It’s kind of ironic that Wheatley from Portal 2 has become enshrined as the iconic example of fan-artists anthropomorphising everything under the sun as skinny, ambiguously twentysomething white dudes in dapper suits, given that he’s like the one character who actually deserves it.
i saw the explanation one time of “he’s a bumbling idiot with a maddening insistence all his horrible ideas are right, of course he’s a white man” and i’ve never heard anything so true in my life
Definitely there’s that, but I’m more referring to the fact that Wheatley’s literal function in the game’s plot is to stand as a monument to white male mediocrity. Like, it’s not even subtle!
(Him and Cave Johnson both, really, albeit in different ways. Cave is a takedown of how that mediocrity can become romanticised in the sufficiently privileged: an ineffectual blunderer with more money than good sense becomes a daring visionary whose ideas fail to change the world only because the world isn’t ready for them, and any damage he’s managed to cause is reframed as evidence of how far ahead of the curve he is. Wheatley’s the flip side of that coin, the wheedling sycophant who thinks he’s got what it takes to sit in the big-boy chair, but wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of influence if he got it.)
I would’ve called Cave Johnson a “wow, they’re not even trying to be subtle” ripoff-slash-parody of Elon Musk’s career trajectory, were it not for the fact the game came out 7 years ago
@unbadger look u’ve made portal discussion history on tumblr
Maybe it has something to do with his voice actor literally being a tall, blonde, white man…?
#it’s not that deep
I have to disagree strongly on this one. If you look at the story in portal two and one it is absolutely loaded with critique of American society and absolutely contains both feminist and anti white supremacy undertones.
For example: Take the fact that the first installment revolves around two driven women characters who are only really in conflict because they’ve been turned against each other by the ambitions of male scientists in positions of power. (And yes. Most of the known male scientists in Portal canon if we include the comic, are men. Caroline could be a secretary for all we know. And we all know what fate she suffered for her loyalty to Cave, even if she was a scientist herself.)
Most, if not all of the male characters in Portal are portrayed as inept mediocre buffoons or quirkily programmed robits. The exception is Doug Ratmann who is a chronically mentally ill guy who is onto Aperture’s bullshit and actively working to save Chell for some mysterious reason.
Another notable thing in Portal is the presence of the moon, which has been linked for centuries on end with femininity due to the cyclical nature of the female reproductive system. It’s especially fascinating that the downfall of both Cave Johnson and Wheatley in P2, is the moon itself. (Cave gets moondust poisoning and Wheatley is blasted into space via the moon.) Perhaps its a symbol for feminist social progress and its effect on haphazard scientific culture of the anglo-western world.
The fact that you play as a colored woman of mixed race for the majority of the two games, who is most endangered in spaces which are a bright, sterile white is also notable. This would be relatively meaningless and “makes sense in a scientific environment” if it wasn’t for the fact that almost all of the “safe spaces” in the game where GLaDoS can’t reach you and you achieve a semblance of peace happens to be in shadowy, brown, dark areas. Further underscoring the very tangible symbolism in the portal series that represents a humanist antithesis to the power structures present in our contemporary world.
I hope you enjoyed my essay, I’m ready for my ValvE analyst PHD.
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