What are the best mothers and ships in video games? Thank goodness there’s a website for that now.
Mothership, a new publication at the intersection of gender and games from ex-Polygon staffers Maddy Myers and Zoë Hannah, is the one bright spot in an already terrible year for games media. Also, it’s about way more than mothers and ships. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, Maddy and Zoë tell us about their plans for the site and what it means to launch a publication like this in an era when feminist media has been gutted, and even venerable institutions like Teen Vogue – a primary inspiration for Mothership – have fallen.
Then we talk about how much money $8 is (actually $10, but also possibly $5). We also imagine what might happen if Asmongold, fresh off being retweeted by JD Vance, travels to The White House and gives Donald Trump some kind of plague. Nothing too terrible, of course!
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can put a crack team of scientists on settling this $8 debate once and for all.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: From one of our readers: Who/what is the best mother in games? Use whatever meaning of the term “mother” you want. And what’s your favorite ship? Use whatever meaning of “ship” you want.
Maddy: Oh my god. Best mother in games is legit hard because there’s almost no moms in games.
Gita: Best as in “best portrayal of what motherhood often ends up being like” is the lady from Portal.
Nathan: Chell?
Gita: Not Chell, the robot.
Maddy: GLaDOS and Chell’s mommy-daughter relationship is terrifying.
Gita: That is a mother-daughter relationship, and that is a pretty accurate representation of how a lot of adult women feel about their mothers.
Maddy: Yeah, I would say [it’s the] best in terms of a story potential and also an iteration on, I would say, the classic Mother Brain-Samus relationship, which is of course an iteration on the original Alien movie – the mother AI in that movie. All of these things are permutations of permutations of permutations, and GLaDOS is one of the greatest ones. The idea of a super computer AI being a female voice and also therefore being your mom and evil – just kind of knowing that lineage is so key there. It’s part of what makes GLaDOS so fascinating and still relevant today to some of the conversations we have about AI and what it’s for and what it does.
Gita: Do you have any other ideas of who the best mom is?
Maddy: I mean, I don’t know. There’s a lot of bad moms in games. I did like Returnal, where you get to play as a woman who’s kind of wrestling with the idea of that. I might go with that. But I think GLaDOS is also a really great answer as a multifaceted mother figure character.
Gita: Your mom doesn’t want you to disobey her, and if you do, she’ll kill you.
Maddy: Maybe it says something that it’s so easy to think of bad moms in games. I think that may be something to interrogate.
Gita: Along the same lines as, at a certain point in time, all video games became about being a father.
Maddy: Yeah, but we still haven’t had the time where all video games are about being a mother. They’re instead about the game developer’s relationship with their mother – which says something about who’s making games still and how many of them are mothers. Maybe not that many.
Gita: Do you have a favorite ship?
Maddy: I was asked on the Minn/Max show earlier this week about what I picture as being the Mothership, and I talked about the Protoss mothership in StarCraft II. I do think that ship looks freaking cool as hell, and it is what I picture.
But I think what they’re really asking [about] is romantic ship. There’s some pretty good Dragon Age and Mass Effect classics. Like, come on: Player/Garrus. There’s a reason why that’s a classic. It’s still good.
Gita: We all understand why.
Nathan: Calibrations.
Maddy: Calibrations, baby.
Gita: Hundreds of thousands of frustrated female players and Johnny Silverhand is my favorite.
Maddy: He’s not my type, personally, but I do get it.
Gita: And you know why he is my type.
Maddy: I do know you well enough to know that, and it’s like with anything else: You have some mild concern about someone whose type is Johnny Silverhand.
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