What Michonne, Sasha, and Beyoncé Teach Us About the Complexities of Anger

Shonte Daniels
Deorbital
Published in
7 min readJun 6, 2016

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As Beyoncé twirls in her sun dress, her hot sauce-labeled bat equipped in her hand, she looks nothing but content. “What’s worse, being jealous or crazy?” she sings in the song “Hold Up” skipping down the street as she bashes car windows and knocks hydrant tops until they erupt. A smile sits on her face as she chooses: “I’d rather be crazy.”

When Beyoncé released her visual album Lemonade on April 23, 2016, Black women rejoiced in celebration and commendation: finally, a piece of work centering a Black woman who is vulnerable, open and unequivocally angry. Beyoncé disrupted the notion that a Black woman’s emotional (and physical) strength makes her impenetrable, that a confident appearance does not hide feelings of betrayal and depression. Beyoncé humanized the angry Black woman, flipped the stereotype on its head and revealed the complexities of rage: irrationality, sadness, loneliness, jealousy and so on. Every person can be angry, but why is a Black woman’s anger ridiculed and dismissed?

Women of color are rarely placed in the spotlight in entertainment, whether it be in movies, television or videogames. Beyoncé, sitting nicely on the success she has made for herself, has the ability to show a more personal side without fear of losing her fans. But not all artists of color, or even fictional characters of color, are awarded the ability to show their anger without being distilled down to a troublesome stereotype.

Yet two games, released this year, have done well at showing how a Black woman and Latina can be both angry and not defined by their anger. Coincidentally, both feature sword wielding heroines, much like Beyoncé, sauntering with her bat. The Walking Dead: Michonne and Severed featuring protagonists Michonne and Sasha respectively both show what anger in a woman of color looks like when shown multidimensionally.

The Walking Dead: Michonne follows the katana-wielding protagonist between issues 126 and 139 of the comics, when Michonne leaves her main group to reconcile with her personal demons alone. Throughout the miniseries, Michonne is distant and taciturn. When players can pick a piece of dialogue for Michonne to say, those options rarely allow Michonne to show emotion beyond anger and annoyance. Since she is most known for her impressive skills slicing heads off of zombies with her famous katana, a character like Michonne always runs the risk of being the Strong or Angry Black Woman trope, but game developer TellTale works mercilessly to show that Michonne’s ruthlessness comes as the result losing her daughters, Colette and Elodie. Michonne is perhaps most known and most favored for her strength, and her capability to survive a zombie apocalypse on her own, but the thing that anchors her in the game is the trauma of losing her children.

The game begins with a crushed Michonne, walking between hallucinatory states of the past and present, as she kills zombies and follows images she believes to be her daughters. Dejected, Michonne contemplates suicide and brings a gun to her head. The game shows that Michonne is more than her sword skills; she is torn by the fact that she is still alive and her children, presumably, are not. While Beyoncé can smash windows and public property with a smile on her face, Michonne kills zombies tight-lipped, seemingly emotionless. Meanwhile, their hearts are breaking. Their violent actions (i.e. smashing car windows and slicing through zombies) are manifestations of their anger and their grief. It is their mode of physical and emotional survival that makes their rage so complex and human.

The final episode of Michonne’s miniseries solidifies that Michonne is not defined by her muscles and sword skills. The final choice the player makes is whether or not to leave her children, now hallucinations, in a burning building. In this sequence, Michonne is reeling with grief. Throughout each episode, she sees her children, relives old scenarios, reminds herself that she’ll never know what happened to them. Michonne’s anger, like anyone’s, is multifaceted and should be seen as such. Even her sword skills are loaded with the heaviness of her burden, something that cannot be resolved with zombie slaying.

Sasha, from DrinkBox Studio’s “Severed”

Sasha, the main protagonist for DrinkBox Studios’ Severed is motivated in a similar fashion as Michonne. Severed stars Sasha, a young Latina woman who loses her arm during an attempt to rescue her family, and must travel alone in demonic ruins in search of her brother and parents. Latina women also face the burden of being reduced down to their rage. Stereotypically, if Latinos are not portrayed as criminals or maids, then they are loud, incredibly passionate in their love or anger. But Sasha’s anger is wrapped up, like Michonne, in her isolation from the loss of her family. Where Michonne and Beyoncé’s emotion comes from speculation and mystery (rumors of cheating, missing children), Sasha’s source of anger comes from the knowledge that her family is dead. Sasha finds her family in lifeless piles, roots growing through their skin and eye sockets. In one way, Sasha’s fate helps her through her grieving process, as she’s able to bury her lost family, and even speak to them. Sasha finds solace where Beyoncé and Michonne cannot, by destroying the beasts that separated her from her family. In an interview with Power Up Gaming, DrinkBox Studios’ concept lead, Augusto Quijano, explains that the game is less about death and more about Sasha’s healing process as she finds her family, but anger is a part of her healing. In the moments when we can see Sasha through her reflection, her anger is like Michonne’s, a quiet festering within. Even as she slices her foes, she does not scream or shout; The strike of her sword is a release of rage.

The silent protagonist is not new in games, and is sometimes considered to be a stand-in for the player. Sasha is clearly not one of those protagonists. Sasha’s silence represents her own troubles ruminating in her head. Michonne may be tight-lipped, but she isn’t quiet; she has many opportunities to express her concerns to her peers. Conversely, Sasha is a silent character placed in a world that despises her. She has no opportunity to grieve, to share her misery, except for the end of the game when she finds her family.

Sasha’s emotion also comes across in the game itself, through its unsettling imagery and characters who at first see Sasha as a trespasser. Remnants of her enemies, dropped eyeballs, wings, and teeth, all make up Sasha’s armor as she traverses through a world that is constantly threatening to kill her. No matter where she goes, death is around her. by the end of the game, characters that originally despised Sasha find a liking to her, and help her on her quest. When she finally finds her family, their spirits remind her to not be afraid, and to wear the pain she feels as love. Like Michonne, Sasha’s anger comes from grief, and learning to live past it. In these scenarios, we end up with formidable, strong women, but we cannot divorce that strength from the hurt they are feeling.

In her essay “The Uses of Anger”, Audre Lorde describes anger a “a source of empowerment we must not fear to tap for energy rather than guilt.” Rage is a means of survival, and should be as acceptable an emotion joy or fear. These three women all use their rage as both survival and grief. Because of niggling ideas that Latinas and Black women are always angry, always strong and emotionally bulletproof, our anger is diminished and dismissed. But the truth is that our anger is complicated and multifaceted. No art form should avoid the portrayal of an angry woman, but they should consider the ways anger is tied to a myriad of emotions. Beyoncé’s album is in many ways speaking primarily to Black women and their struggle, but people of all races should look to Beyoncé, as well as Michonne and Sasha, to discover how to show the dimensions in rage.

Another important question to ask is when we’ll see more depictions of women of color that are not suffering. I want more happy-go-lucky Black women, silly Latinas, loving women of color who are not defined by their misery. As Melissa Harris-Perry pointed out at Elle, “I want to believe at least one black woman was not handed lemons, but lemonade, already chilled and sweetened.” Repurposing the angry trope is helpful, but when will we see more characters of color, both in leading and supporting roles, sipping sweet lemonade without a care in the world?

Shonté Daniels is an editorial associate at Rewire, poet and games journalist. Her work has appeared in Kill Screen, Motherboard, The Arcade Review and elsewhere. Follow Shonté on twitter: @Johnnyxh.

Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. We are always looking for pitches, send an email to editors@deorbital.media if you are interested.

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