30 Days of Mass Effect: Day 11 & 12
May. 9th, 2013 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaONWARDS!
Favourite Alien Species.
Making me choose between the Quarians and the Geth is cruel!
And I mean really fucking cruel, like reminding me of the first time I played the third game and I was half aware how hard achieving peace was and all I knew for sure was that I hadn't done one of the things (destroying the heretics) and omfg the tension.
I'm gonna go with the Quarians though not as a reflection of my feelings about fucking awesome robots. I just really love their technomadic culture as well as the transquarian, cyborgian implications of the complexity of their suits. The idea of the Geth uploading themselves into those suits and physically interacting with Quarian immune systems was one of the coolest things I ever heard.
Favourite NPC.
Favourite NPC is a tough one, and I'm not completely satisfied I've spent long enough considering it - I sorta feel like add soon as I hit post, I'll be like crap how did I forget THAT dude?!
But since I'm already a day behind I'm going to go with Aethyta. She's great - she's funny and unexpected, but there's a level of poignancy and seriousness to her even in the second game, before you know anything about her relationship to Liara. When you hear the story about her parents, or way she masks her bitterness about the self-satisfaction of Asari culture with humour.
And after you do find out who she really is, again, it's both funny, messed up and cathartic, as she should be.
I'm gonna take a minute, though, to note my runner-up, and, probably, spend more time talking about her than my first-placer.
Let's talk about Kalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani.
So, I'm gonna be clear up front, I have some conflicting feelings about the punching thing. Cus I get why it's funny. I do - there's a lot in RPGs, even ones that you take seriously, that's about doing daft shit and seeing what you can get away with and I don't think finding humour in inappropriate violence in the context of a video game makes you a terrible person. I think Bioware put it in there as the awful option and ran with it when it unexpectedly became popular. And fuck it, I actually sort of one day want to play a Shepard who punches her just so in the third game, I can deliberately miss that second trigger and let her knock me the fuck out and storm off righteously.
But also, I've never punched her. Not even when I was playing a renegade because it's just fucking unnecessary. It's pure thuggery. It does nothing but turn her biased perspective on you into an objective one.
Cus to go back to that paradox with an RPG, it's so huge, you have the narrative bits, the shooting bits, and the bits that are basically pissing about, like collecting model ships, or feeding your fish, or spuriously endorsing shops, or playing mini games. You have surreal funny pop culture references and it's fine to just walk into people's houses and nick shit. I honestly think that the Let's Punch Her meme largely took off because it's so out of proportion and it comes so much out of nowhere that it becomes farce. Like you think you're just gonna be a renegade and yell at her or something, and instead you yell I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR DISINGENUOUS ASSERTIONS! and knock her the hell out. It is ridiculous, to the point I think it's legitimately funny but of the total disconnect.
And I think that most of the people who find it funny do so on those grounds. I might be wrong, but that's my instinct. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there's a depressing percentage of people who honestly think that it's awesome they get to Shut The Bitch Up.
So even though, for whatever reason, I don't think this particular meme about violently assaulting a queer woman of colour in a position of authority is actually based on anywhere near as much grossness as it sounds like, (because I think it's more like Bioware put a queer woman of colour in a position of authority, and then accidentally made the option to be an asshole to her so over the top it was hilarious), it still doesn't really get around the fact that it's a meme based around violently assaulting a queer woman of colour. Which sucks.
I dunno, I'm sort of rambling at this point. Basically because I wanna talk about how the Shadow Broker DLC ended up making al-Jilani a fair bit more nuanced and interesting in a 30 second piece of stolen CCTV footage. And it wouldn't make sense without the punching meme.
I'm pretty sure Bioware put her in there getting punched by a Krogan as just one more reference to the idea that Kalisah getting punched is lulzy. Until that point, I'd enjoyed her character mostly because I liked the fact that the press and the press' importance was acknowledged, but I was a bigger fan of Emily Wong's investigative journalism than al-Jilani's political correspondence. I was...not sure whether she was supposed to be a good journalist with an aggressive and contrary attitude, or an editorialising panic-monger.
But seeing that, I kinda though, you know what? If it's not just a hypothetical Commander Shepard who assaults her, if that's like, a thing that actually happens to her on a fairly regular basis and she STILL goes out there doing her job, that says a lot to me about (a) her reasons for her attitude and more importantly (b) her dedication.
So fuck the haters, I love Kalisah al-Jilani, her leading, slightly manipulative questions about valid and important concerns, and her incremental improvements in the art of self-defence and I regret nothing!
Hooray for never punching her and instead finally winning her respect and thereby an additional FOUR war asset points, which will then become TWO because I refuse to multiplayer!
Yeah, I still like Aethyta more, but I guess I really did have more to say about Khalisah.
Also I would have paid real cash money for DLC that let me have her instead of Allers. I mean, seriously, that can't be that hard, it'd be a straight-up model-and-dialogue-file swap.
Favourite Alien Species.
Making me choose between the Quarians and the Geth is cruel!
And I mean really fucking cruel, like reminding me of the first time I played the third game and I was half aware how hard achieving peace was and all I knew for sure was that I hadn't done one of the things (destroying the heretics) and omfg the tension.
I'm gonna go with the Quarians though not as a reflection of my feelings about fucking awesome robots. I just really love their technomadic culture as well as the transquarian, cyborgian implications of the complexity of their suits. The idea of the Geth uploading themselves into those suits and physically interacting with Quarian immune systems was one of the coolest things I ever heard.
Favourite NPC.
Favourite NPC is a tough one, and I'm not completely satisfied I've spent long enough considering it - I sorta feel like add soon as I hit post, I'll be like crap how did I forget THAT dude?!
But since I'm already a day behind I'm going to go with Aethyta. She's great - she's funny and unexpected, but there's a level of poignancy and seriousness to her even in the second game, before you know anything about her relationship to Liara. When you hear the story about her parents, or way she masks her bitterness about the self-satisfaction of Asari culture with humour.
And after you do find out who she really is, again, it's both funny, messed up and cathartic, as she should be.
I'm gonna take a minute, though, to note my runner-up, and, probably, spend more time talking about her than my first-placer.
Let's talk about Kalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani.
So, I'm gonna be clear up front, I have some conflicting feelings about the punching thing. Cus I get why it's funny. I do - there's a lot in RPGs, even ones that you take seriously, that's about doing daft shit and seeing what you can get away with and I don't think finding humour in inappropriate violence in the context of a video game makes you a terrible person. I think Bioware put it in there as the awful option and ran with it when it unexpectedly became popular. And fuck it, I actually sort of one day want to play a Shepard who punches her just so in the third game, I can deliberately miss that second trigger and let her knock me the fuck out and storm off righteously.
But also, I've never punched her. Not even when I was playing a renegade because it's just fucking unnecessary. It's pure thuggery. It does nothing but turn her biased perspective on you into an objective one.
Cus to go back to that paradox with an RPG, it's so huge, you have the narrative bits, the shooting bits, and the bits that are basically pissing about, like collecting model ships, or feeding your fish, or spuriously endorsing shops, or playing mini games. You have surreal funny pop culture references and it's fine to just walk into people's houses and nick shit. I honestly think that the Let's Punch Her meme largely took off because it's so out of proportion and it comes so much out of nowhere that it becomes farce. Like you think you're just gonna be a renegade and yell at her or something, and instead you yell I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR DISINGENUOUS ASSERTIONS! and knock her the hell out. It is ridiculous, to the point I think it's legitimately funny but of the total disconnect.
And I think that most of the people who find it funny do so on those grounds. I might be wrong, but that's my instinct. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there's a depressing percentage of people who honestly think that it's awesome they get to Shut The Bitch Up.
So even though, for whatever reason, I don't think this particular meme about violently assaulting a queer woman of colour in a position of authority is actually based on anywhere near as much grossness as it sounds like, (because I think it's more like Bioware put a queer woman of colour in a position of authority, and then accidentally made the option to be an asshole to her so over the top it was hilarious), it still doesn't really get around the fact that it's a meme based around violently assaulting a queer woman of colour. Which sucks.
I dunno, I'm sort of rambling at this point. Basically because I wanna talk about how the Shadow Broker DLC ended up making al-Jilani a fair bit more nuanced and interesting in a 30 second piece of stolen CCTV footage. And it wouldn't make sense without the punching meme.
I'm pretty sure Bioware put her in there getting punched by a Krogan as just one more reference to the idea that Kalisah getting punched is lulzy. Until that point, I'd enjoyed her character mostly because I liked the fact that the press and the press' importance was acknowledged, but I was a bigger fan of Emily Wong's investigative journalism than al-Jilani's political correspondence. I was...not sure whether she was supposed to be a good journalist with an aggressive and contrary attitude, or an editorialising panic-monger.
But seeing that, I kinda though, you know what? If it's not just a hypothetical Commander Shepard who assaults her, if that's like, a thing that actually happens to her on a fairly regular basis and she STILL goes out there doing her job, that says a lot to me about (a) her reasons for her attitude and more importantly (b) her dedication.
So fuck the haters, I love Kalisah al-Jilani, her leading, slightly manipulative questions about valid and important concerns, and her incremental improvements in the art of self-defence and I regret nothing!
Hooray for never punching her and instead finally winning her respect and thereby an additional FOUR war asset points, which will then become TWO because I refuse to multiplayer!
Yeah, I still like Aethyta more, but I guess I really did have more to say about Khalisah.
Also I would have paid real cash money for DLC that let me have her instead of Allers. I mean, seriously, that can't be that hard, it'd be a straight-up model-and-dialogue-file swap.
