"She sees a mirror of herself
An image she wants to sell
To anyone willing to buy"
Green Day - Extraordinary Girl
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Moderate spoilers from The Order of the Stick
Irrelevant spoilers for a badly-written character from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
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Back when I was fourteen I came up with the best idea for a novel: science fiction, but with no science! It was gonna be, like, space guys, but not in space. Also, monsters. Is that not the most awesomest and most original idea evar!?!
One of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' few well-written moments comes while ransacking the lair of a mad scientist experimenting on demons. You set loose a witch who'd been sentenced to burn at the stake beforehand, only for him (of course it's a him in this particular case; man bad, woman good - repeat the mantra) to say "crusader, didn't you ever consider some of the witches condemned might actually have been guilty?" and proceed to attack you in the name of his demon lord.
Yes, categories are usually established according to some observable (albeit often misinterpreted) trend. Wer-wolfes bite people, damnit!
But that's a one-liner from an enemy redshirt, belying the idiot-friendly tripe pervading Wrath's portrayals of good and evil. Meanwhile Ember, the witch companion you interact with for five variously ludicrous acts is a cheesy, infantile parody of a Mary Sue, a perfect light of goodness and clairvoyance who needs do no more than pout for even ersatz divinities to obey her demands.
Because of course your witch friend is an exception to all witchy ways. She's speshul.
And of course the orc is a noble paladin. She's speshul.
And of course the kobold is a mysterious benevolent sage in kobold's clothing. He's speshul.
And of course the succubus is reformed to goodness and an invincible spotlight-stealing plot-trampler. She's speshul.
And of course the female drow you chase down turns out to be good at heart and only victimized by a man. She's speshul.
And of course your aasimar, being male, is a token watered-down "evil" bishonen bad boy. He's the wrong kind of speshul and he needs you to emotionally manipulate him into boyfriend material.
Needing a break from that nonsense, I decided to fire up Vagrus: the Riven Realms instead, a managerial strategy game with turn-based squad combat and a strong role-playing side. Sure, they misspelled my name in the preorder credits, but I'm not nearly shallow enough to complain about that repeatedly and at length every time I mention Vagrus... y'know, that game that misspelled my name in the preorder credits? Anyway, I schlep on over to the first major city and start recruiting companions.
Of course the orc is a noble warrior who doesn't live by his people's code of brutality. He's speshul.
And of course the drow has abandoned his people's underground empire. He's speshul.
That second particularly grates, as Vagrus pedals furiously along the elfemism treadmill.
You introduce a race of antagonists: evil, underhanded troglobites. Call'em orcs or goblins. They sing songs about going down. They're pretty cool. Now readers/players demand more orc characters in the story. Now they want to identify with the badass orcs, since it would give them an excuse to act "evil-lite" and still claim they're better than the average orc. Pretty soon orcs/goblins are looking less and less antagonistic, and comic after comic starts treating them like some beleaguered ethnic minority. They even move aboveground, improve their posture and start dressing like spaghetti western injuns.
Problem: now what are we supposed to slice'n'dice in caves?
Solution: introduce a completely new race. Oooh, let's make them fallen, mutated elves (a very non-Tolkien original idea *wink-wink*) 'cuz that always drums up some drama. "Drow" sounds like a badass title. Make'em evil so the players don't feel sorry for killing them and give them some cave adaptations like shadowy dark skin to blend in the dark and make them dishonest and underhanded and treacherous so they're even more hateable. Cool, huh? So cool, in fact, that readers start demanding more of them, and then start identifying with them and demanding drow heroes who can act evil-lite yet still bemoan their fellows' greater evil.
Problem: now what're we supposed to mince and mash in caves?
Solution: introduce a completely "new" race. Make 'em sneaky and underhanded and evil and hateable and cannibalistic ("looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!") and give' em some cave adaptations like pale cadaverous skin for lack of pigmentation. Call 'em "wraiths" because that won't cause any confusion and this completely new and original fantasy wraithsrace will solve our evil-oid humanoid scarcity FOR EVER AND EVER and ev- seriously though, set your clocks.
It's a variation on the red queen hypothesis. Each newly introduced character/category is defined from the start as more extreme than its predecessor, but in reality this only places it in the same niche vacated by that predecessor as it bred out to generalism. How many times this cycle will repeat is anyone's guess, though if the "specialness" inflation of real-world social movements and religions (ever more puritan, ever more vegan, ever more queer) is any indication, the sky's the limit. For now let's just consider the typhoid Marys, the Drizzts and Thralls watering down fantasy races, those speshul little snowflakes. Let me ask you something: was Legolas elvish? Was Elrond?
Galadriel? Even the second-stringers like Thranduil, Glorfindel,
Haldir, Arwen? Did any of them need to become the antithesis of all
things elvish to stand out from the crowd? Did Tolkien go "roight then,
first elf I wrote was an ancient, gracious, graceful, wise guardian of
the land, so enough of that, next elf must needs be an adolescent
vampire!" Or a seraph. Whatever.
While I stand by my criticism of GreedFall, there was one character I liked, and surprisingly he hailed from my temperamentally antithetical faction, the theists:
Petrus (at least in the first half of the game I played) didn't need to be holier than all the other thous around him to get his point across. His personality was not defined by either one-upping or renouncing his group designation but owning it, a welcome undercurrent throughout GreedFall but less pronounced in other characters. In fact, he slightly reminds me of another badass grandpa from another fantasy religious order, O-Chul the paladin's paladin from The Order of the Stick... and O-Chul in turn brings us full-circle back to Wrath of the Righteous.
See, O-Chul may or may not have tamed one of the villains (spoiler alert as to which one) while the villains help him captive and tortured him for months on end - with the prerequisite of susceptibility on that villain's part and an extensive build-up of tenuous game-playing metaphors and uncertain rapport. Contrast him to Ember from Wrath, who routinely turns gangs upon hordes upon armies of demon-worshippers and demons themselves from evil to good by no more than flatly telling them to be good - with the writing doubling down by outright commanding you to believe that cheesy platitudes just sound more convincing when they come from this insipid little snot because she's so convincingly good. A witch mind you. The good witch of the worst. *
The descriptor we need to introduce here is "facile" and it applies to both the basic design of characters like Ember and their expected interaction with the world. After his imprisonment, O-Chul delivers his rescuers a list of their common enemy's attacks. How did he get it? By instantly and effortlesly discerning it via telepathy? By just asking and having them tell him their secrets because he's too cute to refuse? By stumbling upon it via heroic luck? No. "One saving throw at a time." He remained a Lawful Good paladin and played his strengths under the circumstances, awaiting the right moment for decisive, unflinching action toward the greater good. He endured, and in enduring not only grew strong but strengthened his allies.
If you create a paladin it should be because you want to play a paladin, not a barbarian with better public relations. If you insert a witch class into your game, it should not consist of people wrongly accused of witchcraft! Space dudes not-in-space is not an original idea. "Dudes" is not a fantasy race! Character designs like "orc that doesn't act orcish" or "drow that doesn't act drowish" aren't just facile in their concept but in their interactions' overwhelming focus on the non-issue of their exceptionality instead of more personal motivations. Is it so impossible to create a witch character with her own personality and with actual struggles to overcome by personal choice, effort and sacrifice who still acts like an illicit practitioner of occult magic? Was Dragon Age's Morrigan so unpopular a character?
And yes, it's damn near impossible to discern how much of this idiocy is due to pop fiction writers' professional incompetence or their intellectual inability to move past such clichés or just disinterested pandering to the retard market they believe they can't capture otherwise. I'd bet on the third factor overwhelmingly. And yeah, admittedly, I did think up "space dudes not in space" at fourteen... but after a few pages realized the plot was going nowhere. Within the year I'd abandoned it altogether. Vagrus is now two months old and Wrath three. By June the degenerate munchkin brigade you apparently think requires your undivided attention will be ashamed they ever associated with your brand name... not that you could pry them away from Hello Kitty Online in the first place no matter how hard you Mary your Sues.
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* There's an obvious parallel to be drawn here to real-world social activism. A white person declaring all white people are racist, the "one good man" declaring all men rapists, the religious believer declaring we are all sinners, all are implicitly setting themselves up as holier-than-thou... by doing absolutely nothing aside from moving the goalposts.
P.S.: You misspelled my name in the preorder credits!
P.P.S.: If you're going to bring up Fall-From-Grace, I'll get to that, geez, gimme a break.
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