As bad as I feel about how much I hate Dorian, I honestly feel worse that I canāt stand bringing Sera into my Inquisitions anymore. Mostly because with Dorian, his writing paints a character who I wish I could punch, but I take enough major approval gains at the plot developments to make that impossible, but with Sera, I see a character who I want to help but her writing wonāt let me.
Like in over a dozen runs of Inquisition, I have only gotten her rooftop cookies scene ONCE, which was in my āfor variationās sakeā siding with the templars run. I just cannot make headway with her approval metric.Ā
But the bigger thing is thatā¦ Her writing pretty much actively hates her. It is filled with the Inquisitor talking down to her, and treating her in the most juvenile ways, rather than respecting her. And, in return, we donāt actually get to HELP Sera come to terms with her self-hatred, with the crisis of faith she has, with anything that she struggles with. Itās not that Seraās a stagnant character in Inquisitionās narrative, itās that sheās a stagnant character and her writing calls that a feature, not a bug.Ā
And it gets worse when I remember thatā¦ Gaider defended this, back when he was with BioWare. Her writer made a fratboyās image of a lesbian, created a romance dynamic that is borderline (if not over the line) abusive, and when actual lesbians were calling it out, said he thought that she was fine, and that he liked that she would beĀ ādivisive.ā In addition to this, thereās the fact that sheās the only character who can be kicked out of the Inquisition at any time, plus the fact that within the Inquisition itself, most of the companions donāt seem to care for her (side note, this is a frequent problem I have with characters written by this writer, that he continually makes characters who no one gets along with for no apparent reason). Oh, and then thereās the classism implied with a lot of what done with her, where sheĀ ādoesnāt make senseā because she uses a boatload of slang thatās common on the street level of Thedas.
Justā¦ Iām not gonna argue that characters shouldnāt be divisive. That characters shouldnāt be opinionated and such. Butā¦ Okay, the post I wanted to link to is from a long-deactivated blog, so the short version is that people who have legitimately worked with abuse survivors could use a checklist against her - thereās the way she blames the Inquisitor for HER OWN dreams, thereās the shitty way that she treats Lavellan for being Dalish, hating them in the name of doing it to them before they do it to her, and then, of course, thereās the ultimatum:Ā āDismiss your entire heritage and culture to make me feel better or weāre breaking up because you think Iām stupid.ā
All of this could be interesting depictions of a character, places to go with her developmentā¦ But theyāre presented wholly in isolation, existing no where but the brief conversations with her. The extent of herĀ āgrowthā in the game is restricted to the time jump between the base game and Trespasser, where it happens not as character development but asĀ āwell, we made her a little TOO divisive, letās smooth those edges out here!ā Except if you canāt do more than break even on her approval metric (like in my case), you donāt even get to SEE that.Ā
And while racism inherently doesnāt make sense, it still makes no sense, in terms of connecting the dots, that her reason for hating the elves is that she was adopted by a noblewoman who told her a baker didnāt serve elves, making her hate herself, and turns it around to hating all elves because that makes them different from humans, only to learn that the noblewoman lied, soā¦ she still hates elves and while sheāll kick some the big knobs around, her approval at Halamshiral is geared to approve of Celene, the biggest big knob in Orlais, over Briala, who is championing the rights of the lowest of the low, purely because Briala is an elf.
I mean, whereās her breaking point with Trevelyan, with the human noble? No talk about how this noble lady isĀ āslumming itā with her, in a year, sheāll laugh about it with her friends at fancy dinner parties and such, right? Or how the Friends of Red Jenny have been called upon in the lands owned by her family, and gee, how exactly DO you view theĀ ālittle peopleā you deal with? Like, this stuff is entirely reasonable things to argue about and break up a relationship over. But it never happens. Her anger is reserved for the elf Inquisitor.
You canāt even blame that on theĀ ārace variation was added at the extension,ā since human Inquisitor would have been the baseline for all this. And itās just not there.
All this, and I havenāt touched on theĀ āā¦ewā factor of having a lesbian character basically say about mages what IRL people say about gay people, that sheāsĀ āfineā with theirĀ āfreedom,ā so long as they take theirĀ āfreedomā and beĀ āover there.ā
Sera could have been a fascinating character - a city elf, whose perspective has sorely been lacking, an elf determined to look at the world as it is, not as it was, a champion for the poor and downtrodden in a world that steps on them without looking. And instead, sheās basically reduced by her writing toā¦ honestly, the equivalent of an extended fart joke.Ā
Dorian I hate for the characterization he has, a characterization I find unpleasant to be around, and a story that hammers homophobia into a world that I had been able to view as being free of it, particularly doing so in a fashion that both could be transplanted to or from just about any other source and require barely a rewrite of the scene to make sense, AND in a way that reduces this to the only thing that Inquisition really cares for you to remember about him as a character. Seraās problem is that she doesnāt even GET characterization. Sheās just a caricature within the gameās presentation.
