I recently started on my second playthrough of Torment:Tides of Numenera and took stock of which companions I had left to try. During my initial run I'd given a passing thought to the oddity of winding up with an all-girl posse (a pussy posse, if you will*) tanking for Matkina, Callistege and Rhin but hadn't given much consideration to the fact that I'd picked the entire female half of the cast while telling the three male mooks to take a hike without ever looking back. Weird, huh?
See, I hadn't actually set out to do this. I'd simply picked personalities after my own tastes: nerds and loners, savants and dark knights. I picked anyone dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, possessed of a dark, brooding antiheroic backstory or who seemed to have great potential (and Rhin's late-game "cobbler" and "cypher adept" abilities turned out as overpowered as expected.) I chose self-possessed intellect.
I threw out anyone who was hinted to be a fanatic or a comic relief blowhard or standard backstabbing roguish gutter trash. Wouldn't you know it, that turned out to be all the male characters. But hey, no-one minds when writers do this to female characters, right? No-one's ever bitched out Frank Miller for his comics' high whore quotient, right? So it's not like we're working with a double standard or anything. Right? Granted, I've been told Avellone eventually turned Erritis into something memorable against all odds, but the observation stands.
Dignity: now a gendered term.
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*P.S.
Was going to demand royalties if anyone wants to use the term "pussy posse" as a band name, but apparently Leonardo DiCaprio already beat me to the term. Hollywood stars never sue anyone though, right?
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