But Valerie ain't that. She's a completely typical cliché from the dawn of fantasy itself.
lolwhut - what's "typical" about her story in fantasy such that it's a "cliché" exactly? Did fantasies often used to have female characters lecturing their audience about the male gaze?
The same goes for the concept of plate-wearing women in P:K as a whole - they fit completely naturally into the cartoonish high fantasy setting here. Her main crime as a character is being a fairly run-of-the-mill man-girl-proves-herself-to-the-world-but-really-she's-proving-something-to-herself story, but then again: it's cartoonish high fantasy. The floor for our expecations must be low. Of course there is such a thing as a fiction contract, but females in plate armor don’t come close to breaking that considering what else is allowed as part of this fiction’s non-supernatural.
I'd give Valerie's story more credit than that actually. While it starts off as Feminist twaddle, the most interesting part of it is the last part, where she comes to terms with her beauty, when she stops being an asshole to anyone who points it out. That's the part that subverts expectations and shows some intelligence and awareness in the writers. Similarly with Amiri's later resolution - another character that comes across initially as a tiresome Feminist cliché, but whose story becomes quite moving in the end (with a possible ending that's
really depressing if you interacted with her a certain way). And I'd join with you in criticizing some Codexians for not giving the writing a chance, so that they can see those aspects of characters that are initially just a turn-off.
But I'd be surprised if there's a similar subtlety in the next game. It'll be more stolidly woke, without the nuance of PFK's writing, pretty much guaranteed. The only reason the writing in PFK has a bit of depth and intelligence is because there's been a hangover of scepticism about the Left, and a residue of artistic and intellectual integrity, in parts of Europe that are less subject to influence from the US. But that's been changing pretty fast and Eastern Europe is on its way to being as woke as the rest of Europe. Everyone has to fall in.
You're proceeding as if everything is as normal, like it was even in the mid-Noughties - you know, writers write what they want, etc. But that's not the situation today. Writers
have to write badly because they
have to make everything an intersectional teaching moment - if they don't, the eye of Sauron will focus on them and they could be in trouble. Even if in their hearts they know it's bullshit, they can't move, can't breathe, for the social media/HR Stasi Panopticon watching their every move. The artistic world is in a much, much worse condition than you think.
Good writing is bootleg these days, it's something that you might occasionally find squeezed in a crack in the wall of propaganda that people
have to put out, on pain of losing social status, or even their jobs.
