Christmas The Third

[For your recollection, the first two NWN/gender posts are at Always Christmas And and Still Always Christmas.]

It was doing so well up til then.

I've been loving the hell out of the NWN2 xpac. Like Hordes Of The Underdark was to the original Neverwinter Nights, I think it's the project the writers were working on while the tech team wrote the script for the base game. Somehow this one ended up with everything the base game lacked - good writing, genuine plot that twists when you prod it (virtually all quests have multiple endings, and these often affect later events), voice actors that you don't want to see taken out and shot, and some vestiges of originality, albeit within the cliché-eating-cliché that is Forgotten Realms.

And there's far more female visibility. I guess this is a product of the better writing, rather than a cause. The story happens to be set in one of Faerun's canonical matriarchies; aside from that, there's a lot more women around to talk to and get help and advice from. There are even, saints preserve us, women who organise with other women for purposes all their own.

In other words, it was doing pretty well up until we got to what Okku said to Kazimika Vadoi. Kazimika is one of the aforementioned matriarchs, though not their leader, and she didn't like us, for quite sensible reasons. This is what Okku [who is a beary spirit of bears and bearness] did to bring her into line:

I remember the prayers of the dockside girl, before she donned her mask. I remember how she begged the spirits to make her pretty, so that the sailors might whistle at her...might even pay for her company...

This is where I stop playing the game and and start throwing things at the wall behind my desk. Hello, it's the sex work trope again, and this time it's being explicitly used to disempower a previously significant female character, and to shame her, and to silence her objections towards you, no matter that it has nothing the fuck to do with those objections. Congrats, Kazimika, you're up there with Molly Millions and Catwoman in the hall of Awesomely Powerful Female SF Characters Whose History Of Sex Work Is Used Against Them By The Author Who Made That History Up In The First Place.

This is why male SF writers need to stop writing about sex work, unless, you know, they've done it themselves. Because male writers are going to keep building women up then using their own fantasies about sex work to knock them down again. In their hands, the trope is invariably hammer-shaped, and women look like nails.

[I just made an FMT tag, so's not to lose track. For fairness, see the two longest threads on this I've seen elsewhere, in which many people disagree with me; the recent FSF one and the older Alas one.]

still always Christmas:

[this post contains very small spoilers for Part II of Neverwinter Nights 2]

Thinking about gendered space in game worlds is fiddly because each player brings their own gender with them. I'll do the gamer drag thing later, I guess, but for now I can only hazard guesses about how much more welcoming the NWN2 gameworld would look to a male PC.

I am, as I am getting tired of being when it comes to gender, more vigilant than I'd like; I know that in games like this male is the default, for NPCs as well as PCs; women like Kana, Brelaina and Torio feel hopelessly token because the public spaces in the game are overwhelmingly gendered 'male'. I'd love to not be distracted by this point, but it's there. There's very little female visibility in the gameworld.

I'm just into Part III (of III) of this game, and how many female temple officiaries have I met? None. The only two female religious types around are playable characters; no other druids or clerics we've seen are women. How about the smiths and other merchants you rely on to keep your inventory turning over? Offhand I can think of only one woman among them, Nya in Port Llast, who is also a sweet soft plot hook due to her rustic paranoia over necromancers. Watchmen? This is where Brelaina looks really token; she's their leader, apparently, and she's also the only one with boobs except for my player character. Yes, having named female NPCs in important plot roles is an improvement on where we were in BG1, maybe, with just evil priestesses and the odd crazy wizardess/diviner. It also just makes it look even more weird that the rest of the world is overwhelmingly male. Where are all the missing women? Is there some genetic quirk of this world that makes 75% of useful, interactable characters male, or what?

(Oh, and Kana? Slanted-eyed person who talks about 'the Way' and says you couldn't understand because it's so totally Other? Not even slightly Orientalist, is it? Fuckssake.)

Then there's the Neverwinter Nine, Nasher's very favourite hired killers. The only female one we've met so far, Melia, has this SEKRIT IDENTITY because for some reason that's better than her just being one of the Nine poncing about in the cute blue outfit in the same way Callum and Nevalle are, owning the same public space as they do. You will never, ever, guess what her sekrit identity is. Ever. It's something that has never been worked into the story of a prominent female sci-fi character ever, ever, ever before.

*groans*

Above and beyond wondering what it is about guys who write sci-fi and their obsession with collectives of whores - and why (with few exceptions; Galvena in BG2 was one) in sci-fi, male pimps/leaders of whores are evil and female ones are good, as if somehow happy hookers are more easily defensible as happy hookers if their pimp/leader (Ann-Hari, Nandi, Mrs Palm, Ophala, Gail) is a woman rather than a man, when in reality all this crud is authored by men anyway - why do so many prominent tough-women-in-sci-fi have sex work as part of their personal journey? Men never do. But we've got Ann-Hari, Molly Millions (and Mona), Mitsuko Souma...

Here, Torio makes the unsurprising admission that she was once a bar performer - singing and dancing, something which is given distinct gendered overtones, not least because there is totally not a rampantly gendered cliché about women fucking themselves into positions of political power (and other jobs, see Kaylee freaking Frye).

One thing I find quite positive is a change they've made in the voiceovers; previous AD&D RPGs have often had some voiced dialogue, some not, and have formerly gone into great linguistic contortions to keep those voiced lines gender-neutral. NWN2 instead frequently makes such lines gender-specific, so clearly they've gone to the minuscule data expense of recording two versions of each such line. And seeing as they've gone to the trouble, I'm going to be ruining their day by looking for slip-ups. Thus far I've hit only one - Daerred called me 'he' this one time. I'll be doing another playthrough sometime, not least because part I has two different routes and I want to see both; it'll be interesting to see if there are any slips in the opposite direction. (There was one such error in BG2, made by Jaheira in the Galverey estate; I swear blind she says 'she' in place of a 'they' that appears in the text, even if you're fronting as a guy).


Thus far into the game (unlike the last one), there has been little romance. Just Casavir and Bishop taking turns to sulk at me. But I know what NWN1 was like and I keep wondering if Shandra's really hitting on me or if that was just my dykey imagination; is any of her dialogue (particularly during the vigil) different if you're playing a man, or differently charged, or leading to different moments later? I guess I'll find out if I come back here in a few months time, but my guess is that the dialogue is the same but the male version gets more romantically charged later - as if (within eternally heteronormative gamespace) you can address men and women as being exactly the same and yet only really mean it if you're fronting male. (If anyone out there's played this game with a male PC, please let me know about this).

I do rather like Shandra, but, that twee little speech she gave later about HOW VERY AWFUL it must be to suffer maternal bereavement when you're young? Urgh. As if I've not heard enough of that sick fetishisation IRL.

It's a fun game, even a fun story once you're out of the dire tutorial and part I, but I could wish I didn't have to put up with this crap to get my fun stories.


[also, hello to a certain red person who has been reading my blog from her workplace lately. *beams*]

always christmas and:

[in my next post, I will take the piss out of CS Lewis more directly, I promise.]

Alis Dee: breaking my heart and winning the internets.

A related aside; when replaying RPGs, it's really interesting to gen a character of the opposite gender to the one you took in your first trip. Firstly, I find it subtly changes the way you see social tone of the gameworld. (This is particularly so in BGII: Throne of Bhaal - standing there between Sarevok and Imoen, whether you're representing yourself as male or female does make a slight difference, if only in my head.) Secondly, it makes you aware of how the gameworld doles out [relentlessly heteronormative] sexual comfort to each gender. I usually, but not always, go with female characters on first playthroughs, and regularly wind up shocked when situations that were rendered neutrally in that first playthrough are directly, deliberately sexual when I'm playing a man.

I've just got done replaying Neverwinter Nights and it's pretty stunning how much cock-soothing there is thrown in there - everyone from both the two female henchmen to many minor NPCs to one of the major villains is at it. I'm fond enough of Aarin Gend, but after trying it in gamer drag, he feels like famine. Solanas was right; a female PC is asexual, desireless, but a female NPC is an object, a fucktoy. [We will forgive NWN, but only because of Valen. Valen!]

You can always reinterpret a book, but in videogames misogyny is hardwired, right there in the 1s and 0s. It's made invisible to female gamers except in the ultralight of drag. Weirder still is the experience of playing one of those games that were written before gender; I played a little of Final Fantasy I last year, and was confused at the excess of random lesbianism until I realised that the game was assuming that all my self-genned, neutrally presented characters were male.