ok my last one. this is my last one i prommy my very last one
there are a lot of miscellaneous little things that i disliked about js2 that i'm gonna get out of the way now
this quest suffered immensely from both lack of length and a lack of focus. it could easily have been another two hours long and still not explained everything it needed to explain. why are there protos in the future? why do they draw on the corpus aesthetic? why do they have railjacks? how and why are they related to their respective cardboard cutout children, beyond "ryoku wise sensei and vena crazy yandere"? why are the cardboard cutout children doomed to fight each other? why is wally so mad specifically about these cardboard cutout children and why does it want them to fight each other? why are the murmur here suddenly? why does vena have grineer troopers on her railjack? why do the post-quest rj missions have golden maws and orowyrms in them?
why are we supposed to believe umbra wouldn't frankly kill stalker on sight for what he did to the operator in js2? why are ordis' completely legitimate concerns about umbra betraying the operator to help the orokin bootlicker who traumatized them written off as a funny little joke that he immediately reneges on to cower when umbra mean-mugs him? why is umbra being brought up at all just to be used to babysit another man's child and stand completely stationary in exactly the same pose for the next three missions?
why does hunhow sacrifice himself for stalker and his cardboard cutout sons? why could he not have done this for natah/the lotus? are his efforts to help her in TNW supposed to mean anything to me now, knowing that he could have simply Magically Undone her repeated enslavement & abuse this whole time, and apparently chose not to? am i supposed to give a fuck about him now having alzheimer's? i don't. the lines where he brings up natah specifically piss me off -- when one of hunhow's final acts as "himself" was to leave the lotus in the dark, insinuating she's some sort of feeble little waif who Can't Handle the threat of a doomed future, all of his lines about natah come across as such "dogshit father devastated his daughter won't see him on his deathbed" shit and i could not give less of a fuck about him at all.
i'd say "them giving him alzheimer's feels like it's supposed to be seen as some sort of karmic retribution for octavia's anthem, which is cheap and lazy as all hell," but between TOP & daklo & the aforementioned bastardization of ordis, i sincerely doubt a single person on DE's writing team even remembers octavia's anthem.
sloppy, rushed, completely and utterly nonsensical fucking quest that didn't even have the decency to look and sound as nice as the original js did. but the thing i keep coming back to is how they once again completely fucking abused jade
like, the reproductive control of disenfranchised women is a real horror. stripping disenfranchised women of their right to be mothers is a real horror. the forced sterilizations of Black women, indigenous women, disabled women, etc; the forcible separation of these women from their children as a form of eugenics and genocide -- these are real fucking horrors that women have faced, and continue to face. and digital extremes COULD have dug into that. warframe's story is PREDICATED on the themes of autonomy & lack thereof. warframe has ALREADY approached the topics of genocide, enslavement, and domestic & sexual abuse. there is no reason why they couldn't have, and frankly inexcusable that they didn't, sensibly approach the topic of reproductive control with the nuance and sensitivity it really needed
yet it's only made clear in jade's memory feathers that getting pregnant was even a conscious choice that she made in defiance of the looming threat of orokin violence against her for exercising her autonomy. in js1 it's just presented in this fucking naive, vaguely baby-trap-ish little "oopsies! guess the condom broke! teehee!" way where stalker immediately panics while jade feeds him tepid platitudes about how "you'll always pwotect us 🥺 🥺 🥺" as though she doesn't ALSO know damn well what power the orokin hold over them both and what risks she was taking. to quote my own post from back when js1 released, digging the hole for stalker’s guilt to take root was the priority over jade’s insight and characterization, and she gets no personality beyond her completely blind faith in sorren, and her apparent willful ignorance of what unpermitted pregnancy in someone of her station would actually entail, and the fact that she is Going To Be A Mommy, Yay!
so, in js2, where is the jade we see in her memory feathers? surely we see her, right? surely DE did not make the same mistake once again of boiling her down into a passive, docile, domestic mother figure?
lol!!!!!!! lmao!!!!!!!!!!!!!
she appears for all of about five seconds as a specter of her WARFRAME FORM. in stalker's beautiful little dream where he's living out his little idealized life with his sons, jade doesn't even get the dignity of being remembered as the woman she was, but the war machine the orokin turned her into as punishment, kept in an eternal limbo state of being perpetually pregnant. the war machine that stalker himself then killed with sheer fucking negligence and an over-inflated ego
and this is... supposed to be romantic, i suppose. stripped of her face, denied once again the dignity of even being referred to by her real name (WE STILL DON'T KNOW HER REAL FUCKING NAME??? WE GET TO KNOW THAT SORREN HAD HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE AND WAS A VEGETARIAN, BUT WE CAN'T KNOW JADE'S REAL FUCKING NAME?)... but it's just soooo sweet that stalker remembers herrrrr and there's a cute little section where she's coaching him on how to take care of their babies omgggggg omg isn't that soooo cute, isn't that soooooo sweet that jade gets to be this giggly mild-mannered barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen ghost of a wifeeeeee omgggggg
then she shows up again as some manifestation by wally and stalker kills her in ~2.5 seconds and doesn't even have the decency to deliver a single stilted, sufficiently tortured-sounding line about it, it's just oh wow, so sad that happened i guess, anyway head to your next objective
i guess all this is just to say that i am genuinely disgusted by how jade's story, which should have been one about misogyny & reproductive control & violence against the most vulnerable groups of women, has culminated not once, but TWICE now in jade being used as literally just a fucking prop with generic misogynistic tropes stapled on top, who shows up just to die, and the second time around she isn't even afforded the dignity of being fucking mourned over
and to top THAT all off, ALL THIS is taking place in pontis tower. which i guess was a lab the orokin used to make sentients, according to the wiki? i don't fucking know? anyway it's this orokin tower and i guess???????? hunhow manifests it in his desire to create an ideal home for stalker & cardboard sons?
hunhow? hunhow's idealized home for stalker is an orokin tower? the orokin committed genocide against his people and enslaved jade and sorren. and, you know, that could have been brought up. wally stripping hunhow's memories for parts and maliciously complying with their "deal" by twisting his desire for a good home into a physical reminder of orokin dominion could have been something we'd been intended to linger on. that makes me feel vastly worse for hunhow than his subsequent confused voicelines do!
but instead the discrepancy is completely glossed over, and it just ends up being "wow! look at this gorgeous pristine tower with a pristine nursery and pristine kitchen! what a lovely home!" played completely straight. it's such bizarre fucking RETVRN shit, it's wedding-on-a-plantation shit
and the fandom at large STILL has the audacity to be like "erm... actually... i think that maybe YOU'RE the misogynist here... i think YOU are the ones who hate women having a choice when their choice is to have the baby... checkmate..." oh my god what year is it. where the fucking hell am i. it's so dark in here
