All right so, while another troll was busying themselves spiting me, I was watching a few DA:2 scenes to remind me of what it is I am looking to see in the game.
Grace from DA:2 (the blood mage) is what I think of as a feminine type of character, she's to the point, doesn't care about making nice with literally everyone, "who cares about Meredith." Seriously, what a breath of fresh air, I've been listening to these characters go on, and on , and on, and on, and on, and on, and it's like HELLO!? The game was utterly devoid of heart, it was simply a reading of issues and characters commenting on them from a safe distance. When you do that, you don't get resonance. When people say what's really in their mind, you get resonance. Maybe the DA:2 characters and DA:I characters "are" saying what's on their mind, but for a variety of reasons, I personally don't find it very interesting.
But obviously, the gender thing was too complicated, so I'm going to phrase it like this. I'm seeking honesty, a person's genuine emotional desires and expressions. Not the mages, not the templars, not the divine, not the war in whatever, not the merchant's guild, not the rising price of wool and the complications of transport, or the fallen tradition of the elves, I want to know, you know, what does that personal character/individual think and feel about all this. Not what they think, what they feel. I don't know what they think most of the time because they're so attached to their respective organization's goals, these extremely submissive qualities are what I find boring and lacking, and make them into weak characters. The notion that submissive is what I want is by the people who have not bothered to read in detail what I've been saying, it's really quite the opposite, it's someone who isn't so tepid and timid all the time. These DA:I characters are constantly weighed down by so many things that need to be done and so on, it's irritating to the extreme.
Generally, women tend to be more honest than men, and more direct than men, but seriously, whatever, that kind of gender speak obviously invites the people who don't care about the actual substance of the issue here.
DA:I shapes up to be the same, a whole bunch of issues that require attention, needs to be met, thinks to be done, all distractions when I want a character that says "Hey you know what? Screw the inquisition!" from time to time. That doesn't mean I want to see a character that recklessly takes hostages and kills everyone, with screw the rules, screw the perfect little this and that all the time. That would simply be substituting one caricature for another.
Now, If people are really so threatened by those ideas that they have to suggest that that must be what the other character is like, then that's precisely the kind of fragility that makes those characters weak. Sera maybe slightly meets this defintion, and that's basically it. Additionally, her and Grace arguably show up as like bad caricatures, they flash their emotions but are (although still unknown in Sera's case) immediately converted into mega-villains for people to dispense with quickly. That represents a fear about what they represent, and consequently, an inability to create that theme of impulse and independence consistently across the game. Every suggestion I've had that their viewing femininty from the wrong perspective, theoretically, selfish can mean "hateful and wants to just take hostages and kill people because everything is too much effort, or selfish can mean I just want to take a break and rest and do something for myself that's fun to keep things together.
Compare to something like Game of Thrones, the characters, feminine and otherwise, are considerably more willing to accept and admit their lack of understanding or occasional bursts of passion, anger, whatever. Their neverending drive towards the Throne or the North or whatever it is that they need to function is supplemented by all the intervening passions and confusions they clearly face on a continual basis. Now, I'm not saying that makes it really all that better, but at least their honestly confessing to their own confusion.
Additionally, characters of relative "peace" aren't necessarily feminine, or nice. People kept holding out Merrill but upon re-watching the video, she is very masculine to my mind. Ok, right, forget the gender thing. Going from the battlefield to books or studying history isn't a transition or a dualistic character, it's the other dimension of singularly defined character, i.e. someone who wants to conquer and obtain control. Take, for instance, her obsession with history, that is typically a drive towards finding and supporting a cause, such as reclaiming the Elves heritage for a political cause, or shaping their understanding to be more about power or some other abstract ideal. Her obsession with power and duty is continuous, regardless of the precise shape of the hobby.
Meanwhile, the problem is even more considerable when you factor in the remaining characters, such as Varric, Aveline, etc, to also be in support of various causes and efforts, but nary a peep into their own real personal perspective. The one dimensionality is injected deep into characters but also spread laterally across a massive variety.
It seems to me that people completely misinterpreted by original post as frustrated I couldn't have my super calm wife to tame or something, which is pretty extraordinary because the only reason I had any interest in DA;I was because of concept art of Sera, which seemed like a fairly legitimate character, and the first time since DA:2 where I cared about literally anyone. However, that wasn't the intention of the original post, the intention of the original post was to characterize the overwhelming array of submissive male characters (i.e. Blackwall, etc), as well as the submissive qualities in Cassandra, Vivienne, and Sera. In Sera, it isn't really recognizable.
However, in both Cassandra and Vivienne, these are characters that strike me as fairly (in the case of Cassandra) to very (in the case of Vivienne) as very obsequious and deferential, that's why I was referring to them as manly. I think of men as tending to be obseqious and deferential, submissive, etc, at least the stereotypical man. Now, this appears to contradict what a lot of people have to say or believe on that subject, but it honestly just doesn't even really matter. All the men and women have too much of one quality and not enough of a different one, it's as simple as that, all this gender and this and that again should probably just go away.
The DA:I characters are timid, seemingly dishonest, not very forthright, and a whole host of other things which I think is remedied by a feminine "Grace" like presence, screw the Chantry, screw the this, which doesn't turn into she's being a pyscho villain oh my god lets get rid of her now, because at the same time, in my previous feedback thread about the boring characters, I was mentioning how characters that were more honest and direct, such as Kefka or whoever, were at least being direct, and immediately everyone sought to portray them as being.
I then began to cite examples from JRPGs and other areas, in the interest of trying to illustrate that there exists a medium between the crazy selfish assassins like Grace and the super submissive like Aveline or whoever. The inability (or lack of desire) for Bioware to imagine or fill that gap with that kind of character is what I see as a glaring issue with the game. These endless binary divisions don't allow for that third way, and even now no one has actually commented on the likes of Fi or whoever, as representing a kind of independent impulse crossed with a kind of service and aggression.
So, ironically, it's Sera and kind of Cassandra that are being sort of celebrated here, to a degree, the problem is that they are also far too representative of all the other characters in the game, that have already been created along a similar kind of stereotype. I sense the inability to create this kind of character is somewhat common, however Bioware (has apparently) taken considerable pride in their character creation abilities but I still don't actually really see something that interests me, it happens, I guess.
Ce sujet est fermé
Guest_Puddi III_*
Retour en haut
I believe its done. Its not about more females, just how Kefka bashes on females when its a HUMAN trait, not gender.
