I like watching people fight. In animation, staged contests, virtual contests, and sometimes,
real contests. But there are parts of fighting culture that bother me, and I’m still trying
to unpack them. Martial arts is a huge, ancient, awesome thing, but its most public gatekeepers
encourage men to act… not cool.
- What the [bleep] is wrong with him!?
- I wanted to examine those macho ideals by surveying the fighting game dudes who
didn’t fit the hypermasculine mold.
Necro, Lee Chaolan, Faust, Belial, the list goes on.
But no matter where my research took me, I always got pulled back to an inescapable,
singular figure, and the contradictions he embodies.
Voldo.
What. Is up. With Voldo?
He’s haunted us since he first wriggled into our lives in 1995. Everything about him
is evasive, slippery, and hard to pin down: I mean his character, and his combat game plan,
and his reasons for existing.
[buzzing seductive sword noise]
Here’s what the games tell us:
Voldo is a character from the Soul Edge and Soulcalibur fighting games. He’s one of
5 characters who have appeared in all 7 entries.
He’s a warrior who’s implied to be blind and mute, either by natural causes or from all the…
stuff? stuck to his head. He’s the obsessive servant of an Italian weapons merchant,
Vercci Di Napoli, who gets very rich, and then loses most of his fortune in the Italian Wars.
[DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MARCH!]
After that, Vercci becomes more and more paranoid, and he makes plans to hoard the remainder
of his wealth in an underground vault called THE MONEY PIT. He pays some poor contractors
to build it for him, and when they’re done, Voldo ensures the vault’s secrecy by killing them.
Another case for strong unions.
Not long after that, Vercci dies, and the Money Pit becomes his tomb. Voldo stays there
as its guardian, using his trademark Katar to chop up anyone who comes snooping around.
He’s a servant to a dead master, protecting wealth he’ll never enjoy, living his life
in cold and darkness.
He also does a funny dance.
So yeah. He's got this grimdark origin story that… really doesn't explain his whole
deal. Voldo is an oddity. He’s unusual, he’s beloved, and he inspires questions.
What's with all the wiggling? What's with the clothes? Is he… y’know?
That’s up to us to figure out.
So let's start what we can see: Leather and Grace.
[pop music with seductive male vocals building]
Voldo usually wears some assortment of skintight leather straps, harnesses, fishnets and devices
meant to constrict, blind, or gag him.
It’s BDSM gear.
To really understand why, and how
this got into Soulcalibur, we’ve got to go back to WWII.
- Welcome back to the stage of history!
Gay men have always existed. The subcultures, assumptions, and stereotypes differ from region
to region and era to era. But in the 1940’s, in the United States, the semi-modern stereotype
of the gay man had been codified enough that a subset of gay men were ready to rebel against it.
So a subculture emerged! Leather culture is a lot of things to a lot of people, but one
of the core elements was an exploration or adoption of an extreme form of masculinity.
Pretty much every guy had served in World War II or at least been exposed secondhand
to the hypermasculine hierarchy of the military. The movement was inspired by that, and by
Marlon Brando’s badass leather-clad biker dude character in The Wild One.
The scene spawned bars and motorcycle clubs. Leather was a lifestyle, and for a lot of
people, that included the kink side too. Leather culture and BDSM culture were tightly bound,
if you’ll excuse the pun.
Leather and chains would bleed out into other scenes. In the late 1970s, British God of Metal
Rob Halford was the lead singer of Judas Priest. Rob was gay, and very aware of the leather
scene. When he adopted the leather daddy look for his stage gear, other bands and fans imitated.
All of a sudden, this look was a gay thing and a heavy metal thing, and different kinds
of people were enjoying the same masculine symbols for really different reasons.
-JUDAS PRIIIIIIIIIIIIEST
-You leave your girlfriends at home or something? -YOU KNOW IT!! -YEAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
But how did all this western queer and metal culture make its way into a fighting game, developed
in Japan in the mid 90s? I couldn’t find any recorded answers from the game developers,
but if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say it arrived by way of HellRaiser.
Hellraiser is a psychosexual horror movie written and directed by Clive Barker, who
is also a gay man. When it was time to design his interdimensional sex gods, Clive yoinkreated
the eldritch leather daddy look, inspired by punk and metal fashion, and his own visits
to S&M and leather clubs. For straight people who didn’t go to metal shows or frequent
Mapplethorpe exhibits, Pinhead was probably their first contact with eroticised leather.
The movie was influencing pulpy Japanese media as early as Kentaro Miura’s Berserk in 1991.
And, I mean if you look at Voldo next to Pinhead or Butterball, the line is pretty clear.
Other than the looks, Voldo and the cenobites have another big thing in common. They were
both monsters introduced to unsettle the audiences’ normie sensibilities. But a dedicated segment
of the audience said “these weirdos rule! Give us more!” By the third Hellraiser movie,
the cenobites were center stage, getting their own origin stories and redemption arcs. Just
like there’s no Hellraiser without Pinhead, there’s no Soulcalibur without Voldo.
He's always there!
But that doesn’t explain everything. I mean I’ve never seen *this* in a Clive Barker movie.
So let's talk about the moves. Let’s talk about Grace.
The defining trait of Voldo’s movement is grace, which sets him apart from a lot of
male fighting game characters. He slithers along the ground, he gyrates, moves softly,
and generally does stuff that the masculine gatekeepers have conditioned us to think of as frivolous
in MARTIAL COMBAT. But Voldo is still a threat.
How do you fight a guy who does this????
You could write it off as pure video game fantasy, but there are a handful of non-digital fighting
men who have embraced grace.
Muhammad Ali, perhaps the best fighter to have ever lived, proudly claimed that he could
“float like a butterfly.” In the weird old days of MMA, Genki Sudo would wiggle his
way around the ring, pop-locking and dancing. Over in his American UFC bouts, you can hear
the commentators trying to rationalize his grace and flamboyance the only way their little
MASCULINE BRAINS can: as a form of psychological warfare.
-He’s totally turning his back to him! …
...AND he can fight, he’s not just crazy like this! This guy can really fight!
- They just couldn’t seem to comprehend that, for this guy, fighting wasn’t just about
performing masculine dominance. It wasn’t war. He was having fun, and he liked to dance.
He retired from fighting with an impressive 16-4 record, but he’s still dancing.
Maybe the best historical parallel to Voldo came from the pro wrestling world.
Outside the ring, he was known as Bernard Herman. He was a small guy, Jewish, came up as an
amateur boxer, supposedly lived in a trailer full of fine books and records.
In the ring, he was Ricki “The Ballerina” Starr. The very idea of a male ballerina was provocative.
Maybe it still is? I don't know when Billy Elliot came out.
It was even more of a novelty to see a male ballerina in the context of combat.
- Ricki Starr, who in fact *is* a ballet dancer, is wearing... [chuckes] ballet shoes!
- He’d do his stretches, and after the bell, he’d literally dance circles around his
opponent. They’d get more and more frustrated, and eventually, he’d seize victory with
some goofy act of brilliant grace.
And just like Voldo, this outsider, this misplaced, incorrect-kind-of dude would become beloved.
Even in front of the working class crowds of 1950’s wrestling fans, Ricki Starr was
a hero.
Dance scholar Laura Katz Rizzo writes:
- “Within his choreography, masculinity is not the opposite of femininity, but is instead
a diverse range of characteristics along a spectrum ranging from graceful to strong.
When Starr/Hermann flaunted a queer masculinity in the wrestling ring, he also exposed the
distinctions between masculine and feminine as truly constructed presumptions”
- Obviously there are some differences. Bernard Herman’s ballet thing wasn’t just a bit
for the wrestling ring. He legitimately studied and practiced the art. Starr was a character
that Herman created that explored and exploited the gender conflicts he himself embodied.
Voldo is a character created by
other people to titillate and provoke our ~normative gender feelings.~
But they share something important. They show that men, even in competitive, combative spaces,
can express parts of themselves outside the Masculinity Starter Kit of stoicism, efficiency,
and strength. When Voldo goes toe to toe with Nightmare or Mitsurugi or Geralt
(who is in the game for some reason), it’s a tacit admission that the stoic ideal of masculinity
is kind of bullshit. Get absolutely rekt Hemingway.
Dudes like Voldo, Starr, and Sudo expose the truth, which is that fighting is kind of silly.
It doesn’t prove who is better, or who is right. Despite what the UFC and WWE promo
packages tell you, these guys aren’t going to war. They’re going to sport. And that
sport is better and more interesting when the people who do it can be joyful and expressive,
and aren’t forced into a generic masculine mold.
- I’m going away from promos, and I’m just gonna be myself. Thank you, Alexander Gustafsson.
You made me a better man and fighter tonight. I will forever be indebted to you.
- In a world governed by T O X I C M A S C U L I N I T Y, there is a narrow set of ways guys
are supposed to move. Our bodies are the most visible parts of us, and the easiest to police.
Anyone who has ever thrown a football wrong can attest to this. They will eat you alive.
Growing up as a dude means other dudes will scrutinize the way you move through the world
and punish you until you fall into line.
Why do you walk like that?
Why do you put your hands on your hips like that?
Why do you hold your sandwich like that?
It’s exhausting. Once I was doing a stream with a sports site and somebody in the
chat called me a beta and said it looked like I could barely hold my glass of water with
my “little praying mantis” arms, which is an incredible roast... but come on, dude.
To escape that scrutiny, you’ve got to find a way to be the right kind of man. And if
you look at the leading men of fighting games, you can see a cartoonish embodiment of the
desired masculine ideals. Bodies built for violence. They move in strong, straight lines.
Brutal, efficient, confident, dominant.
Which is why Voldo is so compelling and unusual and charming. By merit of being a little freak,
he’s one of the only men freed from those limitations. He can wiggle and sway like a
reed in the wind. He can be graceful. No man has ever dapped another man in the gym and
said “bro i admire your grace.” But they should. It would be nice. That’s where
I’m goin with this.
Makes me wonder what kind of guy Ryu or Kazuya Mishima would be if their stories weren’t
full of dudes being extremely mean to them. Maybe they’d find ways of using their
bodies that didn’t involve fighting, and if they didn’t, they'd at least have
more fun. Maybe Ryu could relax his shoulders a bit. Maybe Kazuya would be able to smile
serenely without throwing his dad off a cliff first.
I think it would be more fun. In a world where more real and fictional fighters were free
to wander off that set path, characters like Voldo would stand out less. But maybe that
would be okay.
So that’s what’s up with Voldo. He is a graceful, leathery little man. He's a bundle
of questions and contradictions, patched together from centuries of queer culture and masculine rule.
Now it’s time to hop onto Reddit and check my math on this one.
[typing]
[click!]
Ah.
Nah, he— he’s just Italian.
[the sultry sounds of SWING-TINGED DANCE MUSIC]