Regarding Aerie
This is Aerie from Baldur's Gate 2. If you have never played Baldur's Gate 2, it is likely this entry will not mean much to you. I apologize in advance. Wait, no I don't. Fucking play it already, Jeez, what's wrong with you?
So anyway, Aerie is an avariel - a winged elf. Or she was. Some indeterminate time ago she was taken into slavery and kept in a cage, where her wings atrophied and became diseased. They had to be amputated, an operation her owners did not perform gently. She has since regained her freedom and spent some time with a traveling circus, but memories of the trauma and the fact that she will never fly again, naturally, cause her some upset from time to time.
Getting to the point: There are many people out there who hate Aerie. And I am here today to tell you this: People who hate Aerie are being stupid.
Now, perhaps my feelings on the matter are due to playing a female character the first time I had her in the party. Aerie is canonically heterosexual, you see, and she acts differently if her romance isn't activated (Jinkies, a clue!). She made very little reference to her wings, or her trauma, and she didn't start fights with Jaheira (though Jaheira is no less bitchy). Instead she was merely a shy, timid girl who nonetheless maintained strong ideals and optimism despite what she'd been through. She was strong.
So I decided I wanted to play her romance in my next game. Only to discover that, when romanced, Aerie turns into an unholy fiend of downright moronic angst. She whines over her wings. She cries over them. She briefly appears to consider suicide. Who the hell is this thing that calls itself Aerie, and what happened to the real one?
I can somewhat understand that if that was someone's first impression of Aerie, they might not like her as much as I do. And maybe they decided to never use her again, thus never getting to see how perfectly normal she acts when you play a female character (or a male of a race she isn't attracted to). But I seriously doubt every single hater has only seen whiney romance-Aerie. Several have surely seen both sides of her, and if they continued to hate her they've missed something. The fact that she's effectively an entirely different character depending on whether you're romancing her is significant. But hell, that's not the only clue, or even the most glaring one. Even those who have only experienced romance-Aerie should have figured it out.
Here's the thing: It's not Aerie's fault. We have a character here who, left to her own devices, can be a strong, shaken-but-far-from-broken young woman. However, in the presence of a man she finds attractive suddenly she's overwhelmed by HOW UNBEARABLY MISERABLE EVERY SECOND OF LIFE IS WITHOUT HER PRECIOUS WINGS. No, wait, scratch that; Haer'Dalis doesn't make her turn into an idiot. It's when she's in the presence of a man she finds attractive who was raised in Candlekeep by a foster father named Gorion with a sister named Imoen that suddenly she's overwhelmed by HOW UNBEARABLY MISERABLE EVERY SECOND OF LIFE IS WITHOUT HER PRECIOUS WINGS. And then, setting the inconsistency of character aside, the game gives every implication that she's been without her wings for at least a few years. She's perfectly well-adjusted when you first meet her; it seems we're supposed to believe she's managed to put off being COMPLETELY DEVASTATED by her loss for a few years, or at least until the completely arbitrary trigger of meeting a male player character.
The point of all this is Aerie, as a whole, does not make any sense. And there's only one person to blame when a character doesn't make any sense: Their writer(s). Aerie's romance writer(s) utterly fucked up. Fucked her up. And that's not her fault. Amputate the entire player character romance (SoA parts, anyway) as was done with her diseased wings of old, and you get just the likeable, logical Aerie that so impressed me the first time I played.
That's the real Aerie. The writer(s) didn't mean to make Aerie irritating and stupid. She was supposed to draw sympathy and admiration in equal measure. You can see it in her portrait. You can see it in the first encounter with her, when she doesn't hesitate to face danger for her uncle; doesn't even consider the possibility of staying behind unless you tell her to, in fact. You can even see it in parts of the otherwise ridiculous romance, when Viconia is at her cruelest and Aerie never once waivers, never once backs down, and always manages to make a valid - if much less biting - reply.
The romance is...a lie. It never happens; not like that anyway. Aerie never approaches a charname who's just recently escaped weeks (at least) of imprisonment, during which he and his sister were tortured regularly and two of his friends were killed, and is now daily having to deal with his sister being captured alongside her torturer by an organization consistently showing itself to suffer from a significant derth of scruples, so she can cry to him about how awful it is not being able to fly anymore. Aerie is compassionate. Aerie is observant (16 Wis, guys). Such nonsense never happens, and never would happen. Aerie is better than that.
And if you still hate Aerie, you are stupid. The end.