Incidentally Roguey, a fair portion of the hatred of Hepler came from her promoting a complete 'whore/virgin dichotomy' with regard to the DA2 companions in a manner that was more poor fan-fiction than professional writer (i.e. the 'we've got a sex-obsessed massive-chested girl and a faux-virginial girl, so we've got them all covered covered'). Even putting aside that it's one hell of a sexist depiction for a person whose likes to pretend to be a feminist, it beggars belief that anyone could work as a professional writer while being so utterly unaware of such a fundamental creative failure. Whore/virgin dichotomies are the kind of thing you might forgive from a writer who has started out as an amateur hobbyist and gained a following - but for someone who took the route of studing writing at university (Hepler did creative writing or similar), it's an incredible failure. The reason why you hire professional writers is because you expect them to be aware of well-known literary flaws and tropes, so they can either avoid or subvert them. Either she's a complete failure of a writer, or worse, she knew that she was writing one-dimensional characters on the virgin/whore template and did so deliberately to pander to the bioware fanbase.
Add that to her declared lack of interest in gaming, and the poor work of the DA2 writing team in general (Did nobody stop to think that having a character talk about sex all the time just makes her seem like a naive school-kid trying to talk herself up (instead of the sexually confident woman that they were trying to write)?b I keep harping about the romance dialogue, but that's just because it shows how their failure was structural, rather than just a poor once-off result: so much of the embarassingly shite dialogue comes from trying to shoe-horn romances in from all characters to all possible PCs with no thought for thematic consistency or organic character growth - it's porn-level 'I'm here to clean the pool' dialogue, because like porn and fanfiction there's not even the most basic attempt to match the sex with the context of the story/character). It isn't a big leap from there to connect the two and conclude that she's working in games because that kind of writing doesn't get you work outside the pulp franchise 'novel' industry?
Please stop this absurd misogyny-internalizing shit.
You can call it misogyny-internalising all you like, but it's still shit writing. Any writing that uses one-dimensional dichotomies as the basis for characterisation, without the slightest awareness of that one-dimensionality (DA2 isn't an example of a piece that deliberately uses tropes for effect; it's completely lacking in self-awareness), is overwhelmingly likely to turn out to be goddawful, as it wipes away any sense of organic character development. The fact that the dichotomy was, in this case, the most well-known, over-studied characterisation flaw in literature just makes it all the more unbelievable that a professional writer would produce it in such an obvious manner, to such poor effect.
Can you honestly tell me that you didn't feel insulted by the DA2 dialogue? With those 2 characters in particular? Can you honestly say that they weren't unbelievably one-dimensional? That's BECAUSE they've just been constructed around a linear dichotomy. Instead of either (a) thinking of the character naturalistically, (b) having the character arise from the narrative's themes, or even (c) going with the dichotomy but just being aware of it and using it to effect (e.g. Troika uses the same dichotomy at times in VtMB, but always knowingly and to effect, often as a means to lure the player into making certain false assumptions about what an NPC is going to do) Bioware's writers simply mark out spots along basic dichotomies and hang all of the character's personaity and motivations upon it.
It's also why Bioware's characters keep falling back upon 'daddy issues'. They have to - there's nowhere for the characters to go in the narrative, so instead they turn to the past in a manner that's disconnected from their current context. They're too one-dimensional for the writers to think in terms of organic growth (i.e. 'how would this character react to this situation, and how would it change him/her?'), they serve no function in terms of the story's themes, and they're mostly extraneous to the narrative (given the issues that arise from making NPC's vital to the narrative, hence forcing the player to take them, I tend to favour thematic characters ala PS:T). Sure, they can add a backstory and have the characters reference it, but when it comes to their actual personality, the writers haven't thought past 'is this one a virgin or a whore? Is that guy a paladin or a psychopath?' and so any character growth is going to feel arbitrary. I forget the exact wording of the Hepler quote that folks made so much fun of, but it was something along the lines of 'We've got a highly sexed character and a virginial character [nb:except that she didn't say it in terms that were as self-aware as these] so we've got them all covered.' (I'm sure someone can find a link to the quote).
And a professional writer should know that shit. It isn't even an issue of talent, it's just the basics of writing - as I said in the previous post, it's the kind of thing that separates professional writing from fan-fiction. The fact that this comes from full-time writers, who studied writing formally, makes it a lot less forgiveable than it would be if this was a hobbyist who made it big on pure talent, or if it were a developer/designer who was writing due to lack of a writing team.
, ever watched Farscape? That could have done it for me. But Morrigan was a bit unevenly written, but still better than Leliana. Both were like paradoxes in personality and behaviour.
Now I feel bad.
