Top Five Reasons I Am Just Not That Into Dragon Age 2

Posted by Rawles Marie in Non-Fiction and tagged with ,

5) Sloppy mechanics/design. There are multiple (multiple!!) gameplay innovations/choices that I love in DA2: the conversation system! the friend/rival system! the fact that you can romance any of the options regardless of gender! the existence of characters you can hit on but who will not return your feelings! the fact that your frigging family members are actually generated to look like you! But that gear situation where since I’m a specific class I can only equip certain gear and I can’t actually equip any of my party members so I am just constantly overloaded with stuff the game has coughed up that I literally would not be able to use under any circumstances is just LAZY. Similarly, the endless waves of magically appearing enemies instead of properly scaling difficulty: LAZY. And do I even need to mention the nine billion repeats of the same half a dozen areas? LAZYYYY.

4) I’m not that interested in gnawing on the whole total paucity of choice bone again but the lack of even the ILLUSION of meaningful choice in most instances was just annoying. How many times did I stand there while someone killed an innocent person right in front of me? Then there’s the fact that every single element of the main plot is completely unchanged no matter what you do even though there were numerous instances where, given a meaningful choice, you could actually have done something to affect the outcome, even if it was just going to be for an epilogue card! If you just want to tell me a static story, then fine. Tell me it! (Frankly, on a fundamental narrative level I don’t think you’re that good at it, but go for it anyway!) But don’t present or market it to me as something I have any kind of control over.

3) Poorly paced and super segmented narrative. Most of each act has shit all to do with the previous acts. I understand the whole tenuous thread thing and know that they tried to fix it with the (clumsy) framing device and they’re going for a whole little things becoming big things sitch, but it’s all mostly just disjointed, which goes for the character/relationship arcs as well. Which is sad because they could have salvaged the game for me if they were better. (Fenris! We banged! And you left! And then… we apparently didn’t talk about it for three years???? Yet you get all pissy when Zevran propositions me THREE YEARS LATER? Oh. I see.) Unfortunately, due to the way the relationships were structured to fit into the framing device, I felt like I didn’t really get to know most of the characters very well at all. And if I don’t know them, I don’t really care about them.

2) I am so fucking over the insertion of supernatural beings as stand-ins for oppressed minorities. I am not a werewolf or a vampire or a fucking mage, okay. Frankly, such analogies are usually just a way for people to pretend that they’re being socially conscious while still not being forced to tell stories about anyone but conventionally attractive white people, and I’m sick (and bored) to death of it.

1) It’s ableist as fuck. At least five major storylines I can remember off of the top of my head boil down to LOOK AT ALL THE EVIL THIS ~CRAZY~ PERSON HAS DONE! Cuz they’re ~*~*~crazy~*~*~!!1 And that’s not counting the entire mage storyline in and of itself presented as them just hulking out/losing it and literally becoming demons. I straight up find the level of ableism in the game sickening.

In conclusion, all of this mixed together in a giant knot of umbrage and disappointment in my gut that caused me to play Dragon Age 2 through, beginning to end, exactly once and then go, “Okay, I’m done now.” and never touch it again.

Bechdel: Not Actually a Test

Posted by Rawles Marie in Non-Fiction and tagged with ,

Anyone who has so much as dipped their toe into feminist activism on the internet has probably heard of the Bechdel Test. This infamous criteria for whether a character in Alison Bechdel’s long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For would see a film was simple and direct:

1) It has to have at least two women in it,

2) Who talk to each other,

3) About something other than a man.

And just like that, because of the fact that there are so many things that don’t actually meet this basic criteria, a wonderfully incisive commentary was made on the representation of women in popular media.

Then, things kind of went to shit.

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Construct

Posted by Rawles Marie in Fiction

Charlie loses her virginity on a muggy Thursday evening in August. Darius Edwards — senior, varsity football team, first string — has had the distinction of being her first Real Boyfriend for just over three months. Four days ago he sent her a “happy three month anniversary” text five minutes before showing up outside of her house to take her to dinner. For the first forty-five minutes of their date, a familiar voice blares in indignant tones in her head that a three month anniversary is a semantic impossibility, which Charlie, as is often the case, must concede as correct.

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Liberation Has Nothing to Do With It: Starfire in the DCnU

Posted by Rawles Marie in Non-Fiction and tagged with , , ,

A lot of people have already spoken on the depiction of Starfire in the DCnU, but I have some thoughts I wanted to add in response to the pushback against the outrage.

Specifically, I’d like to address the assertion that criticizing Kory’s portrayal in Red Hood and the Outlaws #1 is a form of slut-shaming and/or arises out of some sort of bitterness about the dismissal of her past relationship with Dick Grayson or general resistance to change.1

the cover of red hood and the outlaws #1; starfire, arsenal, and the red hood attack unseen enemies as a unit

The cover of Red Hood and the Outlaws #1

Two things to directly address the assertions above:

1) I don’t really care about Dick/Kory. I don’t dislike it or anything, but I have pretty much no emotional investment in it whatsoever. It wasn’t formative for me and that’s just how these things go. My only emotional investment as regards Dick/Kory is my general fury at a) the years the canon spent shitting on and dismissing both Kory and the significance and importance her relationship with Dick had to him, and b) the fact people were extremely intent for some time on just having Kory spend the rest of her existence pining hopelessly for Dick.

2) Seems obvious to say but: I have no problem with Kory having as much consensual sex as she wants with whomever she wants. Red Hood and the Outlaws was one of the few titles to which I was tentatively looking forward (and not with hateticipation for a delicious hateread, but genuine anticipation) because I thought it was an interesting combination of characters and, quite frankly, I wanted Kory, Jason, and Roy to be sexy ginger friends who maybe spent some of their time together having friendly ginger sex.

So why the problem with Kory being sexually involved with Roy and Jason in the actual comic?

Put simply: because it’s not about Kory. Someone out there in the wilds of the internet pointed out that the book treated her like a walking blow up doll and that’s not too far from the mark.

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