Anders was the first gay romance she wrote
From reviews I read her comic MITH heavily featured homosexual romance ("The story focuses homosexual relationships to a large degree (easy once every three pages)"). As it stems back from her pre-BioWare career and no one told her to write her comic book characters that way, well... But no doubt Gaider has a cover-up for that too?
Not that I've read MITH or played DA2, or ever will, haha.
Read a quality comic instead, Fear Agent, retro-style sci-fi gunslinging with an intelligent rollercoaster of a plot (shameless plug)
As Gaider said, anyone who insulted her has no clue what her job responsibilities are and that includes you.
See? Thanks for proving my point about BioWare for me. Anyone who criticizes them "has no clue". The standard BioWare response. The only way anyone would insult her is on the basis of having no clue. Guess what? We don't have any clue about the exact job responsibilities of pretty much any writer/designer out there, and usually don't until years after the game. We still praise/criticize them.
She's no better or worse than any of the DA writing staff. If it was about her "being bad at her job" they would have demanded all the writers fired.
As stated, the problem with her being bad at her job was not that she's a poor writer. As you say, their writers are all kind of shitty. She became a lightning rod/easy scapegoat because she's a poor writer who disdains the industry she works in.
Also when you insult someone with gendered slurs you're being sexist. Period.
Sure, but not all sexism is equal, there is a difference between a boss who makes a joke about his employee's short skirt and the one who won't hire women at all because they're incompetent. They're both wrong, but they're not both equal.
And the question is, who brought sexism into the debate? Who went "they're jealous of my vagina"? Which, you'll note, was a highly sexist attempt to dismiss all criticasters as "forever alone" types. The thing you're ignoring is that Hepler being an ugly fat woman just gives people ammunition to fire at her, but it's not *why* people fire at her. If she was an ugly fat man instead, people would have gone "he's thinking with his cock" and "I bet he just writes this stuff so he has something to jerk off to". Is that less sexist? Somehow I think it wouldn't be seen as sexism, and the white knights would've kept their swords sheathed.
The distinction between why and how is pretty damn important, because it means that while I can and do scoff at the tone of criticism, that does not mean I can dismiss the criticism as a whole. This is something the braying game journalists that ran with this story and the company that was pulling their strings simply refused to accept, that there is in fact a big divide between why people were upset with her and how people were upset with her. It was a p cheap and easy trick to just focus on the tone of criticism and then handwave it away. Even better, the implication as a whole is that the detractors of BioWare are *all* typical internet assholes, loons and loners, and they should just be ignored.
Yeah, nothing wrong with that company culture at all. Just put on the blinders and KEEP ON RIDING. Cliff? What cliff? Only haters believe in the cliff.
Splitting writers and coders and designers isn't dubious at all; you're just less able to compensate when one faction sucks at their only task.
I believe BioWare is the only one that runs this as a development house model. Don't get me wrong, other videogames have brought in writers completely separately from designers to draft up the basic story or work on dialog, and the principle of that is alright. But what BioWare is saying by splitting them absolutely is that they feel story and gameplay are separate *in principle*. They may interact, but only on an incidental basis when separate departments coordinate it. You can say "that fits their design philosophy, then" and you'd be right, but, well, as someone who feels BioWare games are pretty damn mediocre and boring, this is what I feel lies at the heart of their problem.
There are no gay relationships in MITH. There's a single heterosexual kiss near the end. Furthermore, even if there were, the book was co-written by her husband Chris who might have very well had a thing for the queers in this hypothetical situation.
