Batman: Arkham Knight Has a Serious Problem With Women

After nearly a full year of delays, Batman: Arkham Knight is finally here. Gamers are able to hunt down new Riddler trophies, zoom around the streets in the Batmobile, or soar over skyscrapers in Gotham. Despite an enormous budget and plenty of pre-order cash flowing in, the game has launched with a few major problems. Although the main technical issue has been that the game is nearly unplayable on many PCs there are some narrative and character problems, as well.
There’s no denying that Batman: Arkham Knight is an incredibly well-made game. The combat, exploration, and detective mechanics are all as tight as ever and the final installment is one of the best in the series. That said, the game seems to be ages behind in its representation of women.
We’ll get to specific details after the spoiler warning here, but it’s safe to say that the game includes a handful of female comic book (and cartoon) characters who are incredibly smart and strong in their source material and wastes no time reducing them to damsels in distress or glorified power-ups for the Caped Crusader. We won’t dive too deep into the game’s major plot twists (you can do that over at our spoiler discussion), but be warned that some spoilers are incoming…

Poison Ivy

Aside from a brief conversation with Oracle (we’ll come back to her later), the first woman in Batman: Arkham Knight to get major screen time is Poison Ivy. The villain is a serious player in Batman’s rogues gallery and has proven to be a worthy foe time and time again in Batman lore. Despite her credentials, Arkham Knight introduces the character as a victim. This is a role the game keeps her in throughout the story.
Ivy has a gun to her head when we meet her and is saved by Batman. Although it’s believable that she might be taken down by Batman’s main adversaries in the game, it seems like a waste of a strong, scary villain to have her sitting at the gunpoint of a goon who she should be able to easily overpower. We do get a brief display of her powers in this scene, but she is quickly put back in captivity without much of a fight at all.
This offense would be forgivable if the game didn’t keep Ivy In this position of captivity throughout its entirety. Batman moves Ivy from one cell to another and keeps her there (hardly dressed, of course) until he needs to use her powers. She acts as a power-up for Batman later in the game, so we do get to see her powers eventually, but it’s not on her own terms. She is removed from prison by the hero, just so he can control her and her powers. This becomes a trend with most of the powerful female characters in the game…