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[The Elder King]

She is clearly designated as a non-combatant, and I'm sure this affects her personality and characterization in ways that I find unattractive. I find the fact that people seem to like her more because of this disturbing in a game supposedly about liberating women from their roles as teenage eye candy. Give me wildcard Sera anyday.
 
But no instead I'm lectured for being infatuated with teenage eye candy with zero logical support. Myuria from Star Ocean 4 absolutely crushes and devours the likes of DA:I females, and I'm not even saying that's the best game out there. She was a deeply romantic girl who <spoilers> gets married to her lover, loses him in an attack, dedicates her life to vengeance, becomes an extremely powerful mage, discovers the truth of his death, forgives the person involved for the misunderstanding, and so on and so on. And yes you get to actually use her in combat, unlike DA:I characters.
 
This 'eye candy' has 9x the spine of the likes of Josephine. For people who can't get past the fact that she's dressed to impress, it would look like she's just there for teenage titillation, but she struck me as infinitely more interesting in the aggregate than Josephine who judging from the forum has been treated as basically teenage eye candy.
 
Isn't it obvious? The only superficial (well analytically superficial) ones here are the people who look at a revealing outfit and go oh she's just dumb titillating eye candy, and they look at Josephine dressed all regal and supreme and say oh of course she's respectable and powerful.

Understood. Though from my knowledge josephine isn't treated at all as eye-candy in the forum. Not more then the other characters anyway.
I personally don't care much about Josephine's dress. From what the devs said I don't think she'll be spineless as you think she might be, and she seems intelligent and capable in her field.

[Bugsie]

What? We have barbarians in DA. We even have to deal with them in DA:I.
[snip]

And they will likely be presented as random enemies for us to practice our tactics with, much like the Forsworn and bandits in Skyrim who are equally attired. Conan and co are presented as the dominant race in that universe, it makes sense they're all dressed the way they are. Does it make sense for all the people in DA to dress like the barbarians in this image? No, I think not.

[Seraphim24]

Would be much easier to create that impression by simply having her as a combatant. /Shrug.

 

Personally I don't know why advisors ever became a thing, I don't like them in any game, Traynor? The other one? I can't even remember their names because they were purposely all pushed to the side. Also if I'm not mistaken why were all the other ones women? Why are the majority of them women?

 

I miss the simplicity of BG where a character being the game meant you could use them, period, and there were plenty of women to choose from, Viconia, Imoen, Dynaheir, etc. Also it was a limitation of the engine, but I was envisioned her being somewhat attractively dressed n line with other Drow aesthetics.

[Hanako Ikezawa]

As the person who runs the Josephine thread here, you are factually incorrect about your assertions Kefka. 

[Seraphim24]

I'm not sure how important it is to this topic, but it is factually true she's not playable, she can't cast spells or use weapons. I don't care if she's the most psychotically aggressive woman on the planet who uses diplomacy like a sword. As far as I'm concerned, she is out of interest the moment she can't be brought into the party. As a video game player, I like to play with and as the things I like. I treat the game as fundamentally your party, no interest in side distinctions. People can say whatever they want it doesn't affect how I feel about that little trick.

 

I based a lot of that when I was asking for more feminine characters and people talked a storm about how nice Josephine was the whole time, it's really only one or the other.

 

Edit: Oh you mean about the thread? I just went there, here's the top of the one of the last pages

 

"Very well. I wasn't trying to suggest the encounter was non-consensual - just that the booze made Sera less discriminating - but if we're heading into uncomfortable territory, I'll drop it.

 

So how about that Josephine, huh? She's quite a gal. Anyone post this one yet?

 

http://www.deviantar...ilyet-486459640"

 

There's a picture on every page I've been on so far practically, with ensuing discussion about her attractiveness, etc.

 

Hello titillation.

 

Honestly though that's just my impression here, it would take forever to go through every page, I'll just say that's what I've seen and that my larger point is about characterization and outfits generally, not the Josephine thread. If you want to talk more about that for some reason lets just go elsewhere.

[Hadeedak]

It's really, really hard to have meaningful debates on characters we haven't met yet.

 

...So I'll just say Aveline is better than the world. 

[FiveThreeTen]

Well I'm glad that I can go in the game knowing my female character will easily have access to practical looking cloths/armors.
I loved Divinity 2 but the armors were awful on female characters for example. Males simply looked more badass despite the over the top design.

 

And wanting my character to not have a ridiculous cleavage in battle has nothing to do with some form of "repressed feminity" on my part.

[Voragoras]

Would be much easier to create that impression by simply having her as a combatant. /Shrug.

 

Personally I don't know why advisors ever became a thing, I don't like them in any game, Traynor? The other one? I can't even remember their names because they were purposely all pushed to the side. Also if I'm not mistaken why were all the other ones women? Why are the majority of them women?

 

I miss the simplicity of BG where a character being the game meant you could use them, period, and there were plenty of women to choose from, Viconia, Imoen, Dynaheir, etc. Also it was a limitation of the engine, but I was envisioned her being somewhat attractively dressed n line with other Drow aesthetics.

 

There have only been 2 assistants in Mass Effect.

 

1) Chambers annoyed me, sure, but she was put there specifically to appeal to Shepard by the Illusive Man, as well as just casually observing the crew to make armchair psychological assessments to unravel the mysteries of the crewmates' personalities, like "Jack is a violent person!".

 

2) Traynor on the other hand, isn't an assistant, she's a communications specialist. Granted, she does handle your mail, but she also handles a fair bit of the feeds on the Normandy, like the War Summit, while uncovering some essential data that points you to most of the N7 sidequests, including Grissom Academy, and she even helps to locate the Cerberus Base through Sanctuary before Priority: Earth. There's also a dialogue with EDI where she licenses some tech from Ariake, improving the stability of the ship's systems. She does more than Garrus does, even if he is a field agent, and her personality is about as well-developed as Cortez. She's also not pushed aside, considering her major role in the main plot...

 

Bodahn and Sandal in DA:O and DA2 could also apply, but they're male. And they're dwarves. So it's an equal ratio of males to females. (Granted, I try not to learn too much about a game before I play it, so DA:I could have a horde of badly developed female assistants, as far as I know.)

[RevilFox]

She is clearly designated as a non-combatant, and I'm sure this affects her personality and characterization in ways that I find unattractive. I find the fact that people seem to like her more because of this disturbing in a game supposedly about liberating women from their roles as teenage eye candy. Give me wildcard Sera anyday.

 

Disagreements about your assessment of Josephine aside, the problem with female representation has never been that some women are portrayed like Josephine, or, the other end of the spectrum, Isabella. The problem is that women used to ONLY be portrayed like Josephine or Isabella. The Dragon Age series, obviously, has characters like Josephine and Isabella, but they also have characters like Aveline, and Cauthrien (Loghain's lieutenant). What's more, characters like Aveline and Cauthrien are not treated as unique or special within the context of the universe. 

 

Feminism as it pertains to video games isn't about "liberating women from their roles as teenage eye candy. It's about presenting women as varied and with as much agency as male characters have always been presented. You can have a character who is very sexual and sexulized, like Isabella, so long as that's not the ONLY type of women you have in your game. This seems to be the point that you, and, indeed, many people, seem to keep missing about why Bioware is so good about female representation. 

[Seraphim24]

The problem is that women as part of the main campaign ONLY used to be portrayed (in BW games) as actually playable characters. The fact that they have regressed in that respect is what's odd.

 

They were presented (generally) with significantly more agency in BG than in DA, period, because I knew that a female character that showed up in the story was likely to be playable in the party. Now, they write these characters and go oh they just stand on the side.

 

Also Isabella was a terrible character, bottom of the barrel stereotype, designed more to serve teenage titillation than any of the characters I've cited, frankly.

 

That's precisely why BW strikes me as so bad about female representation, and yes to reference the thread that extends to clothes and armor. I mean criminity look at Varric and IB with his freaking chest and his whole upper body. Meanwhile Cassandra, Josephine, Vivienne, the base female inquisitor concept armor, covered head to freaking toe.

 

I'm afraid I can't give a good job to that, Sera being the only minor expection at this point, and dramatically reduced from her concept art which was less conservative.

[The Elder King]

The problem is that women as part of the main campaign ONLY used to be portrayed (in BW games) as actually playable characters. The fact that they have regressed in that respect is what's odd.
 
They were presented (generally) with significantly more agency in BG than in DA, period, because I knew that a female character that showed up in the story was likely to be playable in the party. Now, they write these characters and go oh they just stand on the side.
 
Also Isabella was a terrible character, bottom of the barrel stereotype, designed more to serve teenage titillation than any of the characters I've cited, frankly.

So far We had more male supporting non-party members that females though in DA. And there's still one male in DAI.
I'll end my posts about the Josephine discussion (since you're right that it's off topic) with this: every character threads have fanarts and off-topic discussions. By your logic every DA character is eye-candy.

[Seraphim24]

EXACTLY

 

Good god, stop pretending you don't care about appearances. When you don't embrace it in a complete way, people end up paradoxically much more superficial and repressed than otherwise.

 

In BG they did, not now. I guess you could say roughly, sure.

 

Also why is that silly? People have always played games to play the characters they want to play, no more no less. I'm going to borrow something that's been used against me and talk about internal consistency, if you create the impression that there is simply one playable character that is how I treat the universe. If you create multiple characters, and then deliberately segragate some of them (and that segragation appears to me gender-biased) it's going to register as an issue. Obviously, if DA:I just had one single playable character it wouldn't have come up at all.

 

Also it's impossible to be wrong about how I feel, I don't like Isabella, we can discuss the precise reason in one way or another, but that's exactly how I feel. It seems pretty obvious as to why to me, but if you have a differing interpretation go for it.

[Seraphim24]

EXACTLY, because people like them more. You precisely made the point that I've been arguing forever, people like that stuff more, so give the people what they want.

[AresKeith]

Facepalms everywhere

[Seraphim24]

Ok, so she's not a bottom of the barrel stereotype, I'm just trying to orient my preferences relative to the norm.

 

Lets just pretend some character on TV is a bottom of the barrel stereotype, then Isabella is in between that and a cool character I like somewhere.

[AzureAardvark]

You can have a character who is very sexual and sexulized, like Isabella, 

 

Eh? I always thought that *Hawk* was *Isabella's* eye candy more than the reverse.

[Seraphim24]

No it was amazing how I tied that into repression, because it is repressive, and Bioware and their fans are blind to that fact which I have been trying to illustrate for some time.

 

If it's troll worthy simply to suggest the possibility that BW is guilty of some of the sins they find the rest of gaming has perpetuated relentlessly, then BW is not only bad at representing women and sexes, but also unable to deal with criticism apparently. I've already made clear my lack of interest in many other modern (especially western) games is very real.

 

Again, please inform me as to why they are special? I said I gave DA:O a B, that's something isn't it? I think it's cool that Sera is in the game and playable. I can acknowledge some things that make their game more fun than many other very un-fun games out there, but can they (or their fans) acknowledge that their games might not be completely perfect in this respect? I see people acknowledge things they don't like, but the notion that one of things that would be wrong is a failure of repression or justice has been completely incomprehensible when I look at IB and Varric, compare to Cassandra and Viv, and find it completely comprehensible.
 

Can any of them acknowledge at least the slightest possibility that they might not be perfect in this respect? I don't believe I've seen that.

[RevilFox]

The problem is that women as part of the main campaign ONLY used to be portrayed (in BW games) as actually playable characters. The fact that they have regressed in that respect is what's odd.

 

They were presented (generally) with significantly more agency in BG than in DA, period, because I knew that a female character that showed up in the story was likely to be playable in the party. Now, they write these characters and go oh they just stand on the side.

 

Also Isabella was a terrible character, bottom of the barrel stereotype, designed more to serve teenage titillation than any of the characters I've cited, frankly.

 

That's precisely why BW strikes me as so bad about female representation, and yes to reference the thread that extends to clothes and armor. I mean criminity look at Varric and IB with his freaking chest and his whole upper body. Meanwhile Cassandra, Josephine, Vivienne, the base female inquisitor concept armor, covered head to freaking toe.

 

I'm afraid I can't give a good job to that, Sera being the only minor expection at this point, and dramatically reduced from her concept art which was less conservative.

I suppose we disagree on a fundamental level then, because I don't see the fact that female characters that are part of the main campaign not being used as playable as a regression. The idea that you can't have an interesting, positive female character that is not playable is so baffling to me that I cannot wrap my mind around it. I'm also very much struggling to understand the idea that "non-playable" is equal to "less agency". 

[Seraphim24]

Well I agree it's pretty arbitrary, but video games to me mean interactivity. It means I get to play the thing that I want to play in the center of the action. There isn't really a decisive way to prove or disprove it based on game design theory, but instinctively I treat them as separate because that is simply how I play video games.

 

I mean heck my avi is from Super Smash. A character in the game is synonymous with them being playable. It's like an inherent video game logic from a different era that seems to have spiraled off into the aether for some reason.

[AzureAardvark]

I'm also very much struggling to understand the idea that "non-playable" is equal to "less agency". 

 

By definition, a bot doesn't have agency.