It is a commonplace to assert that one of medievalism's greatest virtues lies in its opportunities for the loosening of gender constrictions, and certainly a quick inventory of medievalist texts from the 1980s on seems to bear witness to this phenomenon, as it features females taking up traditionally male roles, alternative matriarchal societies, and the sharp questioning of traditional masculine values. Yet while these may be refreshing changes from the pale and overtressed maidens of Pre-Raphaelite painting or the vapor-prone women of Gothic novels, celebration of this phenomenon needs to be tempered with caution. Jane Tolmie's intelligent essay on heroines in the fantasy genre, for example, shrewdly points out that like their forerunners in medieval romance, fantasy heroines’ very exceptionalism depends, within the constraints of the genre, upon the flattening of representation and upon lack of power for the other female characters. Moreover, the heroine's access to power is frequently through the very cultural institutions that support constraining ideologies of gender in the first place. Other critics, such as James Noble and Lee Tolbin McClain, have focused attention on the problematic gender essentialism and homophobia in The Mists of Avalon, or found that overly narrow emphasis on behavioral gender roles in medievalist texts ignores the issue of determinative embodiment of these heroines: where, for example, is the place in medievalism for the “gap-tothed” Wife of Bath or Grendel's grieving mother? However, most studies of the relationship of gender and medievalism have focused on traditional texts: novels, short stories, films, and, occasionally, graphic novels. Massively multi-player online role-playing games (known as MMORPGs), of which the dominant games are largely medievalist, complicate the idea of a medievalist “text” on a number of grounds. First, they are capable of near-infinite expansion of both narrative geography and characters; in fact, their survival depends upon continual growth in both areas. Second, they are collaborative texts formed from the templates given by the programmers and from the adventures and contextual narratives provided by the participants.