After I acquired an e-mail that Bratz: Flaunt Your Style, the primary official Bratz dolls online game since 2012, was popping out in November throughout most platforms, together with, remarkably, the PS5, I used to be intrigued and a bit of amused. After I booted it up, I acquired that acquainted hit of nostalgia, as every of the 4 most important characters—Sasha, Yasmin, Jade, and Cloe—regarded precisely as plastic-smooth as I remembered their dolls being in 2001. They have been even wearing less complicated variations of the outfits the debut set wore that yr (I had the unique Cloe, and sometimes chewed on her palms). I used to be three then, and I are likely to romanticize my favourite childhood issues, however after taking part in Flaunt Your Style (stylized as Flaunt your vogue), I’m prepared to maneuver on.
I didn’t essentially need to be. With my bonbon-sized child mind, I used to see one thing I wanted in Bratz dolls’ attribute tennis-ball-sized heads: flirty, jet-black eyelashes, plump lips, crimson like two strawberries, all in a variety of pores and skin tones and indeterminate ethnic options that different, extra Anglo-Saxon dolls couldn’t supply me as a mixed-race child. To me, Bratz dolls confirmed me the worldwide femininity I ought to aspire to, a portal to my future. Or I acknowledged the Bratz ladies as “Little Hotties,” as a 2006 New Yorker article places it.
However the recreation is, to place it succinctly, not good. It’s a three-ish hour journey you play as one of many 4 Bratz ladies, finishing minigames and low-stakes missions to your very personal Bratz Journal, the place you achieve hundreds of subscribers each time you submit. Your aims are at all times clear-cut and stereotypically female: do yoga within the park, take a superb selfie, purchase new garments and make-up to be able to take a superb selfie and rack up further subscribers. To make every goal extra mind-numbing, you possibly can by no means lose, even whenever you’re as dangerous at working the sport’s clunky minigames (stroll in a vogue present, play in a rock band) and quicktime occasions (the selfies, once more) as I used to be.
My skill to take pleasure in Flaunt Your Style was definitely restricted as a result of I’m, regrettably, now not three years previous, however extra gender impartial and male-centered youngsters’s titles like Pokémon and Tremendous Mario at the very least attempt to rouse my creativeness, which has no age restrict. It feels unfair that, even in 2022, video video games marketed towards younger ladies are nonetheless so myopic of their focus, so one-note, unthinking, and unfeeling. You get to journey the world in Flaunt Your Style, however builders make it possible for Barcelona, Seoul, New York, and Bratz hometown Stilesville all function a shopping center as their central location. It hurts—we get a style of expansive online game actuality with quick journey, and the Bratz ladies stay alone and assist one another’s careers and pursuits as a style of 2022 freedom. However every thing they do sticks to typical gender roles like an annoying wad of gum. In the end, ladies like cute garments, proper?
I hoped, at the very least, {that a} vogue recreation would sometimes be fairly or spectacular, however I performed on PC with a 3080 GPU on the sport’s finest obtainable graphics setting, and nonetheless felt like I used to be looking for which means in pancake batter. There isn’t a strip of shadow or texture anyplace—each location is interchangeable and flat and pink. With not a lot to take pleasure in visually and essentially the most creative gameplay coming all the way down to an occasional added type of transportation, like curler skates or a hoverboard you possibly can hire, I don’t suppose there was any level in reviving a 10-year-old franchise with a $40 recreation about as intriguing as a cement mixer churning chunky glitter. It makes some extent of retaining ladies’ video video games as unadventurous as they have been 20 years in the past in my childhood. So the entire level of Flaunt Your Style, I understand, is to money in on the 2000’s nostalgia at present trapping my technology in amber.
“There are, after all, some ways to look backward,” College of Toronto professor Linda Hutcheon writes in her dialogue from 2000, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” “You’ll be able to look and reject. Or you possibly can look and linger longingly.” We’re on the high of the Y2K revival rollercoaster (although the 2010’s are praying for a flip), and so ladies my age see Bratz dolls with Saint Laurent hearts in our eyes. We’re keen to suck in for Maroske Peech micro-mini skirts, or in order that Poster Lady clothes can cling to our little our bodies just like the Little Hotties, their unique slogan “the ladies with a ardour for vogue,” taught us to. We’ve already mastered their ambiguous, glossed faces for Instagram, as Jia Tolentino famous in 2019.
We’re turning ourselves into Bratz dolls as a result of, for ladies, browsing a tidal wave of nostalgia wasn’t at all times doable. In her dialogue, Hutcheon references anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer, who wrote in 1994 that feminism has “no tendency towards nostalgia, no phantasm of a golden age previously.” However that’s modified 20 years later—our particular days began within the late 90’s and early 2000’s, when lady’s sexual company and wonder was reframed from one thing for males to concern or take to one thing girls might and will use as an emancipatory device.
“That is about woman energy,” Scary Spice says within the Spice Women’ 1997 VHS One Hour of Lady Energy, “this isn’t about selecting up guys.”
Laura Mulvey descendants may argue the identical, that new feminist nostalgia just isn’t a response to males, however a model of the “feminine gaze”—which The Miseducation of Cameron Submit director Ashley Connor describes as “a way of thinking, the place strategy to topic and materials is extra emotional and respectful.” However I don’t suppose the feminine gaze has an opportunity if it’s solely ever made to stare at what conventional gender roles instruct us to want, Victoria’s Secret baggage and unconvincing pop stars.
Whereas exercising our new nostalgia, I believe we’ve gotten a bit of bit misguided. I don’t suppose each lady ought to disappear herself in a pillar of salt, or like a TreeChangeDoll, a preferred doll rehab on Etsy the place previously glamorous Bratz go to lose their make-up and achieve pigtails. There’s nothing flawed with magnificence, and there’s nothing flawed with a lady who has her personal sense of it. However ladies deserve the prospect to be attention-grabbing, not simply given video video games whose sole goal appear to be pushing capitalism and a restricted model of femininity as a false sense of empowerment. We’ve already turned ourselves into Bratz dolls—that type of nostalgia has nothing left to present. Subsequent yr, perhaps, we are able to attempt once more.