30 Days of Mass Effect: Day 8
Day 8!
Least Favourite Companion.
Okay... So let's talk about Miranda.
In many ways, my problems with Miranda are my problems with Mass Effect 2. It's a far better game than its Hollywood straightjacket allows it to be. Miranda should be a fascinating, complex character, but all the effort goes into making sure her ass is perfectly framed in dialogue shots and that she never steps too far out of the archetypal Sexy Ice Queen role. I don't know who Miranda is.
It took me a while to realise that, actually. Because we find out quite a lot about her past and we save her sister - and I was genuinely pleased to have been able to do so. But I don't know who she is.
I'm gonna try and explain why by using Ashley as a springboard - another character I don't really like that much on a personal level. Or at least, I didn't, until I played through with a Shepard who was an orphan, who was nowhere near as confident as her public persona suggested and lived with a constant fear of not being good enough, of not trying hard enough, and saw in Ashley another kid with impossible expectations labouring under - she believed - an insurmountable penalty. And you were the first one to believe in her. I left her on Virmire, but I felt like the worst person in the world, because I knew I was robbing her of that future; the future where she was good enough. And that mattered more than my discomfort with her xenophobia or her weird stories about sexual assault.
Ashley's a character that judges based on external markers. She distrusts Garrus because he's a Turian, but she distrusts Liara because of her mother's betrayal. She distrusts Shepard because of her Cerberus ties, and it always felt, to me, that Kaidan's attitude on Mars was down to the personal betrayal, but Ashley genuinely wasn't sure whether you were a traitor. I can extrapolate her attitudes based on her personality, and they make consistent sense.
I understood the combination of pride and shame that drove her to join the Alliance, and it made perfect sense for her to distrust aliens but hate Cerberus more. She will never be my favourite - in fact, I don't like her very much as me - but she feels like a complete person.
Miranda, on the other hand... I think I touched on some of this once in a previous post so I apologise if I'm repeating myself for some of you, but whatever, I've started so I'll finish. Let's break down the places I think the game could have made her a complete person, but dropped the ball.
1. Why is she working for Cerberus?
I don't understand why she's doing what she's doing. I don't understand the way her world lines up. She says she's working for Cerberus because she's making a difference, but I'm not sure I believe her. Her father drove her away with his search for personal glory, a personal legacy, but she is eminently willing to sign up to the Illusive Man's search for a racial legacy and racial glory. She turns herself into the tool she was unwilling to be for her father. His desire to create a perfect example of humanity is something about which she clearly has ambiguous feelings, but she is working for an organisation with that self-same goal on a wider scale. The Illusive Man, like her father, is charismatic, arrogant, driven and obsessed with his own legacy, even if the Illusive Man sees it in grander sociological terms.
Can we reconcile this? Of course we can, and it's interesting pretty much any way you do it, from a lack of self-awareness in running back to another father-figure, to attempting to work through what was done to her by attempting to "pay it forward" to the human race, to really not giving a shit about Cerberus politics, but wanting a place where her intelligence and skills are valued, and that affords her power and independence, to maybe beingkind of pissed that she's gotten snatched away from whatever brilliant project she was going to mastermind next and forced to play babysitter to a soldier on a suicide mission.
But I have no idea which it is, or if it's even any of them. It's not discussed in detail (and why I think that is, we'll get to).
2. Relationship to Other Characters.
Miranda provides a brilliant thematic counterpoint to at least three and a half characters that I can think of.
1) Jack. They're both engineered and they both hate their engineers. The game actually does parallel these two quite closely, and clearly deliberately. And it's not that I mind their antagonistic relationship? But I do think it bears noting in the context of all the stuff I'll get to further down, that the one relationship between NPC women that gets any independent attention in this game, is the one where it's basically an extended slanging match. It's a catfight. It's illustrative of the broader pattern I'm getting at: another instance where more complicated characterisation is sacrificed to stick with simplistic, but recognisable tropes. In this case, dodgily gendered ones (and we'll get back to that, and Jack, and Miranda later, too).
2) Grunt. Like Miranda, he was created to be an exemplar of his species. I somewhat forgive the lack of interaction between the two because this isn't a game where NPCs interact much independently, though I found it odd Shepard didn't comment. Mainly this is something I felt wasn't dealt with from the player's perspective. A parallel can still be drawn even without direct interaction, but either it's oddly absent, or, if noticed, it does nothing but highlight that while Grunt's story arc revolved around working out his motivations, Miranda's remain frustratingly opaque.
2.5) Ashley. She's 2.5 because she's barely in this game, and it works best if Shepard romances Ashley followed by Miranda, or at least saved Ashley on Virmire. That said, if we knew why Miranda was working for Cerberus there would likely be some interesting parallels between Ashley - who distrusts aliens, but loathes the anti-alien Cerberus, and Miranda, who really doesn't seem to have any negative opinions about aliens but happily works for Cerberus regardless.
3) Shepard. Miranda talks about the way Shepard is exceptional without enhancements, and how that is more impressive than her own situation. But that's a historical observation. The Shepard Miranda is speaking to is more enhanced, at that point, than Miranda herself. And it was Miranda who did that to her. But again, this isn't raised, not really. Miranda doesn't offer Shepard a chance to offer contextualise her opinions on her own transformation, or even to point out to Miranda what they now have in common. I will say that it's true, the game gives you ample opportunity to talk to Miranda and form a relationship with her, but the nature of that relationship is very telling. She saved your life and brought you back from the dead, fundamentally changing the nature of your physical existence in the process, but the sum total of your relationship's development is, pretty much, dispensing sage advice to her to "fix" her because Ice Queens just need to Learn to Love. It's not that that's a shit thing to learn; it's that the lesson feels hollow when I don't know why she needs to learn it. We'll be coming back to this, later, too.
3. Why does she leave Cerberus?
So at the end of the game, Miranda defiantly follows you away from the Illusive Man, telling him to go fuck himself, she's had enough. She learned this, presumably, by basking in the awesome that is Shepard. Except I don't understand why. Like, even more than my failure to understand her motivation for working for them in the first place, which I can at least speculate about, I don't know why she leaves Cerberus. I have no clue. If it's the accumulated Cerberus-related atrocities she's seen, then we get no real character development indicating her faith has been shaken. And if it's because she's working for them in the first place out of a sense of uncertainty about herself which Shepard has now fixed, then, well, we've finally gotten to the main point.
4. Miranda just needs to learn to feeeeel.
Cus here's the thing. Miranda does get a character arc. She does get development. She angsts and confides in Shepard who can reassure her or tell her to get over herself or make her fall in love with him. But, on a narrative level, it's entirely about Shepard. And in a very...egotistical way. It's about glorifying Shepard and his interactions with her, and yeah, I did switch pronoun there, because gender politics is just pasted all over this. None of these conversations deal with any of the above issues. None of them explain who she is, they just explain how Shepard can fix her.
And that's...that's the Hollywood straightjacket I was talking about at its most basic. Miranda could be so many things. Miranda should be so many things so badly that their absence is like an unmissable wound through the game. But she isn't because conventional wisdom says she'll be a better love interest this way.
A friend recently commented, in response to another post, that he romanced Miranda because she reminded him of Morrigan from Dragon Age. I can kinda see why. And dear lord but I adored Morrigan. And he's right, or he should be. Miranda should have been the Morrigan of Mass Effect. Fiercely independent, practical, unremorseful, powerful, competent, with parental issues as far as you can see, rebelling against someone else's choices for her - she should have an ambitious, dangerous set of goals, and a genuine need to be reminded that kindness can exist in the world.
But she's...not. Other than her loyalty mission (which was completely situational and not something she thought would be an ongoing issue she'd have to deal with), I have no idea what her agenda is, really. They miss half a dozen opportunities to tell us, and spend all her character development on having Shepard fix her by dint of proximity. Proximity and gratuitous cleavage and ass shots.
So, okay, and yes, I will talk about the oversexualisation.
I really do wonder if they got heat for the fact that in ME1 none of their female characters wandered around the ship in sexy clothes and that's why we got Miranda's catsuit and Jack's...belt-bra-thing. I'm not going to hate on the character based on what the developers decided to dress her in, but I do think it's reasonable to submit it as one more way in which her character was clearly subject to commercial concerns and how perhaps that explains the way it feels like she was an interesting character who got hacked down and squashed into a shape demanded by whichever executive worried she wasn't going to satisfy the "target audience".
So, anyway. I suppose that's not my "least favourite" so much as my "most disappointing", but it's probably more interesting to talk about all of this than to say, "Zaeed. Cus I think he's pretty boring and if I want awesome war stories, I'll go back and play KOTOR and listen to Canderous Ordo."
Least Favourite Companion.
Okay... So let's talk about Miranda.
In many ways, my problems with Miranda are my problems with Mass Effect 2. It's a far better game than its Hollywood straightjacket allows it to be. Miranda should be a fascinating, complex character, but all the effort goes into making sure her ass is perfectly framed in dialogue shots and that she never steps too far out of the archetypal Sexy Ice Queen role. I don't know who Miranda is.
It took me a while to realise that, actually. Because we find out quite a lot about her past and we save her sister - and I was genuinely pleased to have been able to do so. But I don't know who she is.
I'm gonna try and explain why by using Ashley as a springboard - another character I don't really like that much on a personal level. Or at least, I didn't, until I played through with a Shepard who was an orphan, who was nowhere near as confident as her public persona suggested and lived with a constant fear of not being good enough, of not trying hard enough, and saw in Ashley another kid with impossible expectations labouring under - she believed - an insurmountable penalty. And you were the first one to believe in her. I left her on Virmire, but I felt like the worst person in the world, because I knew I was robbing her of that future; the future where she was good enough. And that mattered more than my discomfort with her xenophobia or her weird stories about sexual assault.
Ashley's a character that judges based on external markers. She distrusts Garrus because he's a Turian, but she distrusts Liara because of her mother's betrayal. She distrusts Shepard because of her Cerberus ties, and it always felt, to me, that Kaidan's attitude on Mars was down to the personal betrayal, but Ashley genuinely wasn't sure whether you were a traitor. I can extrapolate her attitudes based on her personality, and they make consistent sense.
I understood the combination of pride and shame that drove her to join the Alliance, and it made perfect sense for her to distrust aliens but hate Cerberus more. She will never be my favourite - in fact, I don't like her very much as me - but she feels like a complete person.
Miranda, on the other hand... I think I touched on some of this once in a previous post so I apologise if I'm repeating myself for some of you, but whatever, I've started so I'll finish. Let's break down the places I think the game could have made her a complete person, but dropped the ball.
1. Why is she working for Cerberus?
I don't understand why she's doing what she's doing. I don't understand the way her world lines up. She says she's working for Cerberus because she's making a difference, but I'm not sure I believe her. Her father drove her away with his search for personal glory, a personal legacy, but she is eminently willing to sign up to the Illusive Man's search for a racial legacy and racial glory. She turns herself into the tool she was unwilling to be for her father. His desire to create a perfect example of humanity is something about which she clearly has ambiguous feelings, but she is working for an organisation with that self-same goal on a wider scale. The Illusive Man, like her father, is charismatic, arrogant, driven and obsessed with his own legacy, even if the Illusive Man sees it in grander sociological terms.
Can we reconcile this? Of course we can, and it's interesting pretty much any way you do it, from a lack of self-awareness in running back to another father-figure, to attempting to work through what was done to her by attempting to "pay it forward" to the human race, to really not giving a shit about Cerberus politics, but wanting a place where her intelligence and skills are valued, and that affords her power and independence, to maybe beingkind of pissed that she's gotten snatched away from whatever brilliant project she was going to mastermind next and forced to play babysitter to a soldier on a suicide mission.
But I have no idea which it is, or if it's even any of them. It's not discussed in detail (and why I think that is, we'll get to).
2. Relationship to Other Characters.
Miranda provides a brilliant thematic counterpoint to at least three and a half characters that I can think of.
1) Jack. They're both engineered and they both hate their engineers. The game actually does parallel these two quite closely, and clearly deliberately. And it's not that I mind their antagonistic relationship? But I do think it bears noting in the context of all the stuff I'll get to further down, that the one relationship between NPC women that gets any independent attention in this game, is the one where it's basically an extended slanging match. It's a catfight. It's illustrative of the broader pattern I'm getting at: another instance where more complicated characterisation is sacrificed to stick with simplistic, but recognisable tropes. In this case, dodgily gendered ones (and we'll get back to that, and Jack, and Miranda later, too).
2) Grunt. Like Miranda, he was created to be an exemplar of his species. I somewhat forgive the lack of interaction between the two because this isn't a game where NPCs interact much independently, though I found it odd Shepard didn't comment. Mainly this is something I felt wasn't dealt with from the player's perspective. A parallel can still be drawn even without direct interaction, but either it's oddly absent, or, if noticed, it does nothing but highlight that while Grunt's story arc revolved around working out his motivations, Miranda's remain frustratingly opaque.
2.5) Ashley. She's 2.5 because she's barely in this game, and it works best if Shepard romances Ashley followed by Miranda, or at least saved Ashley on Virmire. That said, if we knew why Miranda was working for Cerberus there would likely be some interesting parallels between Ashley - who distrusts aliens, but loathes the anti-alien Cerberus, and Miranda, who really doesn't seem to have any negative opinions about aliens but happily works for Cerberus regardless.
3) Shepard. Miranda talks about the way Shepard is exceptional without enhancements, and how that is more impressive than her own situation. But that's a historical observation. The Shepard Miranda is speaking to is more enhanced, at that point, than Miranda herself. And it was Miranda who did that to her. But again, this isn't raised, not really. Miranda doesn't offer Shepard a chance to offer contextualise her opinions on her own transformation, or even to point out to Miranda what they now have in common. I will say that it's true, the game gives you ample opportunity to talk to Miranda and form a relationship with her, but the nature of that relationship is very telling. She saved your life and brought you back from the dead, fundamentally changing the nature of your physical existence in the process, but the sum total of your relationship's development is, pretty much, dispensing sage advice to her to "fix" her because Ice Queens just need to Learn to Love. It's not that that's a shit thing to learn; it's that the lesson feels hollow when I don't know why she needs to learn it. We'll be coming back to this, later, too.
3. Why does she leave Cerberus?
So at the end of the game, Miranda defiantly follows you away from the Illusive Man, telling him to go fuck himself, she's had enough. She learned this, presumably, by basking in the awesome that is Shepard. Except I don't understand why. Like, even more than my failure to understand her motivation for working for them in the first place, which I can at least speculate about, I don't know why she leaves Cerberus. I have no clue. If it's the accumulated Cerberus-related atrocities she's seen, then we get no real character development indicating her faith has been shaken. And if it's because she's working for them in the first place out of a sense of uncertainty about herself which Shepard has now fixed, then, well, we've finally gotten to the main point.
4. Miranda just needs to learn to feeeeel.
Cus here's the thing. Miranda does get a character arc. She does get development. She angsts and confides in Shepard who can reassure her or tell her to get over herself or make her fall in love with him. But, on a narrative level, it's entirely about Shepard. And in a very...egotistical way. It's about glorifying Shepard and his interactions with her, and yeah, I did switch pronoun there, because gender politics is just pasted all over this. None of these conversations deal with any of the above issues. None of them explain who she is, they just explain how Shepard can fix her.
And that's...that's the Hollywood straightjacket I was talking about at its most basic. Miranda could be so many things. Miranda should be so many things so badly that their absence is like an unmissable wound through the game. But she isn't because conventional wisdom says she'll be a better love interest this way.
A friend recently commented, in response to another post, that he romanced Miranda because she reminded him of Morrigan from Dragon Age. I can kinda see why. And dear lord but I adored Morrigan. And he's right, or he should be. Miranda should have been the Morrigan of Mass Effect. Fiercely independent, practical, unremorseful, powerful, competent, with parental issues as far as you can see, rebelling against someone else's choices for her - she should have an ambitious, dangerous set of goals, and a genuine need to be reminded that kindness can exist in the world.
But she's...not. Other than her loyalty mission (which was completely situational and not something she thought would be an ongoing issue she'd have to deal with), I have no idea what her agenda is, really. They miss half a dozen opportunities to tell us, and spend all her character development on having Shepard fix her by dint of proximity. Proximity and gratuitous cleavage and ass shots.
So, okay, and yes, I will talk about the oversexualisation.
I really do wonder if they got heat for the fact that in ME1 none of their female characters wandered around the ship in sexy clothes and that's why we got Miranda's catsuit and Jack's...belt-bra-thing. I'm not going to hate on the character based on what the developers decided to dress her in, but I do think it's reasonable to submit it as one more way in which her character was clearly subject to commercial concerns and how perhaps that explains the way it feels like she was an interesting character who got hacked down and squashed into a shape demanded by whichever executive worried she wasn't going to satisfy the "target audience".
So, anyway. I suppose that's not my "least favourite" so much as my "most disappointing", but it's probably more interesting to talk about all of this than to say, "Zaeed. Cus I think he's pretty boring and if I want awesome war stories, I'll go back and play KOTOR and listen to Canderous Ordo."