Apex Legends’ Valkyrie Is A Breath Of Fresh Air For Asian Representation

Apex Legends‘ newest Legend, Kairi Imahara (callsign: Valkyrie) is, in her own words, “The Ghost of Viper.” While her relationship with her late father—a Northstar-piloting member of the Apex Predators, who players must defeat in Titanfall 2’s single-player campaign—is a pivotal aspect of who she is, Kairi is more than just “Viper’s kid.” She’s a Japanese-American lesbian who is so far out of the closet even a titan couldn’t force her back into it. We know minority representation in media is important, but it’s how those minorities are represented that really matters. When these characters are tossed into a story and reduced to their race, gender, or sexuality, it can be just as damaging as not including them at all.

Apex Legends isn’t the first game of its kind to feature a diverse cast of characters (see: Overwatch). But it is, in my opinion, the first to pull off those characters’ backstories and the depiction of their current relationships with such grace and finesse. The way the Legends behave and relate to each other feels genuine, believable, and makes the players who see themselves in those characters feel welcome instead of tokenized, fetishized, or unwanted. Everyone’s different, but there’s a little Legend in all of us, which is why so many players are hyped to see Valkyrie join the squad.

In the wake of recent tragedies, one can imagine why fans were a little anxious when it was confirmed that the next Legend to join the roster would be an Asian woman. It’s no secret that Asian women have long been hyper-sexualized by western media, but many Asian-made games are just as guilty of perpetuating these stereotypes.

There are plenty of examples. Resident Evil’s 2’s Ada Wong starts out doing backflips and high kicks in a form-fitting red dress and black tights, but is now mostly known for her appearance in Resident Evil 4, which sees her still doing acrobatics, this time in that infamous red cocktail gown and a pair of heels, sans tights.

At least Claire Redfield got to wear shorts.

Even Final Fantasy VII’s Tifa, beloved as she is, wears an absolutely absurd outfit for fighting, especially compared to Cloud and Barrett. We’d be here all day if I tried to list every fighting game that allowed you to pit a giant, muscle-bound dude in armor or a ninja outfit against an Asian woman who’s wearing an eroticized, skin-revealing take on the traditional clothing of her culture or sporting a chest-to-waist ratio that doesn’t occur in nature.

I don’t mean to disparage these games, many of them are classics that were (and still are) great fun to play. But you can make a fun game without alienating and stereotyping women and minorities. As we move into an era of classic game remakes and old franchise reboots, we need to make sure we’re not making the same mistakes a second time and simply repackaging these stereotypes in front of a new audience.

To be clear, the issue isn’t as simple as a sexy dress or a short skirt. The issue is a sexy dress when everyone else gets combat gear. The issue is making that short skirt a character’s entire personality. The issue is perpetuating the stereotypes of the ever-polite, cheerful, male-deferring Asian female and the “exotic,” mysterious seductress who exists solely for the sake of eye-candy.

We now live in a world where Ada Wong has multiple outfits (sexy red dress included, of course) and Mortal Kombat 11 saw Mileena get a female partner. That’s great, it really is. Each character mentioned in this piece is from a game franchise I love dearly, and as a bisexual woman myself, I am not blind to the appeal of an attractive female showing some skin, nor am I opposed to it. Under the right circumstances, it works.

In Season 7’s comics, for instance, we got to see Lifeline in a blue version of Ada Wong’s cocktail dress, as she attended an actual cocktail party, and she wasn’t the only person in formalwear. If anything, the fact that she normally wears gender-neutral combat gear made that blue dress reveal even more visually impactful, without objectifying her. The dress itself represented something significant, showing us the kind of life she lived before breaking away from her parents and how different it is from the life she lives now. The dress wasn’t put on simply for the sake of showing off her body, and it did so in a respectful manner that didn’t fetishize her race or gender. She wasn’t just the token hot chick eye-candy. She was Lifeline, dressed up for an important story-related reason. But if that dress had been released as a character skin, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb, because it’s not appropriate for combat.

Like I said, I get the appeal of an attractive female character showing some skin. But it needs to be done tastefully and respectfully in order to avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes and alienating the players who identify with that character. While things have improved on some fronts, there are still a ridiculous amount of mobile games—most often Chinese-made—that reinforce offensive stereotypes about Asian women, even in games that are marketed to them. As happy as I am to see recent remakes of classic games attempting to tone down the festishization of female characters, I think we can do better than just giving them the option to wear pants. I think it’s time to get some new blood in this fight, and that’s where Valkyrie comes in.

Since her release on May 4th, there have been some complaints about the white-haired Legend not looking “Asian enough,” while others lament the fact that she didn’t launch with a Japanese-themed Legendary skin. But as we saw in her episode of Stories from the Outlands, Kairi isn’t just Japanese. Her father, Viper, is white, and in the background we can see her mother, who is Japanese. While Valkyrie’s in-game character model doesn’t perfectly resemble her appearance in Stories from the Outlands, the same can be said for other characters, like Wraith, whose facial structure in the original launch trailer differs greatly from that of her in-game 3D model.

But it’s more than just physical appearance that’s causing controversy among fans of the newest Legend. Players have noticed that unlike Crypto and Rampart, the other two Asian characters who were introduced to the series post-launch, Valkyrie speaks with an American accent, implying English was her first language. She also doesn’t seem to speak Japanese often, unlike Crypto and Octane, who frequently switch to their native Korean and Spanish during gameplay. But again, just like her voice actress, Valkyrie is mixed-race. There are plenty of second- and third-generation Asian-Americans who are not fluent in their parents’ or grandparents’ native language, and their stories deserve to be shared regardless of what language they want to tell it in.

It’s clear that Kairi absolutely idolizes her late father. We’re talking about a kid who piloted a Northstar before she was old enough to drive a Trident. I can absolutely see her refusing to sit still for Japanese lessons, or daydreaming through them with her head in the clouds (literally). It’s also possible that her newly-widowed mother didn’t have much time to teach her, as the family was uprooted from their home on Angelia and forced to move to Gaea in the wake of Viper’s death. Respawn has confirmed as much via a Reddit AMA, explaining that Valkyrie can read Japanese and speaks it at home with her mother, but like many Asian-Americans, she is not fully fluent, and she shies away from speaking it in public. “Though she’ll totally deny that’s the reason if you ask!” the devs added.

Historically, Asian women have been depicted as meek and non-confrontational. Valkyrie directly mocks this in one of her kill quips: “Too aggressive? Oh, I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be timid and shy. My bad.” In her default emote, she attempts a sort of curtsy-bow before giving up and audibly groaning, almost as if to say, “Yeah, that’s not happening.”

In both film and video games, the stereotypical female Asian love interest is often weak or needy. If she’s not in need of rescue, it’s because she’s busy posing sexily with a katana, or doing martial arts in a combat-inappropriate outfit that may or may not occasionally reveal a glimpse of her undergarments. She often doesn’t speak English well, or speaks with a heavy accent. But there is one thing every stereotyped female Asian character has in common: she is almost always heterosexual.

Valkyrie is the antithesis of the stereotypical, hyper-sexualized Japanese female video game character. Like the other Legends, Kairi feels like a real person, someone with relatable strengths, weaknesses and preferences. She is flawed, reckless, and haunted by the death of her father. She’s also clearly nursing a pretty significant alcohol dependency that I suspect will see her knocked out of the sky at some point (don’t drink and fly, kids). But she’s also fearless, funny, and — as we recently learned through this season’s in-game comics — not afraid to flirt with Loba, the bisexual jewel thief introduced in Season 5.

Valkyrie first appears in the comics just as Loba has been flung off the edge of Olympus and sent plummeting into the cloudy abyss below, without a surface to toss her life-saving teleportation bracelet onto. In an awesome scene that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, Valkyrie literally swoops in and catches Loba mid-fall, Superman-style, then makes a joke about beautiful women falling from the sky. Once the talented thief is back on solid ground, she throws her arms around a very shaken Bangalore, who is giving Valkyrie some serious stink-eye while the three of them discuss the aggressive plant life that just threw Loba off the map.

The scene confirmed what some players have suspected for a while: Loba is the former IMC soldier’s love interest. Revenant hinted at it last season, mentioning that Bangalore and Loba were having “girls nights,” and it’s been clear from the beginning that the two Legends have chemistry. But it looks like their romance is about to be third-partied, as Valkyrie has been shamelessly flirting with Loba via in-game dialogue, and Loba (perhaps unaware that Bangalore has caught feelings) is flirting right back. And it’s awesome.

Let me say that again. We’ve got a love triangle between three LGBT women of color, everyone is wearing actual combat gear, and none of them are being overtly exploited for the entertainment of heterosexual men. As a bisexual woman myself, that’s a pretty huge deal. When lesbian and bisexual women are portrayed in media, they’re often hyper-sexualized and designed to appeal to the straight male gaze rather than the demographic they are meant to represent. Representation matters, but it can’t just stop there. Minorities need to be represented with realism and respect—anything less is just adding to the problem.

Part of the beauty of Apex is that it forces players of all different backgrounds to come together as a team of characters whose ethnicity they may not be familiar with. When these characters are accurately represented, they inspire curiosity where there may otherwise be prejudice. I myself have slowly been learning the Korean alphabet in the hopes of more easily translating some of the Hangul phrases found on cosmetics and within the maps themselves. Along the way, I’ve picked up a tiny bit of Korean, and I’ll occasionally understand some of Crypto’s simpler Korean lines like “let’s go,” or “be careful.” I’ve also learned things about Korean culture I never would have otherwise known. That’s part of why respectful representation is so important — it encourages self-education and shatters stereotypes.

When it comes to Valkyrie, the overall reaction from fans seems to be mostly positive, but what really matters is what Asian players think. While some Asian fans are less than pleased with Respawn’s portrayal of the newest Legend, others are happy to see an Asian-American character who expresses her sexuality on her own terms, and Valkyrie’s voice actress, Erika Ishii, is among them. Like the character she portrays, Ishii is a queer Japanese-American. She seems pretty thrilled about Kairi’s addition to the Legend lineup, and she’s certainly not alone. Our newest Legend may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s okay. It’s better than okay, actually — it’s the point. Valkyrie does things her way, and she doesn’t care who likes it.

“My whole life, I’ve waited for a character like her. For a story like this. @PlayApex, thank you,” Ishii said in a recent tweet. “My call sign is Valkyrie. And the skies belong to me.”

Whether you love her or hate her, I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: anyone who’s eagerly awaiting the chance to see Valkyrie go zooming overhead in a fetishized approximation of a Geisha outfit is barking up the wrong zipline.

READ NEXT: Best Apex Legends Controller Settings: Presets, Sensitivity & More