Lady (she/they)i Had Posted A Profile For The Main Character Some Time Ago, But As The Writing Of The

Lady (she/they) i had posted a profile for the main character some time ago, but as the writing of the game progressed, i think i need to update that description to reflect how she actually behaves during the game.

Lady goes by many names, mostly because she rarely bothers to give one. No one knows who or what she is, not even herself, only that she is destined to bring the great calamity and bring an end to the forsaken realm of Narkaas.

Lady is not an evil character, but she is a fatalist and a misanthrope, resenting people for the way she has been treated from the moment she came to be and believing that it is pointless to fight against her fate. She is also a very emotional and impulsive person, often acting reckless or self-righteous, with a complete disregard for her own well-being, but a strong conviction to do what she feels is right in the moment.

Lady is curious by nature, often finding herself intrigued by the people she meet and briefly forgetting about her goals as she pursue her current interest.She is very ignorant and naive, knowing very little about the world and the people in it and often being completely clueless about things that would be obvious to most.

Lady tends to be awkward around people, only speaking when needed and using short, to-the-point sentences. While she is prone to violence, she highly dislikes verbally confronting people and unless provoked, she will either quietly listen to them or ask questions to satiate her curiosity.

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Anyway, thanks for listening to our girl story. I have to go now, please watch over her and make sure she doesn' t join any cults while i' m gone.

i'm seeing people losing hope for palestine i'm begging you seriously please don't. the death toll is high but there are still people alive, there are still journalists risking everything to make sure the world sees what is happening. please continue protesting if you have the option to, keep demanding for a ceasefire and keep talking about palestinians both alive and dead. you have to keep going until the very end or else you really did fail them.

Fantasy races are an uncomfortable concept, because they present a world that literally works the way racists think that it works. The attempts to mitigate this problem often fail to address the core concern, merely making the idea more palatable.

A big example is trying to correct by changing the language from "races" to "species." This attempt fails for two reasons:

1) Exactly! Racists think that people of other races are a different species. That's the foundation of "race science," phrenology, all of it.

2) Are demihumans different species, though? Like, the interactions between elves and dwarves don't resemble the interactions between different species in our world. They don't act like snakes and lemurs, or whales and krill, or even cats and dogs. More often we've got different groups of people, who may speak different languages and have different cultural practices, engaging in diplomacy or war and struggling to coexist. In practice, they are treated as nations: ethnicities. Except they're ethnicities who are biologically distinct enough to have objective differences in ability.

This is something that puts me on edge in Mass Effect, otherwise one of my favorite games. True, the game ultimately lands on condemning the genophage, and it's not subtle about that. I mean just look at the name... But it's still considered debatable, morally grey, and Mordin Solus remains one of the most charming and enduring heroes of the series. The setting has bent over backwards to make every racist stereotype and talking point as legitimate as possible. In this setting, it is objectively true, scientifically proven that it is in the DNA of Krogans to naturally be violent, warmongering killing machines whose explosively rapid breeding poses an existential threat to the galaxy. That in turn is meant to make us think that maybe forced sterilization is something worth considering. It's hard to ignore the parallels to real life racist propaganda. I don't think it's malicious, just ungrounded and thoughtless; the result of creators to whom these ideals are abstract thought experiments, rather than reflections of real history.

Another big example is Dark Elves. They try to make it okay, to mitigate the message by fleshing them out as characters, by scapegoating an abusive deity rather than an ingrained nature, by erasing the monster manual description that reads "Always Chaotic Evil," by trending skin tone away from black and towards purple, or gray, even pale white. But none of it really changes the core issue, does it? The idea of drow is to equate dark skin with evil, to fetishize that idea, and to tell a story about a subsect of people cast into darkness as a result of sin in a direct parallel to racist Christian beliefs about dark skin being a curse or punishment from God.

So, do I think we need to cancel Mass Effect and stop playing D&D or telling stories about drow? No, not really. I mean... I do all these things. Truth is, I don't have an actionable solution, for myself or anyone. But the dynamic is clearly present and worth describing. And the attempts to challenge it are often insufficient, more about making ourselves feel better about what we're already doing than enacting real change.

It's really funny to me how I've heard opposite critiques of the genocide route from folks. Both recognize how this route is a balancing act between punishing and rewarding the player. On the one hand, it has to be tedious and disturbing in a way that calls out the player for choosing to do this terrible thing for their own selfish enjoyment. On the other hand, it needs to actually provide insight, new content, really fun bits that keep the player pursuing their goal.

On one side of the critique, I see people saying that if the player is in fact rewarded for following the route, then the message is limp. It should be a genuine slog without reward, or else you're kind of saying the player is right.

On the other side, some players are just frustrated, and they're saying well if you want us to do it anyway, then don't make us grind and jump through hoops. We get the point, so just make it accessible.

As for me, I actually think this magic trick is a huge part of what makes Undertale such a great game, and it's the sort of design trick that the game is rife with. It changes how the player thinks and feels about their experience without making the game inaccessible. Flowey warns you not to restart the game to plant the idea in the player that they should restart the game. Toby Fox wants you to get to Sans. But he wants you to feel bad about it and reflect on why you did.