Part of Yuma’s whole thing is that it’s glaringly obvious that the people who wrote her looked on her with all the humanity of a. Well an asian female video game character made by white guys in the early 2010s. None of her attributes or beliefs are sourced in anything tangible, she has whatever characteristics are necessary to drive drama, she’s got a cold affect and is hot physically and that’s about it. Riveting. They didn’t bother to remember the backstory they gave her in the closest thing to a next installment, the DLC, and the summation we get of her only meaningful relationship there is far fetched at best (hey guess what the orphaned girl two decades younger than him who Pagan Min made into a military combatant before her 18th birthday after co-opting all of her resources was actually a parental figure of sorts. That’s the dynamic here right.) Buuut she’s got the benefit of being at the center of the most immersive part of the game and at the crux of two interesting characters so like, you can fill in the blanks yourself.
She’s Pagans consigliere who did all the heavy lifting amidst his descent into madness: Pagan who was keeping a mother hostage after killing her children. How did Yuma feel about that, on account of her own parents being assassinated when she was a child? How did she go about managing it? Ever feel a twinge of empathy? She seems to have imprinted on Kyrat’s culture in spite of the fact that it’s in decline. It’s hard to believe she was 100% on every choice Pagan made regarding religion, which being isolated from him helped her get away with. She hates Paul, even though they’re both prison wardens and sadists: probably on account of how little he appreciate the culture she’s projected onto. How much of her still needs Pagan and how much of her is comfortable rebelling? Who taught her to be such a good military commander? Who got her into Kyrati mythology?
You can do something with all this, is what I mean. She’s not written well or with much care by any fucking means but she’s still a character worth exploring.
