I'm crossposting this post about Miranda's infertility, since the quoted posts come from another forum and may be of interest to some. This is what I have posted, at different times, about this topic:
I fully appreciate Miranda's genetic engineering. I think that her father did something desirable in the spirit of human advancement when he created her, and only nullified any merit he might have claimed for it by his underlying ideology and by the way he treated her as a child. Completely apart from the personality I have come to love, Miranda represents an advancement of humanity. I like to imagine that her improved traits eventually will make their way into the human gene pool at large through her offspring.
So, in a purely genetic and impersonal way, I *want* her on that pedestal. I *want* her to be the forerunner of a kind of human advancement that has nothing to do with political domination, and everything with improving individual capabilities and understanding through human ingenuity.
For that reason, I want her to be fully functional as a human woman. That she is not flawless in her reasoning we know, we also know that she has serious problems due to her upbringing. It is enough. I do not subscribe to the school of thought that a character must be loaded with flaws to be sympathetic, and I find it one of the most contemptible human traits to refuse sympathy to someone especially gifted unless that person has some trait that completely cancels that out.
This explains why, even though her infertility will not influence the relationship any of my Shepards has with her one bit, and not lessen in any way my regard for her, I nonetheless hate her infertility with a passion.
I don't mind Miranda having some permanent medical condition. I mind her having exactly this medical condition because it would make that "human advancement" angle die in its infancy, making her, indeed, the end of it. Or so I've thought until I realized that her father's technology would be a means to create biological children of her own.
In the end it's all about the big picture. As for the personal, I want a reasonably happy ending for Miranda, with or without children, it doesn't really matter. She is and stays my favorite character with or without the infertility. I don't see it as insulting, though it is heavy-handed and generally disagreeable. What I mind, that's the possible intention on Bioware's part of precluding anyone from interpreting Miranda's genetic engineering as something both desirable and successful in the long term, for humanity. As I do that and will continue to do it, I feel that my interpretation of Miranda's background is punished by the developers. That's the insult.
Anyway, as for ways around the problem, while medical knowledge and technology aren't perfect in the ME universe, it's simply not believable that an infertility caused by a simple condition is something you can't get around with the level of biotechnology we have witnessed in the game. Which way exactly, that remains to be seen. I've come to prefer jtav's scenario that Miranda will be able to use her father's methods to make biological children of her own, counteracting the flaws in her own upbringring by being a better parent that her father was to her. That would indicate that she's made peace with who and what she is, and bring home the fact that the flaw does not lie in the origin but in the upbringing. That's a message I'd like to see sent.
Against the argument that her improvements are superficial:
Miranda has quite a few non-superficial improvements:
"I heal quickly and I'll likely live half again as long as the average human"
"My reflexes, my strength, even my looks -- they're all designed to give me an edge"
You can also tell she's engineered to be more intelligent.
I agree that the way she was advertised is one-sided.
Against the argument that she needed this to be "humanized"
Grr...
I hate this argument with a passion. She was fine as she was. She doesn't need to be infertile to make people understand her. And she definitely didn't need to be "humanized" Gods, how I hate this term. Miranda is human enough, thrice damn it!
If people can't deal with a confident woman they should look for someone else. If they have the need to drag every companion down below their own level - and the need to do this indicates a very low level indeed - they should look for someone else.
Yes, it was intended to make people go "poor Miranda". It is not a negative way to put it, it *is* negative to start with.
As for a solution: It is not believable that the woman who brought a man back from the dead is unable to come up with way to have a child if she wants to. But anyway, in my view the best way to deal with it is to give us a number of options in an after-the-end conversation (like those after the final battle in the throne in DAO), where we can basically define how things stand by making Shepard say, for instance, one of these things:
Option 1: I never wanted children anyway, and I can't see you as a mother.
Option 2: You brought me back from the dead. Curing you shouldn't be a big problem now that we've got the time.
Option 3: We'll have to live with it - but humanity owes you for that sacrifice, and I won't let them forget it.
While I'm at it. I have read several posts over the time where people said they'd break up with Miranda because of this. That's their prerogative of course, but her infertility does not reduce her great personality one bit, it does not take anything away from her attraction, it does not make her in any way less fascinating - and it also does not make her more sympathetic. She already is - as Samara says - a woman with many burdens she doesn't choose to share (Samara adds "as it should be"). So I refute any claim that this problem was in any way "necessary", as some people say, to make her more accessible. Those who needed that to make it so weren't looking deeply enough.
Modifié par Ieldra2, 03 mars 2011 - 03:56 .
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