Freechoice

On a quick note, I have this professor that is nearly incapable of teaching through anything but references. He should have been a DNF designer.

So I was having this argument over on the Escapist with some Brit over the design of female characters. You can find it here, but the gist of it is that she wanted a female Grayson Hunt that guys don’t call a bitch and I wanted some characters with actual fucking depth. I thought to myself “that doesn’t solve the problem. Hell it exacerbates characterization (the lacktherof) that is already plaguing gaming.” And it does. Do you remember Triskha Novac from Bulletstorm? Do you remember how she was a complete fucking asshole with a screechy voice and she just yelled out swear words without cleverness or levity? Contrast Grayson Hunt and Victor Sarrano, the foe yay frat boys that were hootin’ and a hollerin’ as they called each other dick-faced dingleberry pickers. Now if you didn’t play Bulletstorm, you were probably able to get that Triskha was being a bitch. Given the secondary description of the character cast, doesn’t she also sound like an intrusive child trying to be like the adults?

Most people are already uncomfortable with a female swearing. Socially conditioned sexism? Probably, but it has unintended benefits that I believe women themselves are not unconsciously aware of consciously. Have you ever seen a roleplaying thread or a character sheet regarding a female character, by a female, that lists intelligence as a character trait? You will never find one without it. This is my first assumption: women will want their characters to be intelligent. Because of their disinclinations towards the solution of problems by physical means, (by my observation) they naturally seek out the more intangible solutions that are brought about by thought.

Follow me with this. Now when you think of people that swear a lot, (and this is an important caveat, uncreatively) who doesn’t come to mind? White color personnel, academics and executives within corporate settings. What do they have in common? Education. Education, while not necessarily equating to intelligence, is often a very good sign of its presence. I ask you: how then it is possible to have a believable female character that is both Hawking in thought and Croshaw in voice?

Most women aren’t Will Hunting.

And pretty much everything that follows is derp. Having a female character that swears and is a dick in general does not solve the goddamn problem. All you do is gloss over the supposed gender parity (and piss off your primary demographic) and worsen the problems game characters already have. You know, the one-dimensional, incapable of communicating emotion, speaking only in snark and swear and having short brown hair and being generally boring characters. Basically, 98% of all characters in gaming; Adding a foul mouthed female changes shit-all; it merely adds another fuckhead to the already large list of fuckheads.

‘Sides, this really just seems like a psychological issue. Why does a woman want to be accepted by men for acting like a man? Most women don’t act like men and don’t base their perceptions of self on masculine behavior. A person that dares to go against the grain has to live with the shifts in the wind. Very few people deserve to be harassed, but the majority is not obligated to hear the pissing and moaning of the minority without being to at least some vocal reprisal.

This is an exemplar of the idiotic self-entitlement of this generation. Maybe that’s why the furries are able to be as well rooted as they are: bullshit interpretations of personal liberties without any kind of social awareness. Basically, what enabled Anonymous also enabled the furries. The internet: a place of great good and great evil.