Asenza wrote...
TL;DR: Was Jack Raped? (If so, it was sooo not necessary.)
Alright, so I've been lurking for a while now, just enjoying the discussion of all the other Jack fans, and just now decided to post.
My sister is the biggest Mass Effect fan in the world, and for a while, more engrossed in the Dragon Age Series, all I did was watch her play Mass Effect and ME2 again, and again, and again...
She never took Jack with her in her party. She never took several characters with her at all, actually- Garrus and Miranda were her staple squadmates. And while I love Garrus- who couldn't?- I just.... just something about Miranda's face bothers me, and I couldn't get very sympathetic with her history because the antagonist of it, her father, is a bogeyman we only ever hear about second hand. Bored of watching my sister play as a renagade, with nearly the same face, making all the same decisions, when I finally got interested in Mass Effect, my interest was on characters that my sister hadn't dragged all across the galaxy.
Jack, in particular. There's not much I can say about her that hasn't already been said, as to why I love her as a character so much, but I decided to post today because I had a question. On the Mass Effect Wiki, it states that Jack was raped, shortly after escaping the Cerberus facility, and then while in prison. However, throughout all the Youtube vids with Jack in them, and throughout all my sister's playthroughs (I am just now working on my own, shooting games aren't exactly my forte) I have never once heard or seen anything alluding to that particular abuse. So can anyone point me to where in the game it states- or implies- that Jack was sexually abused?
The rape issue bothers me in particular, because it feels tacked on, a tawdry attempt to add more drama and traumatic experience to an already tortured character. Wasn't it enough that she was kidnaped from her family, imprisioned and experimented on like a lab rat, forced to kill other children and conditioned to love violence, Bioware? Wasn't it enough that her every interaction with other human beings after her escape consisted of manipulation and betrayal? I quote Limyaael, from her wonderful list of Fantasy/Creative Writing Rants when she said-
"... authors misjudge the scale of the abuse. They go too far one way or the other. On the major side, the author introduces a character who was beaten by her mother. And raped by her father. And had her teddy bear ripped apart. And who was neglected. And whose beloved brother died trying to protect her. And whose uncle starved her. And whose sister died in a fire for which the character blames herself. And whose magic was weak enough to get her teased by the other children in the mage school. And who was tortured by the bad guys. The author is screaming at me, insisting, “This character is in such pain that you can’t even imagine it!” Yes. Exactly. Increase the pain too much, and my imaginative connection with the character snaps. She becomes a blank to me, just a body for the author to heap fictional torture on. I don’t feel about her the same way I do about a victim of atrocities in the real world, because the author has reminded me that it’s all make-believe; the only reason this person is suffering so much is because the author wants her to."
That is how I feel about Jack. There is a lot more to her than what Cerberus did to her during her childhood, and I like that. But the thing about her history post-Teltin is that the majority of her experiences were bad ones. So to add a rape (or two, looking at the Wiki again) on top of that, when Jack as a character has been "raped" or abused the majority of her life, that has crossed a line for me.
Ugh. I'm kind of hoping that the Wiki people just got it wrong...
Since this is the romance discussion thread, I should add that I wish Jack's final romance scene had a little more dialogue to it. "That I need...-?" Need what? That all she needs is the love of a good man, and that will repair all the years of abuse and lonliness she suffered? *gags* Couldn't there have been a few more lines before Shepard says, "No more questions?" Couldn't she have said that she wasn't used to him, someone who cared about her, for her, not for what she could do for him? That, while she wasn't used to it, she felt that she could get like it? ANYTHING but just, "Maybe you're right, that I need..."?!. That's too vague, too vague to even begin to guess what she meant by it!
>_> I think I'm done.
Jack tell's you I think it is during the talk that gives you her loyalty mission about how she escaped the teltin facility on pragia.
That after she stole a shuttle and got off world she was picked up by some people who used her and then sold her into slavery.
Also when you take jack to the toilets in the darkstar lounge on the citadel you get a unique dialoge about how during her time in prison she was sexually assaulted by seven guys guardws and cons alike, killing 2 of em in the process.
the others she hunted down afterwards
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