I'm not arguing that she isn't justified for hating the guy.
I'm arguing that she's a murderous psychopath.
"I hate that guy" and "I'm going to stab him so much he actually turns to liquid" are not the same thing?
He
murdered her friend in front of her, stepped over commoners, and literally didn't even acknowledge he had done anything wrong
Psychopathy is the lack of empathy or caring about people other than yourself
She was in a blind rage, she is not a psychopath, at all.
Having incredibly truncated empathy where some people are people and some people are mash under your boot isn't exactly a healthy worldview
You can try to split hairs and say "Well, they care about some people" but that's true of a lot of really dangerous, violent criminals
they'll care about their kids, or their very close friends, or the incredibly narrow band of folk they consider people
the rest of the world can fuck off and die for all they care
and that's exactly how Sera sees nobility, they're not really people to her
which is incredible hypocrisy on her part
she also doesn't give a shit about the plight of the city elves in alienages (because she wasn't raised in one and their experience is foreign to her), completely disregards the Dalish as "shit", and hates mages and is perfectly comfortable oppressing the shit out of them and locking them up as much as possible. mages, to Sera, don't count as an oppressed class of folk because they have superpowers and thus are intrinsically more powerful than other people so oppressing them is okay
is any of this unrealistic? No, not at all
there are absolutely real people in the real world with hypocritical, self-absorbed, truncated senses of empathy like this
are they incredibly unpleasant and narcissistic assholes i want nothing to do with?
I'm not arguing that she isn't justified for hating the guy.
I'm arguing that she's a murderous psychopath.
"I hate that guy" and "I'm going to stab him so much he actually turns to liquid" are not the same thing?
He
murdered her friend in front of her, stepped over commoners, and literally didn't even acknowledge he had done anything wrong
Psychopathy is the lack of empathy or caring about people other than yourself
She was in a blind rage, she is not a psychopath, at all.
Having incredibly truncated empathy where some people are people and some people are mash under your boot isn't exactly a healthy worldview
You can try to split hairs and say "Well, they care about some people" but that's true of a lot of really dangerous, violent criminals
they'll care about their kids, or their very close friends, or the incredibly narrow band of folk they consider people
the rest of the world can fuck off and die for all they care
and that's exactly how Sera sees nobility, they're not really people to her
which is incredible hypocrisy on her part
she also doesn't give a shit about the plight of the city elves in alienages (because she wasn't raised in one and their experience is foreign to her), completely disregards the Dalish as "shit", and hates mages and is perfectly comfortable oppressing the shit out of them and locking them up as much as possible. mages, to Sera, don't count as an oppressed class of folk because they have superpowers and thus are intrinsically more powerful than other people so oppressing them is okay
is any of this unrealistic? No, not at all
there are absolutely real people in the real world with hypocritical, self-absorbed, truncated senses of empathy like this
are they incredibly unpleasant and narcissistic assholes i want nothing to do with?
ayyyyyyyeeeeeeeep
Again, if you dislike her that's totally fine
My complaint was the characterization of the character as a psychopath, which is not accurate
People who commit crimes of passion are not psychopaths, nearly by definition
Also not to drag it out but your description of seras view of mages is entirely incorrect
She has no idea about tranquility and what circles actually do at the beginning and she gets upset when its explained to her
I'm not arguing that she isn't justified for hating the guy.
I'm arguing that she's a murderous psychopath.
"I hate that guy" and "I'm going to stab him so much he actually turns to liquid" are not the same thing?
He
murdered her friend in front of her, stepped over commoners, and literally didn't even acknowledge he had done anything wrong
Psychopathy is the lack of empathy or caring about people other than yourself
She was in a blind rage, she is not a psychopath, at all.
Having incredibly truncated empathy where some people are people and some people are mash under your boot isn't exactly a healthy worldview
You can try to split hairs and say "Well, they care about some people" but that's true of a lot of really dangerous, violent criminals
they'll care about their kids, or their very close friends, or the incredibly narrow band of folk they consider people
the rest of the world can fuck off and die for all they care
and that's exactly how Sera sees nobility, they're not really people to her
which is incredible hypocrisy on her part
she also doesn't give a shit about the plight of the city elves in alienages (because she wasn't raised in one and their experience is foreign to her), completely disregards the Dalish as "shit", and hates mages and is perfectly comfortable oppressing the shit out of them and locking them up as much as possible. mages, to Sera, don't count as an oppressed class of folk because they have superpowers and thus are intrinsically more powerful than other people so oppressing them is okay
is any of this unrealistic? No, not at all
there are absolutely real people in the real world with hypocritical, self-absorbed, truncated senses of empathy like this
are they incredibly unpleasant and narcissistic assholes i want nothing to do with?
ayyyyyyyeeeeeeeep
Again, if you dislike her that's totally fine
My complaint was the characterization of the character as a psychopath, which is not accurate
People who commit crimes of passion are not psychopaths, nearly by definition
Also not to drag it out but your description of seras view of mages is entirely incorrect
She has no idea about tranquility and what circles actually do at the beginning and she gets upset when its explained to her
She's also spent her entire life being told "mages and magic are super scary things."
Cassandra: The simplest spell had you white as a sheet. I've shrugged off worse and practiced.
Sera: Well, sorry I'm scared of the stuff I have been warned about my whole life, like most people who aren't seekers.
some people hate Vivienne because she's arrogant and classist and judgmental and catty and superficial
and she is literally all of those things
Vivienne also fully endorses a status quo society that she completely benefits from and has comfortably learned to navigate
and does not like the idea of throwing things into disarray because she has no idea where she would fit into such a new arrangement, even though she is enormously powerful, brilliant, and adaptive, just the idea of having to adjust her lifestyle so severely like that is deeply troubling to her
she makes valid points and counter-arguments as to why, for example, just shutting down the Circles entirely and saying MAGES SHOULD BE FREE might actually be a really bad idea not just for non-Mages but for Mages themselves, and not for the bog-standard reasons of "possession" and "blood magic"
but also simple fear and power-imbalance, like angry mobs with torches and teenage kids with magic they don't understand accidentally burning their house down and shit
so Vivienne attempts to make some valid points, and tries to see a larger worldview, and most importantly is capable of being argued with like an adult and her point of view comes from one of not just empathy for herself and "her people" but for people in general
but, on a personal level, yeah Vivienne is rude as fuck and she's just sorta mean-spirited and wantonly cruel sometimes, and as a result some people just do not like her
moreover, she manages to push some buttons of class issues some people might have, some they might not even realize, where some snooty upper class person talking down to them just rubs them the wrong fucking way, big time, regardless of whether or not that person is right or has valid points or might ultimately be not a bad person even if they're kind of an asshole
like Vivienne doesn't do anything in the game that strikes me as outright evil or irresponsible or cruel or whatever
she's just... rude
whereas Sera, by comparison, delights some people because she makes jokes and plays pranks and makes juvenile fart noises and throws jars of bees
but Sera is a murderous vigilante with no foresight, no regard for the people she hurts, no sense of blowback or repercussions, no long-game, and a really offensively truncated sense of empathy where there are entire clades of people she just considers not people
and it's kind of telling to me that there seems to be a bit of Venn diagram overlap between "People who like and defend Sera" and "People who hate Vivienne"
Actually I'm curious about something with Viv, though I haven't tried it yet.
Viv personal quest spoilers
So there's an option to give her a regular wyvern heart instead of the snowy wyvern heart. I haven't done it because it seems kind of evil, if I'm going to refuse her request I'll just do it openly, not give her the wrong thing.
But in thinking about it and looking at her card change if you do that, I realized that she's probably knowledgable enough to know what kind of heart you're giving her but that she might use it anyway as an excuse to get rid of Bastian and raise her own power. Has anyone tried it, and if so what are the repercussions?
Vivienne personal quest spoilers:
I also couldn't bring myself to do it, but I did find a video with that outcome. Go to about 5:22:
Basically, she doesn't realize it's the wrong heart until she mixes the formula right at his bedside. She then confronts you on bringing her the wrong heart back at Skyhold. It definitely seems as though she's very upset at Bastian's death, and blames you.
There's not a single character in this so far that I don't like.
Better luck next time, Bioware.
Yeah, even the characters I "don't like" I actually do enjoy for how well they're written. It's like with Anders in DA2-- I might think they're terrible people, but great characters.
Edit: Except maybe Sera, but I'm trying to give her more of a chance this playthrough. I pretty much isolated her in the tavern last run.
some people hate Vivienne because she's arrogant and classist and judgmental and catty and superficial
and she is literally all of those things
Vivienne also fully endorses a status quo society that she completely benefits from and has comfortably learned to navigate
and does not like the idea of throwing things into disarray because she has no idea where she would fit into such a new arrangement, even though she is enormously powerful, brilliant, and adaptive, just the idea of having to adjust her lifestyle so severely like that is deeply troubling to her
she makes valid points and counter-arguments as to why, for example, just shutting down the Circles entirely and saying MAGES SHOULD BE FREE might actually be a really bad idea not just for non-Mages but for Mages themselves, and not for the bog-standard reasons of "possession" and "blood magic"
but also simple fear and power-imbalance, like angry mobs with torches and teenage kids with magic they don't understand accidentally burning their house down and shit
so Vivienne attempts to make some valid points, and tries to see a larger worldview, and most importantly is capable of being argued with like an adult and her point of view comes from one of not just empathy for herself and "her people" but for people in general
but, on a personal level, yeah Vivienne is rude as fuck and she's just sorta mean-spirited and wantonly cruel sometimes, and as a result some people just do not like her
moreover, she manages to push some buttons of class issues some people might have, some they might not even realize, where some snooty upper class person talking down to them just rubs them the wrong fucking way, big time, regardless of whether or not that person is right or has valid points or might ultimately be not a bad person even if they're kind of an asshole
like Vivienne doesn't do anything in the game that strikes me as outright evil or irresponsible or cruel or whatever
she's just... rude
whereas Sera, by comparison, delights some people because she makes jokes and plays pranks and makes juvenile fart noises and throws jars of bees
but Sera is a murderous vigilante with no foresight, no regard for the people she hurts, no sense of blowback or repercussions, no long-game, and a really offensively truncated sense of empathy where there are entire clades of people she just considers not people
and it's kind of telling to me that there seems to be a bit of Venn diagram overlap between "People who like and defend Sera" and "People who hate Vivienne"
Pony the stuff in the back half of this post is largely not true by the end of her arc
I'm not arguing that she isn't justified for hating the guy.
I'm arguing that she's a murderous psychopath.
"I hate that guy" and "I'm going to stab him so much he actually turns to liquid" are not the same thing?
He
murdered her friend in front of her, stepped over commoners, and literally didn't even acknowledge he had done anything wrong
Psychopathy is the lack of empathy or caring about people other than yourself
She was in a blind rage, she is not a psychopath, at all.
Having incredibly truncated empathy where some people are people and some people are mash under your boot isn't exactly a healthy worldview
You can try to split hairs and say "Well, they care about some people" but that's true of a lot of really dangerous, violent criminals
they'll care about their kids, or their very close friends, or the incredibly narrow band of folk they consider people
the rest of the world can fuck off and die for all they care
and that's exactly how Sera sees nobility, they're not really people to her
which is incredible hypocrisy on her part
she also doesn't give a shit about the plight of the city elves in alienages (because she wasn't raised in one and their experience is foreign to her), completely disregards the Dalish as "shit", and hates mages and is perfectly comfortable oppressing the shit out of them and locking them up as much as possible. mages, to Sera, don't count as an oppressed class of folk because they have superpowers and thus are intrinsically more powerful than other people so oppressing them is okay
is any of this unrealistic? No, not at all
there are absolutely real people in the real world with hypocritical, self-absorbed, truncated senses of empathy like this
are they incredibly unpleasant and narcissistic assholes i want nothing to do with?
ayyyyyyyeeeeeeeep
Again, if you dislike her that's totally fine
My complaint was the characterization of the character as a psychopath, which is not accurate
People who commit crimes of passion are not psychopaths, nearly by definition
Also not to drag it out but your description of seras view of mages is entirely incorrect
She has no idea about tranquility and what circles actually do at the beginning and she gets upset when its explained to her
She's also spent her entire life being told "mages and magic are super scary things."
Cassandra: The simplest spell had you white as a sheet. I've shrugged off worse and practiced.
Sera: Well, sorry I'm scared of the stuff I have been warned about my whole life, like most people who aren't seekers.
This kinda illustrates another issue I have with Sera as a character
she's treated as a full party-member but she's so aggressively ignorant of the world she lives in and so unprepared to deal with it and has views relfective of that it feels like, again
I'm either toting around a literal child or someone with some kind of mental disability who is way out of their depth and should not be going on these adventures with me
like a lot of these defenses of Sera keep sounding like "well she just doesn't know how to understand or deal with those things!"
well then maybe she doesn't belong, yeah?
maybe she would've been better served as an Agent or something, then
the rest of the party are adventurers cut from a different cloth
they're hardened mercenaries and powerful mages and experienced warriors and so on
the only one who comes close to Sera in naivete is Cole who is literally not from this world
and even Cole deals with this shit better and with less shitty opinions, because his naivete just results in him not understanding stuff and needing it explained to him
instead of someone who builds a shield by way of just being a fuck-ass about everything
He's just also a murderous psychopath, which sera is not
What Sera did you get? The one I got took great pleasure in stabbing a guy way past the point he was dead. She also screams "Eat it! Eat it!" after nearly every party kill. Seems pretty murderous psychopath to me.
The one who specifically discusses with Bull that she doesn't like thinking about the pain or suffering she causes people in combat. She focuses on what she's doing but is uncomfortable with the actual damage she causes to people and doesn't relish it.
She calls Bull weird for enjoying hurting people.
And I've no idea where the bolded part was from, haven't seen anything like that.
Sera Spoiler:
She has two character quests, the second one you play pranks but the first one she takes you out to check on a Red Jenny operation. During that one there's a noble who sabotaged the operation and he is like "yo Inquisitor stop tooling around with Red Jenny and our ~*noble houses*~ will make a glorious alliance"
and you can give Sera the go ahead
and she kills him
not just a little but a lot
My Inquisitor's exact line was "Sera, stop, he's dead! At this point you're just making wine
I didn't get that at all, I
stripped the noble of his title and put him to work and she laughed about it and that was that.
On my version, Sera
Got tired of me asking him questions, and killed him on her own, same violent result. Then I ripped her a new one back at Skyhold and told her if she ever pulled shit like that again, she's out.
Best thing about Sera (and Viv for that matter) is being able to tell her that her shit opinons don't matter and that she can go fuck herself at any time.
yeah that's what happened in my first playthrough
I was questioning the guy to figure out his fucking deal because this entire scenario was fucked up as shit and partly Sera's fault and partly his fault and I wanted to know what was what so I could yell at the appropriate parties properly
and Sera basically re-enacted the elevator scene from Drive on this fucking guy and I was like jesus christ Sera
then back at Skyhold we argued about it and her response was basically "I'm going to keep doing shit like this because this is how I do things" and I was like "Not if you're part of my Inquisition you're fucking not" and she got shitty with me like it was my fault she got a bunch of innocent people killed with her stupid ideas and bootfucking a guy to death
so I kicked her the fuck out right then and there
second playthrough I refused to recruit her, when the mission came up that introduced her, I did it, I picked apart how she's basically a petty thug who enacts revenge fantasies with no regard for the repercussions and she smiled like "yeah, and?" and I'm like and that's a bad thing, Sera and she was like "pfft" so I told her to fuck off and she vanished from my game and I will never recruit Sera again because she's fucking awful
Sera is a shitty person. She just is. She's either badly written, as a character, or she's written deliberately as someone so aggressively unintelligent and truncated in her ability to comprehend the world that she can't grow as a person or understand complex things and she's basically some variety of mentally disabled.
I've seen some people, I don't know if Chincy is one of them but there have been some, try to defend Sera as being representative of a really basic commoner's point of view; that she's just really uneducated and uncultured and she's basically a street rat and doesn't have the patience or education or background to really think at the level some people are expecting of her and her behavior reflects her life
except that's 100% bullshit if you manage to eke out any of Sera's backstory; she was raised by a human noble with some degree of privilege. She rejects it all, of course, but that's also part of why she's totally shitty towards other elves, for example. She wasn't raised in an alienage and she didn't grow up on the streets starving. Sera grew up in privilege and has only as an adult adopted this whole street rat persona thing and kinda leans on "keepin' it real" to conceal the fact that she's kinda intellectually incapable of understanding the world around her.
it makes her an enormously unpleasant character to be around on like, several levels.
I'm not arguing that she isn't justified for hating the guy.
I'm arguing that she's a murderous psychopath.
"I hate that guy" and "I'm going to stab him so much he actually turns to liquid" are not the same thing?
He
murdered her friend in front of her, stepped over commoners, and literally didn't even acknowledge he had done anything wrong
Psychopathy is the lack of empathy or caring about people other than yourself
She was in a blind rage, she is not a psychopath, at all.
Having incredibly truncated empathy where some people are people and some people are mash under your boot isn't exactly a healthy worldview
You can try to split hairs and say "Well, they care about some people" but that's true of a lot of really dangerous, violent criminals
they'll care about their kids, or their very close friends, or the incredibly narrow band of folk they consider people
the rest of the world can fuck off and die for all they care
and that's exactly how Sera sees nobility, they're not really people to her
which is incredible hypocrisy on her part
she also doesn't give a shit about the plight of the city elves in alienages (because she wasn't raised in one and their experience is foreign to her), completely disregards the Dalish as "shit", and hates mages and is perfectly comfortable oppressing the shit out of them and locking them up as much as possible. mages, to Sera, don't count as an oppressed class of folk because they have superpowers and thus are intrinsically more powerful than other people so oppressing them is okay
is any of this unrealistic? No, not at all
there are absolutely real people in the real world with hypocritical, self-absorbed, truncated senses of empathy like this
are they incredibly unpleasant and narcissistic assholes i want nothing to do with?
ayyyyyyyeeeeeeeep
Again, if you dislike her that's totally fine
My complaint was the characterization of the character as a psychopath, which is not accurate
People who commit crimes of passion are not psychopaths, nearly by definition
Also not to drag it out but your description of seras view of mages is entirely incorrect
She has no idea about tranquility and what circles actually do at the beginning and she gets upset when its explained to her
She's also spent her entire life being told "mages and magic are super scary things."
Cassandra: The simplest spell had you white as a sheet. I've shrugged off worse and practiced.
Sera: Well, sorry I'm scared of the stuff I have been warned about my whole life, like most people who aren't seekers.
This kinda illustrates another issue I have with Sera as a character
she's treated as a full party-member but she's so aggressively ignorant of the world she lives in and so unprepared to deal with it and has views relfective of that it feels like, again
I'm either toting around a literal child or someone with some kind of mental disability who is way out of their depth and should not be going on these adventures with me
like a lot of these defenses of Sera keep sounding like "well she just doesn't know how to understand or deal with those things!"
well then maybe she doesn't belong, yeah?
maybe she would've been better served as an Agent or something, then
the rest of the party are adventurers cut from a different cloth
they're hardened mercenaries and powerful mages and experienced warriors and so on
the only one who comes close to Sera in naivete is Cole who is literally not from this world
and even Cole deals with this shit better and with less shitty opinions, because his naivete just results in him not understanding stuff and needing it explained to him
instead of someone who builds a shield by way of just being a fuck-ass about everything
He also learns many of those things during the journey
part of her arc is her coming to understand the world better
everyone else in your party is an exception badass with a good reason to be there
Sera is a vicious street rat with a bow who kills people and laughs about it, and as such it does seem weird that Cassandra or Cullen or whoever doesn't say "whoa hey, you murderous little shit, I'm going to arrest you here and now."
like there were a lot of people who didn't like Jack in ME2
because she's abrasive and unpleasant and kind of a murderous thug
but Jack gets some character growth, especially if you romance her (which, to be frank, is kind of a troublesome aspect of these games but whatever)
so I get why some people didn't like Jack
that said, at least Jack felt like she was useful and belonged on the Normandy and wouldn't be an active detriment and that you weren't like, doing her harm by bringing her along
with Sera, her presence feels bad for the Inquisition because her Red Jenny bullshit seems like more headache than help and it seems like it's going to cause a bunch of political bullshit the Inquisition doesn't need
and ultimately all Sera herself is, is another archer with contacts in a murder-vigilante peasant-revolt movement thing
but also taking Sera along on adventures itself feels wrong because Sera is woefully unequppied, mentally and socially, to deal with basically half the shit you run into. She spends her time being either scared out of her mind or being an absolute intolerable shitstain (often the latter as cover for the former) because the weird fucked up shit you do on your adventures is waaaaaaaaaay outside her element.
Chincy, you could try arguing "But if you push through that, she has an arc where that changes, especially if you romance her!"
none of that's going to matter to me, because for one thing I'm not going to romance someone that I feel I have a really unpleasant and imbalanced power dynamic with, intellectually
for another the idea of romancing Sera is unpalatable because of her personality in general
and finally having to go through Sera's "arc" would require grinding through just... having Sera around in general which is just ringing hollow to me, narratively. It's like trying to justify a decision that doesn't make any narrative sense with the foreknowledge that it'll all turn around and justify itself later
+2
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Actually I'm curious about something with Viv, though I haven't tried it yet.
Viv personal quest spoilers
So there's an option to give her a regular wyvern heart instead of the snowy wyvern heart. I haven't done it because it seems kind of evil, if I'm going to refuse her request I'll just do it openly, not give her the wrong thing.
But in thinking about it and looking at her card change if you do that, I realized that she's probably knowledgable enough to know what kind of heart you're giving her but that she might use it anyway as an excuse to get rid of Bastian and raise her own power. Has anyone tried it, and if so what are the repercussions?
Vivienne personal quest spoilers:
I also couldn't bring myself to do it, but I did find a video with that outcome. Go to about 5:22:
Basically, she doesn't realize it's the wrong heart until she mixes the formula right at his bedside. She then confronts you on bringing her the wrong heart back at Skyhold. It definitely seems as though she's very upset at Bastian's death, and blames you.
That video doesn't fully answer my question, because
(Vivienne, later game spoilers)
If you do the quest the right way, then later in the game Bastian's family come to visit and you see Vivienne skillfully spinning Bastian's death to aquire more power for herself.
Probably she still felt something for the man, but she's not above using his corpse as a tool.
She's also very good at showing the emotion that you want to see.
So I can totally see her acting outraged that would sabotage her potion, possibly costing a man's life, because that's the politically intelligent way to respond, all the while hiding the fact that she's really happy he's dead because it means she can advance. It's hard to really know, since the great game is all about masks, and Vivienne is very, very good at the game. So I can see a possibility of that later scene being changed to show that she knew perfectly well what she was feeding Bastian and did it anyway because it worked in her favor.
Peace to fashion police, I wear my heart
On my sleeve, let the runway start
like there were a lot of people who didn't like Jack in ME2
because she's abrasive and unpleasant and kind of a murderous thug
but Jack gets some character growth, especially if you romance her (which, to be frank, is kind of a troublesome aspect of these games but whatever)
so I get why some people didn't like Jack
that said, at least Jack felt like she was useful and belonged on the Normandy and wouldn't be an active detriment and that you weren't like, doing her harm by bringing her along
with Sera, her presence feels bad for the Inquisition because her Red Jenny bullshit seems like more headache than help and it seems like it's going to cause a bunch of political bullshit the Inquisition doesn't need
and ultimately all Sera herself is, is another archer with contacts in a murder-vigilante peasant-revolt movement thing
but also taking Sera along on adventures itself feels wrong because Sera is woefully unequppied, mentally and socially, to deal with basically half the shit you run into. She spends her time being either scared out of her mind or being an absolute intolerable shitstain (often the latter as cover for the former) because the weird fucked up shit you do on your adventures is waaaaaaaaaay outside her element.
Chincy, you could try arguing "But if you push through that, she has an arc where that changes, especially if you romance her!"
none of that's going to matter to me, because for one thing I'm not going to romance someone that I feel I have a really unpleasant and imbalanced power dynamic with, intellectually
for another the idea of romancing Sera is unpalatable because of her personality in general
and finally having to go through Sera's "arc" would require grinding through just... having Sera around in general which is just ringing hollow to me, narratively. It's like trying to justify a decision that doesn't make any narrative sense with the foreknowledge that it'll all turn around and justify itself later
Dude listen
You don't like her
Okay
but you keep saying things that, if you use her and go through her story lines, are innaccurate
she learns more about mages, about nobles, etc, and does change her views
if you don't want to use her to find that stuff, thats fine
but its kind of shitty to keep dropping walls of text where you call her mentally disabled when you haven't actually gone through her shit to see that that's not true!
so I dunno maybe stop being so INCREDIBLY aggressive and borderline offensive about it?
Pony its really not fucking cool that you keep tossing out the mentally disabled descriptor dude
you don't like her, that's fine
she DOES grow and change her views
if you didn't see that whatever but please don't toss that shit around unreservedly
I call it like I see it, dude
It's how the character comes across to me, especially in light of her backstory, she's not uneducated or uncultured or something
the way she is, her inability to grasp complex concepts and sentences and stuff, is either a deliberate affectation to look more "street" (an equally unpalatable idea) or just... Sera
and people with mental disabilities can absolutely grow and change
speaking as someone who has struggled with mental disability for many years, I know that better than most
it's not a phrase I throw out "unreservedly", don't presume to lecture me about this, bro
if you disagree, you disagree, that's fine
but don't tumblrize at me, I am not who you think you are talking to
I thought Jack was really cool, very well written and played
because she was ultimately a very damaged person who had been through the most traumatic shit and you could help her find a kind of direction in life
Like, in ME3 you see her again and she's actually turned her life around somewhat, doing good in the galaxy, and it's fantastic
Sera is either entirely sane, in which case she's a seriously horrible person with very few actual redeeming features at all, or she's not, in which case she needs to be stopped for her own good
I can see where they were going with Sera and I think it's a reasonable direction to take, but the execution of the character was not the best
What they really should have done was made her incredibly competent, intelligence and level-headed, someone who carefully destroyed the plans of the powerful when they preyed on the weak, someone with restraint, intellect, wit and patience.
Basically if she was a bit more like Batman then yeah sure rockin
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
some people hate Vivienne because she's arrogant and classist and judgmental and catty and superficial
and she is literally all of those things
Vivienne also fully endorses a status quo society that she completely benefits from and has comfortably learned to navigate
and does not like the idea of throwing things into disarray because she has no idea where she would fit into such a new arrangement, even though she is enormously powerful, brilliant, and adaptive, just the idea of having to adjust her lifestyle so severely like that is deeply troubling to her
she makes valid points and counter-arguments as to why, for example, just shutting down the Circles entirely and saying MAGES SHOULD BE FREE might actually be a really bad idea not just for non-Mages but for Mages themselves, and not for the bog-standard reasons of "possession" and "blood magic"
but also simple fear and power-imbalance, like angry mobs with torches and teenage kids with magic they don't understand accidentally burning their house down and shit
so Vivienne attempts to make some valid points, and tries to see a larger worldview, and most importantly is capable of being argued with like an adult and her point of view comes from one of not just empathy for herself and "her people" but for people in general
but, on a personal level, yeah Vivienne is rude as fuck and she's just sorta mean-spirited and wantonly cruel sometimes, and as a result some people just do not like her
moreover, she manages to push some buttons of class issues some people might have, some they might not even realize, where some snooty upper class person talking down to them just rubs them the wrong fucking way, big time, regardless of whether or not that person is right or has valid points or might ultimately be not a bad person even if they're kind of an asshole
like Vivienne doesn't do anything in the game that strikes me as outright evil or irresponsible or cruel or whatever
she's just... rude
whereas Sera, by comparison, delights some people because she makes jokes and plays pranks and makes juvenile fart noises and throws jars of bees
but Sera is a murderous vigilante with no foresight, no regard for the people she hurts, no sense of blowback or repercussions, no long-game, and a really offensively truncated sense of empathy where there are entire clades of people she just considers not people
and it's kind of telling to me that there seems to be a bit of Venn diagram overlap between "People who like and defend Sera" and "People who hate Vivienne"
So the thing I love about Viv is that she acknowledges your right to dislike her for this, that your disapproval does not impact her view of herself, her morals, or her goals
it's the same reason I love having characters like Sten in a game, it's nice to have characters that aren't emotionally or structurally beholden to your uber-protagonist, who operate under their own guidelines
I'm not arguing that she isn't justified for hating the guy.
I'm arguing that she's a murderous psychopath.
"I hate that guy" and "I'm going to stab him so much he actually turns to liquid" are not the same thing?
He
murdered her friend in front of her, stepped over commoners, and literally didn't even acknowledge he had done anything wrong
Psychopathy is the lack of empathy or caring about people other than yourself
She was in a blind rage, she is not a psychopath, at all.
Having incredibly truncated empathy where some people are people and some people are mash under your boot isn't exactly a healthy worldview
You can try to split hairs and say "Well, they care about some people" but that's true of a lot of really dangerous, violent criminals
they'll care about their kids, or their very close friends, or the incredibly narrow band of folk they consider people
the rest of the world can fuck off and die for all they care
and that's exactly how Sera sees nobility, they're not really people to her
which is incredible hypocrisy on her part
she also doesn't give a shit about the plight of the city elves in alienages (because she wasn't raised in one and their experience is foreign to her), completely disregards the Dalish as "shit", and hates mages and is perfectly comfortable oppressing the shit out of them and locking them up as much as possible. mages, to Sera, don't count as an oppressed class of folk because they have superpowers and thus are intrinsically more powerful than other people so oppressing them is okay
is any of this unrealistic? No, not at all
there are absolutely real people in the real world with hypocritical, self-absorbed, truncated senses of empathy like this
are they incredibly unpleasant and narcissistic assholes i want nothing to do with?
ayyyyyyyeeeeeeeep
Again, if you dislike her that's totally fine
My complaint was the characterization of the character as a psychopath, which is not accurate
People who commit crimes of passion are not psychopaths, nearly by definition
Also not to drag it out but your description of seras view of mages is entirely incorrect
She has no idea about tranquility and what circles actually do at the beginning and she gets upset when its explained to her
She's also spent her entire life being told "mages and magic are super scary things."
Cassandra: The simplest spell had you white as a sheet. I've shrugged off worse and practiced.
Sera: Well, sorry I'm scared of the stuff I have been warned about my whole life, like most people who aren't seekers.
This kinda illustrates another issue I have with Sera as a character
she's treated as a full party-member but she's so aggressively ignorant of the world she lives in and so unprepared to deal with it and has views relfective of that it feels like, again
I'm either toting around a literal child or someone with some kind of mental disability who is way out of their depth and should not be going on these adventures with me
like a lot of these defenses of Sera keep sounding like "well she just doesn't know how to understand or deal with those things!"
well then maybe she doesn't belong, yeah?
maybe she would've been better served as an Agent or something, then
the rest of the party are adventurers cut from a different cloth
they're hardened mercenaries and powerful mages and experienced warriors and so on
the only one who comes close to Sera in naivete is Cole who is literally not from this world
and even Cole deals with this shit better and with less shitty opinions, because his naivete just results in him not understanding stuff and needing it explained to him
instead of someone who builds a shield by way of just being a fuck-ass about everything
She isn't ignorant of the world she lives in though.
She's ignorant of the world you live in, where you can deal with literal manifestations of emotions rooting around in your head and mages launching firestorms and world-shattering, cataclysmic events are happening around you, and then you can turn around and chat with your buddies like it's no big thing, maybe attend a ball or go for a walk.
Sera can't deal with that, not all at once, not like it's no big deal, because it turns her understand of the world upside-down. She knows the Chantry Doctrine, knows what people told her about alienage elves and the Dalish. It's different from Cole who doesn't have any preconceptions to build off of, because she has views and opinions already, and changing them means first breaking down her existing views and then building new ones.
Now, whether you personally want to put up with someone questioning their worldview and their basic assumptions about the world is, you know, personal preference.
But saying that she starts out as a murderous vigilante who's an ignorant bigot, continues being a murderous vigilante who is an ignorant bigot, and closes the game as a murderous vigilante who's an ignorant bigot is completely ignoring her character arc.
Pony its really not fucking cool that you keep tossing out the mentally disabled descriptor dude
you don't like her, that's fine
she DOES grow and change her views
if you didn't see that whatever but please don't toss that shit around unreservedly
I call it like I see it, dude
It's how the character comes across to me, especially in light of her backstory, she's not uneducated or uncultured or something
the way she is, her inability to grasp complex concepts and sentences and stuff, is either a deliberate affectation to look more "street" (an equally unpalatable idea) or just... Sera
and people with mental disabilities can absolutely grow and change
speaking as someone who has struggled with mental disability for many years, I know that better than most
it's not a phrase I throw out "unreservedly", don't presume to lecture me about this, bro
if you disagree, you disagree, that's fine
but don't tumblrize at me, I am not who you think you are talking to
"Calling it like you see it" does not excuse you from being kind of a goose
your laying labels that are offensive and problematic at the feet of a character you have not seen the progression of
Sera has almost the same framing and arc as Jack except Jack felt integral to the progression of the story and also had more dynamic reasons for inter-party conflict
The continued statement AND SHE NEVER CHANGES is absolutely false, demonstrably so, and completely ignores where the character goes
you are stating she is disabled because of how you perceive her to be at the beginning of her arc, and I am telling you that that arc fills out and explains the character
if you want to either experience that and then confirm your beliefs or just say "I hate this character I don't want to use her" thats fine but I'm REALLY uncomfortable with the language you're using and I'd appreciate it if you stopped, thats all
some people hate Vivienne because she's arrogant and classist and judgmental and catty and superficial
and she is literally all of those things
Vivienne also fully endorses a status quo society that she completely benefits from and has comfortably learned to navigate
and does not like the idea of throwing things into disarray because she has no idea where she would fit into such a new arrangement, even though she is enormously powerful, brilliant, and adaptive, just the idea of having to adjust her lifestyle so severely like that is deeply troubling to her
she makes valid points and counter-arguments as to why, for example, just shutting down the Circles entirely and saying MAGES SHOULD BE FREE might actually be a really bad idea not just for non-Mages but for Mages themselves, and not for the bog-standard reasons of "possession" and "blood magic"
but also simple fear and power-imbalance, like angry mobs with torches and teenage kids with magic they don't understand accidentally burning their house down and shit
so Vivienne attempts to make some valid points, and tries to see a larger worldview, and most importantly is capable of being argued with like an adult and her point of view comes from one of not just empathy for herself and "her people" but for people in general
but, on a personal level, yeah Vivienne is rude as fuck and she's just sorta mean-spirited and wantonly cruel sometimes, and as a result some people just do not like her
moreover, she manages to push some buttons of class issues some people might have, some they might not even realize, where some snooty upper class person talking down to them just rubs them the wrong fucking way, big time, regardless of whether or not that person is right or has valid points or might ultimately be not a bad person even if they're kind of an asshole
like Vivienne doesn't do anything in the game that strikes me as outright evil or irresponsible or cruel or whatever
she's just... rude
whereas Sera, by comparison, delights some people because she makes jokes and plays pranks and makes juvenile fart noises and throws jars of bees
but Sera is a murderous vigilante with no foresight, no regard for the people she hurts, no sense of blowback or repercussions, no long-game, and a really offensively truncated sense of empathy where there are entire clades of people she just considers not people
and it's kind of telling to me that there seems to be a bit of Venn diagram overlap between "People who like and defend Sera" and "People who hate Vivienne"
So the thing I love about Viv is that she acknowledges your right to dislike her for this, that your disapproval does not impact her view of herself, her morals, or her goals
it's the same reason I love having characters like Sten in a game, it's nice to have characters that aren't emotionally or structurally beholden to your uber-protagonist, who operate under their own guidelines
I think Viv is a fascinating character
I wouldn't say I like Viv as a person
She's rude as fuck!
Like sometimes the banter she has it's like
jesus Viv
that's kind of unnecessary
but she's certainly a well-written character with an interesting worldview, a worldview that I think was important to represent within the themes of the game, and she represents it well
and I agree that it's neat that she's not like, beholden to trying to make you like her, and that includes her not being a romanceable character
and much like a drill instructor, she'll bust you the fuck down even if she likes you
0
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
I'm not really understanding how interpreting her as having a mental disability is supposed to be offensive?
A lot of people have interpreted Cole's personality as sharing some symptoms with autism, and Cole is one of my favorite characters (probably why I view Solas more favorably than a lot of people, because he clearly loves Cole).
Peace to fashion police, I wear my heart
On my sleeve, let the runway start
Sera has almost the same framing and arc as Jack except Jack felt integral to the progression of the story and also had more dynamic reasons for inter-party conflict
she also has a much better reason for being the way she is, and her attitude/mentality comes down much quicker. by the time you do her quest, you can easily see what she really wants.
Posts
but should I do it as a Qunari or a human
Having incredibly truncated empathy where some people are people and some people are mash under your boot isn't exactly a healthy worldview
You can try to split hairs and say "Well, they care about some people" but that's true of a lot of really dangerous, violent criminals
they'll care about their kids, or their very close friends, or the incredibly narrow band of folk they consider people
the rest of the world can fuck off and die for all they care
and that's exactly how Sera sees nobility, they're not really people to her
which is incredible hypocrisy on her part
she also doesn't give a shit about the plight of the city elves in alienages (because she wasn't raised in one and their experience is foreign to her), completely disregards the Dalish as "shit", and hates mages and is perfectly comfortable oppressing the shit out of them and locking them up as much as possible. mages, to Sera, don't count as an oppressed class of folk because they have superpowers and thus are intrinsically more powerful than other people so oppressing them is okay
is any of this unrealistic? No, not at all
there are absolutely real people in the real world with hypocritical, self-absorbed, truncated senses of empathy like this
are they incredibly unpleasant and narcissistic assholes i want nothing to do with?
ayyyyyyyeeeeeeeep
dwarf, for comedy
but
I wanna try a mage out
Again, if you dislike her that's totally fine
My complaint was the characterization of the character as a psychopath, which is not accurate
People who commit crimes of passion are not psychopaths, nearly by definition
Also not to drag it out but your description of seras view of mages is entirely incorrect
She has no idea about tranquility and what circles actually do at the beginning and she gets upset when its explained to her
She's also spent her entire life being told "mages and magic are super scary things."
My Steam
some people hate Vivienne because she's arrogant and classist and judgmental and catty and superficial
and she is literally all of those things
Vivienne also fully endorses a status quo society that she completely benefits from and has comfortably learned to navigate
and does not like the idea of throwing things into disarray because she has no idea where she would fit into such a new arrangement, even though she is enormously powerful, brilliant, and adaptive, just the idea of having to adjust her lifestyle so severely like that is deeply troubling to her
she makes valid points and counter-arguments as to why, for example, just shutting down the Circles entirely and saying MAGES SHOULD BE FREE might actually be a really bad idea not just for non-Mages but for Mages themselves, and not for the bog-standard reasons of "possession" and "blood magic"
but also simple fear and power-imbalance, like angry mobs with torches and teenage kids with magic they don't understand accidentally burning their house down and shit
so Vivienne attempts to make some valid points, and tries to see a larger worldview, and most importantly is capable of being argued with like an adult and her point of view comes from one of not just empathy for herself and "her people" but for people in general
but, on a personal level, yeah Vivienne is rude as fuck and she's just sorta mean-spirited and wantonly cruel sometimes, and as a result some people just do not like her
moreover, she manages to push some buttons of class issues some people might have, some they might not even realize, where some snooty upper class person talking down to them just rubs them the wrong fucking way, big time, regardless of whether or not that person is right or has valid points or might ultimately be not a bad person even if they're kind of an asshole
like Vivienne doesn't do anything in the game that strikes me as outright evil or irresponsible or cruel or whatever
she's just... rude
whereas Sera, by comparison, delights some people because she makes jokes and plays pranks and makes juvenile fart noises and throws jars of bees
but Sera is a murderous vigilante with no foresight, no regard for the people she hurts, no sense of blowback or repercussions, no long-game, and a really offensively truncated sense of empathy where there are entire clades of people she just considers not people
and it's kind of telling to me that there seems to be a bit of Venn diagram overlap between "People who like and defend Sera" and "People who hate Vivienne"
Vivienne personal quest spoilers:
Basically, she doesn't realize it's the wrong heart until she mixes the formula right at his bedside. She then confronts you on bringing her the wrong heart back at Skyhold. It definitely seems as though she's very upset at Bastian's death, and blames you.
Yeah, even the characters I "don't like" I actually do enjoy for how well they're written. It's like with Anders in DA2-- I might think they're terrible people, but great characters.
Edit: Except maybe Sera, but I'm trying to give her more of a chance this playthrough. I pretty much isolated her in the tavern last run.
but
but
she's so annoying I cannot bring myself to actually converse with her
Pony the stuff in the back half of this post is largely not true by the end of her arc
This kinda illustrates another issue I have with Sera as a character
she's treated as a full party-member but she's so aggressively ignorant of the world she lives in and so unprepared to deal with it and has views relfective of that it feels like, again
I'm either toting around a literal child or someone with some kind of mental disability who is way out of their depth and should not be going on these adventures with me
like a lot of these defenses of Sera keep sounding like "well she just doesn't know how to understand or deal with those things!"
well then maybe she doesn't belong, yeah?
maybe she would've been better served as an Agent or something, then
the rest of the party are adventurers cut from a different cloth
they're hardened mercenaries and powerful mages and experienced warriors and so on
the only one who comes close to Sera in naivete is Cole who is literally not from this world
and even Cole deals with this shit better and with less shitty opinions, because his naivete just results in him not understanding stuff and needing it explained to him
instead of someone who builds a shield by way of just being a fuck-ass about everything
best write up of sera
He also learns many of those things during the journey
part of her arc is her coming to understand the world better
everyone else in your party is an exception badass with a good reason to be there
Sera is a vicious street rat with a bow who kills people and laughs about it, and as such it does seem weird that Cassandra or Cullen or whoever doesn't say "whoa hey, you murderous little shit, I'm going to arrest you here and now."
you don't like her, that's fine
she DOES grow and change her views
if you didn't see that whatever but please don't toss that shit around unreservedly
but characters in Inquisition generally seem to have less of an "arc" than characters from other Bioware games
not everyone of course, Cassandra's a big exception to that
but people tend to be who they are and accompany you and they're very well formed and set in their ways off the bat
this might change as I progress tho
maybe you'd be best served sitting, over here, forever. good job, great job sera.
because she's abrasive and unpleasant and kind of a murderous thug
but Jack gets some character growth, especially if you romance her (which, to be frank, is kind of a troublesome aspect of these games but whatever)
so I get why some people didn't like Jack
that said, at least Jack felt like she was useful and belonged on the Normandy and wouldn't be an active detriment and that you weren't like, doing her harm by bringing her along
with Sera, her presence feels bad for the Inquisition because her Red Jenny bullshit seems like more headache than help and it seems like it's going to cause a bunch of political bullshit the Inquisition doesn't need
and ultimately all Sera herself is, is another archer with contacts in a murder-vigilante peasant-revolt movement thing
but also taking Sera along on adventures itself feels wrong because Sera is woefully unequppied, mentally and socially, to deal with basically half the shit you run into. She spends her time being either scared out of her mind or being an absolute intolerable shitstain (often the latter as cover for the former) because the weird fucked up shit you do on your adventures is waaaaaaaaaay outside her element.
Chincy, you could try arguing "But if you push through that, she has an arc where that changes, especially if you romance her!"
none of that's going to matter to me, because for one thing I'm not going to romance someone that I feel I have a really unpleasant and imbalanced power dynamic with, intellectually
for another the idea of romancing Sera is unpalatable because of her personality in general
and finally having to go through Sera's "arc" would require grinding through just... having Sera around in general which is just ringing hollow to me, narratively. It's like trying to justify a decision that doesn't make any narrative sense with the foreknowledge that it'll all turn around and justify itself later
That video doesn't fully answer my question, because
(Vivienne, later game spoilers)
Probably she still felt something for the man, but she's not above using his corpse as a tool.
She's also very good at showing the emotion that you want to see.
So I can totally see her acting outraged that would sabotage her potion, possibly costing a man's life, because that's the politically intelligent way to respond, all the while hiding the fact that she's really happy he's dead because it means she can advance. It's hard to really know, since the great game is all about masks, and Vivienne is very, very good at the game. So I can see a possibility of that later scene being changed to show that she knew perfectly well what she was feeding Bastian and did it anyway because it worked in her favor.
On my sleeve, let the runway start
Dude listen
You don't like her
Okay
but you keep saying things that, if you use her and go through her story lines, are innaccurate
she learns more about mages, about nobles, etc, and does change her views
if you don't want to use her to find that stuff, thats fine
but its kind of shitty to keep dropping walls of text where you call her mentally disabled when you haven't actually gone through her shit to see that that's not true!
so I dunno maybe stop being so INCREDIBLY aggressive and borderline offensive about it?
Because she gets so damn excited when she sees that giant and dragon
I call it like I see it, dude
It's how the character comes across to me, especially in light of her backstory, she's not uneducated or uncultured or something
the way she is, her inability to grasp complex concepts and sentences and stuff, is either a deliberate affectation to look more "street" (an equally unpalatable idea) or just... Sera
and people with mental disabilities can absolutely grow and change
speaking as someone who has struggled with mental disability for many years, I know that better than most
it's not a phrase I throw out "unreservedly", don't presume to lecture me about this, bro
if you disagree, you disagree, that's fine
but don't tumblrize at me, I am not who you think you are talking to
I thought Jack was really cool, very well written and played
because she was ultimately a very damaged person who had been through the most traumatic shit and you could help her find a kind of direction in life
Like, in ME3 you see her again and she's actually turned her life around somewhat, doing good in the galaxy, and it's fantastic
Sera is either entirely sane, in which case she's a seriously horrible person with very few actual redeeming features at all, or she's not, in which case she needs to be stopped for her own good
I can see where they were going with Sera and I think it's a reasonable direction to take, but the execution of the character was not the best
What they really should have done was made her incredibly competent, intelligence and level-headed, someone who carefully destroyed the plans of the powerful when they preyed on the weak, someone with restraint, intellect, wit and patience.
Basically if she was a bit more like Batman then yeah sure rockin
So the thing I love about Viv is that she acknowledges your right to dislike her for this, that your disapproval does not impact her view of herself, her morals, or her goals
it's the same reason I love having characters like Sten in a game, it's nice to have characters that aren't emotionally or structurally beholden to your uber-protagonist, who operate under their own guidelines
She isn't ignorant of the world she lives in though.
She's ignorant of the world you live in, where you can deal with literal manifestations of emotions rooting around in your head and mages launching firestorms and world-shattering, cataclysmic events are happening around you, and then you can turn around and chat with your buddies like it's no big thing, maybe attend a ball or go for a walk.
Sera can't deal with that, not all at once, not like it's no big deal, because it turns her understand of the world upside-down. She knows the Chantry Doctrine, knows what people told her about alienage elves and the Dalish. It's different from Cole who doesn't have any preconceptions to build off of, because she has views and opinions already, and changing them means first breaking down her existing views and then building new ones.
Now, whether you personally want to put up with someone questioning their worldview and their basic assumptions about the world is, you know, personal preference.
But saying that she starts out as a murderous vigilante who's an ignorant bigot, continues being a murderous vigilante who is an ignorant bigot, and closes the game as a murderous vigilante who's an ignorant bigot is completely ignoring her character arc.
My Steam
"Calling it like you see it" does not excuse you from being kind of a goose
your laying labels that are offensive and problematic at the feet of a character you have not seen the progression of
I am asking you to please not do that
you are stating she is disabled because of how you perceive her to be at the beginning of her arc, and I am telling you that that arc fills out and explains the character
if you want to either experience that and then confirm your beliefs or just say "I hate this character I don't want to use her" thats fine but I'm REALLY uncomfortable with the language you're using and I'd appreciate it if you stopped, thats all
I think Viv is a fascinating character
I wouldn't say I like Viv as a person
She's rude as fuck!
Like sometimes the banter she has it's like
jesus Viv
that's kind of unnecessary
but she's certainly a well-written character with an interesting worldview, a worldview that I think was important to represent within the themes of the game, and she represents it well
and I agree that it's neat that she's not like, beholden to trying to make you like her, and that includes her not being a romanceable character
because they're sleeping kind of close to her doorstep and ew
She mostly agrees with my Inquisitor but I'm not sure we're working off the same moral foundation
those cheekbones alone make her way out of my league
you have to pull yourself up by your bootlaces to impress her
except in this case 'pulling yourself up by your bootlaces' equates to 'look absolutely fabulous and wheel and deal like nobody's business'
A lot of people have interpreted Cole's personality as sharing some symptoms with autism, and Cole is one of my favorite characters (probably why I view Solas more favorably than a lot of people, because he clearly loves Cole).
On my sleeve, let the runway start
she also has a much better reason for being the way she is, and her attitude/mentality comes down much quicker. by the time you do her quest, you can easily see what she really wants.
This game just gets better all the time