Lae’zel and Shadowheart can be mean sometimes, and it’s okay to embrace women in video games like them.
Nobody’s afraid of them. This article created its own problem to complain about.
Lae’zel and Shadowheart
This feels a lot more like the author is upset by the way these two were done, and is in turn projecting that upon “other gamers”.
So the author argues that unlikable characters should be liked because: buzzword, buzzword, woman, buzzword and that the customers are wrong. It’s art, it’s subjective, and that means people can also not like it. If it is indeed the case a vocal group of customers are finding it hard to get into the game because some characters are perceived as badly written, I doubt this is because they are all misogynistic neck-beards.
Yeah, “people don’t like the racist authoritarian because she’s a woman” sure is a hot take.
What…? This isn’t a real issue
The least important part of a character is their sex.
Well that’s not true at all. Men and women have different life experiences and that often is what drives a narrative.
So you can’t have a good character or story unless it’s centered around whether the character is a man or a woman? You’re gonna lose your mind when you hear about aliens, robots and other non sexed characters.
So you can’t have a good character or story unless it’s centered around whether the character is a man or a woman?
Where on Earth did you get that from my comment?
You’re gonna lose your mind when you hear about aliens, robots and other non sexed characters.
….which often is attached to specific unique narrative concepts for those types of characters, since they too share a unique world view that is helpful or even necessary to set the background and future specific storyline.
Minthara, a companion who could previously only be recruited by joining her side and more or less committing genocide on a grove full of tieflings, can now simply be knocked out and talked to at a later point in the game where all of that drama can be ignored.
Minthara was being mind-controlled. When she’s free, she’s still evil but not that evil - she even asks the player character what his excuse for killing the tieflings is, since he wasn’t mind-controlled.
(Knocking her out still doesn’t make sense, but mostly because at that point in the game the player has no in-character reason to think that she’s special aside from the fact that all the other enemies are goblins and she’s a
Forgotten Realms BDSM sex symboldrow.)Nice… A big old spoiler
Yeah, I blew her the fuck up. I didn’t think she was a companion until I looted her and she had underwear and a backpack. Strangely only companions wear underwear in BG3. I don’t know what’s up with that.
I would add another thing to this I wish the author would talk about instead of immediately projecting onto their own prejudices: People generally prefer the “good” option in games.
And I don’t even necessarily mean whatever the game calls Paragon-vs-Renegade. I mean the fact that for a game where you recruit characters to your “camp”, naturally losing characters feels like a fail state. Like you messed something up. As a result, players will intuitively lean to options that present the least “bad outcome”, in this context meaning the less often NPCs leave your camp the better. Recruiting someone is a victory, someone leaving is a defeat. The games present it as such, so it’s no wonder players err towards wanting everyone there.
Look, I’m a lesbian, all hot girls intimidate me.
I’m
arousedimpressed by strong women, physically and emotionally. And in a world that can do better by them, this is balancing the scales.I also want to say that as we saw with Legend of Korra, if they’re interesting characters and are ‘cool’ nobody will care about gender.
