'fore I swallow all of it
Could you please?"
Marilyn Manson - A Place in the Dirt
Heather Poe's character analysis ranks as one of my Den's more popular pages, but in one respect (not to impugn the perspicacity of my scant few readers) maybe I was being too subtle. When I said that the death of a female draws more sympathy than a warehouse full of disposable male mooks, did you assume it was just a case of "a million is just a statistic" - and if so, might you indulge me in reiterating my observation about Resident Evil: Afterlife?
"Hey, fun exercise:
The Resident Evil movies have skipped the 900mil mark in profits. Someone find me a billion-dollar action movie franchise in which a male hero and his male sidekick mow down row after row of female redshirts, cheerfully tossing shuriken through women's eyes, shooting women through their chin with blood spurting out the top of their heads, stabbing women in the face with machetes to the swell of an unapologetically triumphant soundtrack, caving women's chests in with shotgun blasts, sliding beneath women to shoot them in the crotch with coin-shot for a big applause moment.
Ask some Hollywood pretty-boy... ida know, let's say Ashton Kutcher, if he'd like to commit career suicide by starring in it. See if Sony Pictures wants the distribution rights. It'll give you some idea of whether our contemporary Western society despises women or men more. And hey, if you somehow find or make that despicable billion-dollar series of movies featuring male heroes curbstomping armies of women, then I might condescend to consider the question of whether women are "objectified" by our modern world."
Why are men always the statistic? I compared Heather Poe to a military conscript towards the end of my original post, to all the disposable cannon fodder for whom we hold no sympathy whatsoever. Do you find it at all odd that we require a female emblem for a male affliction? Well, as should happen, Bloodlines included other minor players in vampiric society. Gentle reader, mosey on over to the beach and let's us now visit, for a spell, with Heather's quaint and quirky Santa Monica neighbours the thin bloods.
While, as vampires, they should technically be slightly more powerful than ghouls, they occupy a similar low rung as the dregs of their society (or the "runts" in E's wording) and they are actively being targeted by more powerful vamps for being harbingers of the vampocalypse.
First up you've got Rosa the Malkavian fortune-teller, who is both a politically correct ethnicity and the politically correct sex, and so purely by coincidence is allotted the bulk of respectability among all of them. You cannot harm her in any way and only have the option to directly help her escape L.A.
Then there's Lily, a good-natured and innocent victim of vampiric machinations being held prisoner by an evil male ghoul.
The males are represented by E, Copper and Julius.
Copper's the one you repeatedly con into buying useless junk for hundreds of dollars and finally fool into getting himself killed by trying to stake "the head vampire." He's defined by his comical stupidity and derided even as he charges to his final death.
Julius is cruelly, openly ridiculed for his stuttering. He's also guilty of divulging vampiric secrets and thus you have the option of killing him as he runs pathetically in a panic around the beach, whimpering like a coward, this being AFTER several lines of dialogue where you repeatedly tell him his fate and he whimpers, begs and outright bawls like a baby at you to spare him, with dialogue like "f-f-f-find your h-h-heart" specifically designed to make him sound even more worthless.
And last, let's not forget E, who's permitted to be a good, level-headed male... for having his existence justified by his devotion to a female, for having his entire raison d'etre revolve around rescuing his girlfriend Lily.
Now, it would be dishonest of me to leave the discussion at that. Part of Bloodlines' storytelling quality lay in not diving headlong into FEMale chauvINISM or other politically correct superficialities. Ming Xiao as a representative of the Orient is both a backstabbing villainess and at the same time a supremely dignified, well-spoken and self-possessed woman of power with little of her male counterpart LaCroix's foppish overtones. LaCroix himself in his role as eurotrash was offset by the respectable Maximilian Strauss. Fat Larry's a laughable pastiche of an inner-city black hustler, but two blocks away at the Last Round stands Skelter, a black Vietnam War veteran who couldn't be more dignified and his own man if you chiseled him out of basalt... and they were both voiced by Phil LaMarr for good measure. In fact your campaign features a direct female counterpart to Julius in the Downtown area: Patty the Toreador ghoul, recklessly blabbing about vampirism, whom you also have the option of killing directly, and who was also rendered extremely irritating by her speech patterns. Bloodlines has remained a classic for the past fifteen years partly because its characters had actual character and were so rarely predictable based on their chromosome maps or other superficialities.* The thin bloods stand out only when dissected as a single group, and your character can even mock Lily and E the romantic vamps for being fodder for a cheap airport paperback.
But nonetheless, it's worth noting that if you choose to execute Julius you have to do it yourself, while Patty's quest lets you pass the buck to another -female- character. And I'd very much like to see some datamining of the millions of playthroughs since 2004 to see how many players chose to let Patty escape, because I'll wager many of those did not, in turn, "find their heart" with Julius.
Players love Heather Poe. They pity Heather Poe. They weep for Heather Poe. They want to save her and in fact design special patches for the game in order to save Heather Poe.
Would they have sympathized as much with a putative Heath Poe? Or would they have been perfectly fine chasing him in circles around a beach, gradually cutting and bashing him to death while mocking his speech impediment? Would you have done that to Heather? Feminists did not invent our human favoritism toward women. They've merely tapped into our species' protective instincts for political gain. Instinctively, before all other considerations, we see female suffering as a great wrong to be righted, and we see male suffering as comical or at the very least well-deserved.
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* Well, mobsters aside. The Mafia was always a caricature, be it Italian, Russian or Chinese.
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