>There is no "trope." There's only "100 years ago."

It is actually a trope. While the origins of the trope were in "Perils of Pauline" (debated), it's also been used in multiple cartoons, movies, video games, comics, manga (this was news to me, I had entirely forgotten it's use in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), books, plays, etc.

The fact that the achievement was just for a woman was a shitty decision, but it is a very small decision that was likely made with very, very little thought put in to it at all. Achievements are rarely significant parts of games. They are usually afterthoughts that are there as jokes or to sometimes pad out the game a little more (beat the game on every difficulty is basically tripling the time a player spends on your game).

I will not disagree that they should've put it in the parameters that you can do it to a man as well, but in terms of what Red Dead was as a whole, the single achievement of murdering a single person is relatively insignificant and a bit unfair to a game that has a pretty strong cast of characters. Bonnie MacFarlane is the head of the ranch and saves the protagonists life, does the lion's share of the work on the ranch, just to name one. I don't want to get in too many details because it is a very well done game.

The issue for Red Dead specifically is likely one of time rather than malicious intent. Nothing else about that game indicates any particular hatred of women or even condescension. If the cast seems male-centric, which it is, it's because Red Dead and a lot of Rockstar games tend to tackle issues of masculinity and have been doing so for quite some time.

By no means am I going to stand here and defend the industry, but the example used here with Red Dead is a pretty weak one compared to the vast swaths of games out there that range from "why aren't there and female characters" to "how come all of the ladies in Gears of War never actually do anything besides have gigantic breasts and somehow keep good looking hair in a warzone?" Good-looking, of course, being relative to when their textures load in.

It's an incredible shame that as an industry video games can't get away from the whole white man in front of the camera for the next 20 hours. It's really tiring after awhile and fucking confusing why it keeps happening from a story perspective. Shit, I would've given Watch_Dogs a prop if the protagonist was not-a-white-guy. It'd give more of a reason for cops to show up all the time instead of "AI that are coded to report actions taken by the player in X yards without regards to line of sight."

Outside of indie games, it seems that for the most part companies have gotten it in to their heads that if they let the player be a girl then anyone touching it will think it's gross. It's a larger issue of writing in games that extends far beyond just ladies (name the last black main character where you couldn't customize your main character), and it's something that needs to be addressed at a deeper level than looking at achievements.

It's incredibly confusing that the only game I've played in recent months where you've been in a pretty stable relationship during the actual game is Wolfenstein, a game about a cartoonishly well built protagonist murdering hundreds of nazis every minute. By the way, if anyone likes shooters, you should go play Wolfenstein, because it's actually fun and at least Nazis are really straightforward bad guys instead of yet "generic arabic people living in a desert" or "comically evil russians."