Fair enough! I'm terrible at Sunless Sea, but Sunless Skies has offered a much more merciful learning curve (as well as letting you actually reload saves after death asdfsfs) and has been feeding much of those same feels, at least. :')
The Grieving Mother is an incredibly cool concept, but I was mostly bothered by her on a meta level: in designing and casting the player's companions, we are already skewed towards a predominantly male cast; of the 8 recruitable companions in the base game, only 3 are ladies...which in itself isn't a huge disparity until we get to the fact that only the PC seems able to see or talk with the Grieving Mother at all. At best, IIRC, we get some companion talk about 'why did you pick up that peasant woman?' rather than the full on banter or dynamics with the rest of the group. It felt like a particularly odd (and unpleasant) narrative choice, especially in contrast to how inescapably Durance's unpleasantness and personal history is woven into the fabric of the main storyline, with him having SO MANY opportunities to say rude or horrible things to everyone else.
Again, on a meta level, really uncomfortable. Especially since they're both written by Chris Avellone (full disclosure: I did and do love Fallout New Vegas, and was unaware of the allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment until recently) and it felt like an uncomfortable narrative choice to go to such extremes between the characters, with this extremely vulgar misogynistic male priest who is so inescapably UGH because of how much dialogue he gets, and then....the Grieving Mother, who is a much more serene, silent character who uses her powers to go unnoticed most of the time.
Anyways. I actually liked the Grieving Mother quite a bit, but uh. There were sure some Choices that went into her design. And if there had been more female companions to begin with (not to discount Maneha and the Devil of Caroc, both of whom I love but are only in the White March!) I don't think it would have grated quite as badly for me.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-09-09 07:22 pm (UTC)The Grieving Mother is an incredibly cool concept, but I was mostly bothered by her on a meta level: in designing and casting the player's companions, we are already skewed towards a predominantly male cast; of the 8 recruitable companions in the base game, only 3 are ladies...which in itself isn't a huge disparity until we get to the fact that only the PC seems able to see or talk with the Grieving Mother at all. At best, IIRC, we get some companion talk about 'why did you pick up that peasant woman?' rather than the full on banter or dynamics with the rest of the group. It felt like a particularly odd (and unpleasant) narrative choice, especially in contrast to how inescapably Durance's unpleasantness and personal history is woven into the fabric of the main storyline, with him having SO MANY opportunities to say rude or horrible things to everyone else.
Again, on a meta level, really uncomfortable. Especially since they're both written by Chris Avellone (full disclosure: I did and do love Fallout New Vegas, and was unaware of the allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment until recently) and it felt like an uncomfortable narrative choice to go to such extremes between the characters, with this extremely vulgar misogynistic male priest who is so inescapably UGH because of how much dialogue he gets, and then....the Grieving Mother, who is a much more serene, silent character who uses her powers to go unnoticed most of the time.
Anyways. I actually liked the Grieving Mother quite a bit, but uh. There were sure some Choices that went into her design. And if there had been more female companions to begin with (not to discount Maneha and the Devil of Caroc, both of whom I love but are only in the White March!) I don't think it would have grated quite as badly for me.