resistance, illustrating the generative potential of contained resistance as a platform strategy.

Another significant pattern is the gendered deployment of authority through role subversion. This takes two distinct forms. The first involves leveraging a traditionally sanctioned female role for subversive ends. Xu Man in Code: Kite exemplifies this, utilizing her accepted identity as a female Daoist practitioner to help women escape unwanted marriages. She operates within a patriarchally approved space (the religious sphere) to directly undermine patriarchal control over women's lives (Scott, 1990). The second, more extreme form is the complete adoption of a male identity to access power. The Lord of Guangling in the same game is the ultimate expression of this negotiation. She attains supreme power, but this power is contingent upon her continuous performance of masculinity and the public rejection of her female identity (Butler, 1990). This narrative construction offers a potent critique of patriarchy, made safe by its historical setting. Her public performance of masculinity is a necessary concession to patriarchal norms, but her actual authority is sustained by a clandestine network of allies who, by recognizing her true identity, subvert that very logic from within. Whether repurposing a feminine identity or performing a masculine one, both paths demonstrate that power is accessed through a calculated performance, turning the very architecture of patriarchal roles into a stage for subversion (Butler, 1990, 1993).

Both paths demonstrate that power is accessed through calculated performance. But this raises a further question: why does this particular strategy recur so consistently across the corpus, and why is it so often staged within a historical setting? In Butler's (1990, 1993) terms, the performance of an approved identity is not merely a concession to patriarchal norms but the very condition that makes subversion possible. Yet gender performativity alone does not explain why ancient historical settings are consistently where this subversion is staged. That requires a different analytical register: platform negotiation. These narrative strategies are not incidental creative choices. They are calculated responses to a platform ecology in which commercial imperatives, socio-cultural norms, and regulatory oversight converge (Cui, 2024; Lai and Liu, 2024). The historical frame functions as a containment mechanism: it allows the corpus to stage its most radical critiques while coding the transgression as a dynastic anomaly rather than a generalizable structural condition. The radicalism of the content and the safety of its frame are produced together by the same structural logic, thus form a unique platform ecosystem in China's context.

Therefore, contained resistance should not be seen as defensive adaptation to market pressure. It represents a form of platform negotiation in which the constraints of the game ecology become productive conditions for commercially viable feminist narratives (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill, 2007). By embedding critique within narratively appealing forms, these games may reach broader audiences more effectively than openly confrontational approaches could.

Citational split

Across multiple characters in the dataset, the coding process returned the same unresolved conflict: certain characters could not be reduced to a single gendered script. Rather, they consistently activated conflicting categories simultaneously: resilient heroism alongside feminine vulnerability, systemic critique alongside emotional fragility, authority alongside dependency. This was not interpretable as narrative inconsistency. The more productive explanation was that the contradiction itself was functional: these characters are designed to cite conflicting gender scripts simultaneously, producing a subject position that resists reduction from either end of a polarized player base (Butler, 1993). This is what the analysis identifies as the citational split.

Furina from Genshin Impact provides the clearest illustration. Genshin Impact is an open-world action RPG developed by miHoYo, and Furina serves as the Hydro Archon of Fontaine, a divine ruler whose story centers on public authority and hidden personal suffering. Her characterization works on two levels at once. In public, she projects confidence and sovereign control. In private, she is revealed to have maintained this performance for five hundred years while concealing genuine psychological distress. These are not two stages of character growth but two scripts that exist simultaneously. In Butler's (1993) terms, it is exactly her simultaneously cites resilient heroism and feminine vulnerability makes her resistant to simplistic critique, whether from players who demand strong female characters or those who resist them.

In Furina's case, the citational split is embedded in character design: the player observes two conflicting scripts without being required to perform them. The Lord of Guangling in Code: Kite extends this mechanism to the level of game mechanics, where the player is required to actively perform the split rather than observe it (Carr, 2019). By casting the player as Lord of Guangling (Code: Kite), the game mechanics are designed to compel the player to perform the citational labor (Bogost, 2007; Butler, 1993). The very choice architecture of the dialogue system, the management of resources, and the wardrobe mechanics all function as instruments of this enforcement, compelling the player to fluidly switch between gendered performances: citing masculine authority in the imperial court and navigating feminine social expectations in private (Liu and Cheng, 2024).

This design has measurable effects on player experience. Playing as female characters is associated with heightened feelings of empowerment and engagement (Lynch et al., 2025), and designs that code simultaneously for strength and vulnerability produce more complex audience responses than those built around a single dominant cue (Lynch et al., 2024a). The citational split is therefore not only a narrative strategy but a design logic—one that does not resolve debates about gender but creates a space where players encounter their contradictions directly. This produces what Haraway (1988) calls situated knowledge: understanding that comes not from abstract argument but from the cognitive and emotional experience of managing conflicting subject positions through play (Chess, 2020; Shaw, 2015).

Split performativity

The coding process flagged a third pattern, certain characters split across two registers entirely, with their narrative and visual codes pointing in systematically opposing directions. The narrative codes pointed consistently toward feminist critique, such as opposition to objectification, trauma as structural experience, resilience as resistance, while the visual codes oriented toward idealized or erotically coded bodies, poses designed for male gaze, and aesthetics calibrated for commercial desirability. This contradictory performance is not a design failure but a calculated outcome of navigating the conflicting demands of China's commercial, socio-cultural, and regulatory platforms (Cui, 2024): a single character is compelled to perform feminist critique with her story while performing seduction with her body (Gill, 2007, 2016). This is what the analysis identifies as split performativity (Butler, 1990).

The first key visual strategy unfolds through creating a stark disjuncture between a character's critical narrative and their seductive visual design. Eleven is among the most analytically instructive cases in the dataset. Her horror storyline contains the explicit line We are the perfect commodity which forms a direct indictment of consumer culture's reduction of women to exchangeable objects. The empirical observation, however, is that her in-game artwork operates according to an entirely different logic: her poses and styling are visually alluring, if not seducing, which is commercially optimized for the gacha monetization model in which character art drives player spending (Genz and Brabon, 2017; Gill, 2007). The narrative and the visual thus perform two different functions for two different kinds of audience segments. The critical narrative provides moral cover on the socio-cultural platform, while the visual design satisfies the platform's commercial demand for desirable, collectible characters. The character becomes a carefully constructed compromise, embodying just enough critique to be defensible and just enough allure to be profitable (Gill, 2007; Lai and Liu, 2024).

The second visual strategy extends this logic further. It works entirely within the visual register itself: co-opting aesthetics that signal authenticity or trauma and converting them into marketable style. This is visible in Heartseeker Momiji in Onmyoji, Zoya in Path to Nowhere, and 24 in Morimens. Their designs appear to reject idealized femininity: Zoya's scars, evolving from childhood to adulthood, testify to her tough life experience; Momiji's maple leaves function as both wound and weapon; 24's suture lines suggest fragmentation and repair. Yet within the logic of postfeminist platform negotiation, this aesthetic of the authentically damaged body becomes a commercial asset rather than a subversive one (Cui, 2024; McRobbie, 2008). The scar is not merely a trace of trauma but a marketable signifier of depth and coolness—a counter-cultural symbol commodified to drive consumption (Beezer, 1992). The suture line is not about healing so much as it is about distinctiveness: it renders the character visually unique and therefore more desirable to collect. This repackaging of feminist themes—survival, resilience, bodily autonomy—into a consumable brand identity is a defining feature of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018).

Postfeminist platform negotiation does not resolve the contradictions of the platformed environment but monetizes them (Cui, 2024; Gill, 2016; Gillespie, 2018). Sanitized and stylized, trauma is transformed into a narrative of resilience that deepens character lore while driving player spending. Equally, a female character can carry a feminist narrative while her visual design is framed entirely by the male gaze. What was considered visible empowerment element becomes another consumable aesthetic, placing the female body as a canvas on which that empowerment is performed. But the performance is, above all, a commercial transaction (Banet-Weiser, 2018).