Duviri's writing is interesting in that the courtiers, in a sense, feel like an act of capitulation to the storytelling and characterization limitations of games-as-a-service- the instrumental and perfunctory role that mission givers and bosses tend to have to hold in games like this, if only for reasons of development time and resource allocation. Five endearingly-colorful weirdos who're fun to have as the voice in your ear for a few minutes at a time on repetitive missions.... who are textually only semi-real people, metastasized imaginary friends who exist only to play out the just-so stories for which they were created again, and again, and again, all just sapient enough to express some level of resentment at the fact that they're incapable of character development, existing only to be the mission control and final boss whenever you feel like going on a roguelike jaunt.
I can mow Grineer and Corpus down like wheat without a ton of dissonance- the realities of live-service games aside, if you take the premise at face value those missions are presented as actually being in service of something. But the metatextual stage-play premise of Duviri kind of invites me to feel like my character is, within the narrative, being extraneously awful to someone by choosing to continue to engage at all with the play-acting. It's all very interesting.
