This happens naturally if you rely on Griss tanking lol
I haven’t played your game yet, but it’s at the top of my list. Of the many comments/feedback I see, I’ve heard a great many people praising it as one of the best FE rom hacks ever.
The criticism I see against it is almost always relating to how (some) of the female characters are treated, both by the plot and by the other characters around them.
Again, as someone who hasn’t played the game my two cents are worth anything, but to me I like the idea of your game having, to use a TV Tropes term, Politically Incorrect Villains/characters. I know this isn’t for everybody, but writing like this is stuff I find much more engaging and real than other kinds of writing.
As you said, sexism is bad. That’s a simple, undeniable fact. But denying it’s existence in a setting where it would make sense to exist would only hurt the story.
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Thank you for the response! With all due respect, I still think with your framing that the story you have created is a somewhat sexist one.
I do agree that it is okay and even good to portray sexism within media, some of my favorite pieces of media do so. However, when doing so I believe that it is important to also be sure to tackle one’s implicit biases
Doing so is incredibly hard even for writers who have entire teams of editors and support, let alone just one cishet guy, so in no way do I blame you for what I believe to be a sexist story, nor do I think you to be sexist yourself. Good people can and often do write problematic content. I do not believe the creators of Pokemon are racist, but I do believe that Jynx as a Pokemon is a racist depiction.
It is important to remember when writing a world with bigoted elements to it, that balancing is the key. If it is laid on too thick, then the story itself tends to just become bigoted if you’re not careful, especially when that aspect isn’t supposed to be a focal point, but rather a background element. If it’s a background element it very much should be in the background, but still something shown to be wrong.
The sexism within this story does not do that.
In this story, not only are sexist elements apparent even in characters explicitly made to be against sexism and does not seem to be addressed within the text, but the usage of such elements even by the villains is not what I would call respectful.
There are many points in the story in which casual sexism is put out, and then promptly dropped without being addressed or even acknowledged. If you want to create a sexist world but do not have the time or the intent to ever address that world’s faults, do not drop hints about how casually sexist nearly every male character is, it’s just setting up the story to not properly address what it raises to begin with.
I don’t have the time to specifically look back and find each example but some very memorable moments are
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Edric and co. pretty consistently saying turns of phrases like “what a man’s gotta do”. This in isolation isn’t very harmful (although it is sexist regardless, but the blame for that rather falls on our real world for making it such a prevalent turn of phrase). But in combination with the world established and characters presented, just confirms that every character who says it is a passive observer within the world’s structure.
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Edric himself is extremely passive in this belief that you state that he has. That in of itself is fine, there are plenty of good stories about bigotry that have a passive character. The Apothecary Diaries has a very passive protagonist and it’s still among the best feminist anime that has been released in the past decade. The difference is that these characters need more to them to make their passive nature not come off as an active endorsement. Maomao can be a passive protagonist in her world’s bigotry because she herself is a victim of it, making her passive nature an active point about the world being established. The Apothecary Diaries can do this because its world being so messed up in that regard is one of the main things the story wants to establish.
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Miley as a character is almost exclusively defined by the relations she has with men in the first four chapters. She does pretty much nothing of note to further the plot in these early scenes, is the victim of the passively sexist comments of Dwalt (who says nothing similar in his conversation with the cleric iirc) “women that pretty mean trouble” or something similar, receives a stat booster by talking to her bf which obviously isn’t inherently bad, the trouble comes in that she is implicitly accessory to his character and not the other way around, his description mentions Miley, hers does not mention him. The only purpose Miley has served up to chapter 4 is to make brief comments and to be the reason why the cav joins you. Her description describes her as full of grand ideals and as someone cheery, but I don’t get that from her. I don’t get much of anything from her. All I know about her is that she bickers with Shorn and is the cav’s gf.
Despite what might be assumed I actually don’t have a problem with Elyse. If she was in a story where the women within the story weren’t consistently sidelined I may even have been quite invested in her arc. Her sidelining in favor of Edric is the fuel for her character arc.
And that’s what it really comes down to
The women in this story are treated the way that they are to fuel how the player feels towards male characters consistently. It is a minor element of the story, and it feels like it only is that way because it’s easy to turn the audience against a villain when they treat women poorly. In trying to create a sexist world, that just creates a sexist narrative, especially early on when we know more about and are supposed to care more about the male characters than the women that are victim to them.
I hope you take my feedback to heart, because I do not think that your ideas are bad, I just think they’re integrated in a very messy way that gives off the wrong feeling. I have no interest in authorial intent, so all I have is the text, and the text tells a very clear picture.
I hope in future endeavors that you put out more in progress works, this will better allow for feedback to be implemented before the damage has already had lasting impacts.
I will likely edit this down later to be more concise, but these are my honest thoughts as someone who has experienced what you are attempting to depict.
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I think you’re stretching quite a bit to classify some of these interactions as sexism. Considering you said yourself that you dropped the hack in chapter 4, you haven’t seen enough of the narrative or characters to make such a broad generalization about the story as a whole. For instance, take Dwalt - his canon(?) relationship is with a female axe knight named Rivkah who he recruits later, but she is the dominant one in their convos. He’s not a sexist character, he’s just a well-meaning former bandit who’s kind of rough around the edges. Saying that “nearly every male character” is sexist is pretty extreme.
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I agree with mai, I would admit that the story setting would lend itself to sexism being set in a long time ago setting. Bastards as I have commented are also very biased against.
But, and that is not to discredit your experience playing the hack, respectfully playing 4 chapters isn’t enough to judge a story on
Miley for example? In a future chapter she actively chooses to stay at the player’s side breaking off from her partner galen’s decision
Not mention you haven’t experienced sophia’s arc and her whole thing. Her whole experience and the traume she endured was clearly communicated and talked about by the other main characters, she also takes an active stance in the war and against her oppressor.
Elyse later on has a moment where she reverses her position, where she’s hopelessly in danger to where she’s the danger.
These all sounds vague because I don’t want to spoil the story for others but there are clear moments where female characters do get a chance to actively fight back against the fundamentally sexist society the story is set. That’s also true of the social bias against bastards mentioned previously via the main lord and villain.
And I’m not saying all this because i think DA has the best story of any fe fan game, i think it’s good but I wouldn’t personally say It has the best story of any hack. It’s just I think it’s not very fair to criticize an element of a story off of 4 chapters out of what a 20+ chap narrative?.
I’m not saying the criticism isn’t valid but I think a full playthrough is fair for the author to volley such criticisms.
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To throw my hat in the ring, after playing dark amulet and host of the dark, both hacks in which I enjoyed. I can see where this controversy comes from. There are many lgbtq+ characters in host of the dark, like Fidem, an important character in the story. Although there are lgbtq+ characters in the hack, as in the supports I got, there was no sexism, but lgbtq+ characters shaped the narrative of the story. Both these worlds are flawed, like how Sal is on a conquest to kill demons, which I see takes on the issue of racism rather than sexism. Edric, like said earlier is a result of the world he lives in, like Sal is. These issues are hard to address in video games, and you can’t please everyone, however, I think you both did a good job in spreading you’re messages.
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1- Ppl are wayy too fragile these days, anything u say is offensive if they dont agree with you.
2- No1 is special, you dont deserve special treatment whoever you are or what group u belong to.
3- If u like this mature hack u should try Fire Emblem: Darius the Conqueror (check youtube for it, Its Amazing!)
4- One of the best romhacks i have ever played!!!
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That game is insanely good. A pity that the supports are not fully finished, but aside from that it’s a 10/10.
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All the offense but that opinion both tracks your previous messages and is actually a down-horrendous thing to say
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No, this:
Is perfectly reasonable, and both things are true. We shouldn’t lose our manners at the moment of expresing ourselves (like I did) and if we do, we should apologise (which I also did). However, saying things in a rude way doesn’t mean that what was said is not true. No matter how rudely you say that water wets, water will still wet, even if you could have said it differently.
Ok but this is the down-horrendous thing I was talking about
Fellas let’s not talk about another hack in this hack’s replies shall we?
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Wait, what? Why? I get that you may or may not like the game, but why is considering that game great horrendous?
Yeah, you are right. Consider this message my last public comment about that game.
Beeeestie that’s not what you wanna be saying in response to criticism made towards how bigotry is presented in a story especially criticism by A REAL WORLD TARGET OF SAID BIGOTRY
Like fellas this is the last I’ll say on the matter bc this is getting very very concerning but generally speaking men aren’t great at judging if a story from a meta narrative perspective treats women well or not.
I get that this is a largely male dominated space but c’mon I’m just asking for y’all to trust that I get what the stories trying to do but I think it still did an accidental misogyny. Its not the end of the world, hell some of the most praised works out there have this same problem while still having some good aspects, just look at death note.
I’m not asking people to suddenly think hack bad, I just want the author and players to be aware of implicit biases within the work and endeavor to improve. Read wisely, because otherwise you might miss even worse undertones.
Honestly reading how readily this kinda stuff is just handwaved and everyone just nodding along with it scares me
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You spent so much time discussing about sexism in a fictional story but you also unintentionally said something that would be considered sexist in real life…
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I’m not even going to try and explain this one… Like omg
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How is this sexist if it’s statistically true-
I mean, that’s just stating a fact
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Whatever happened to you in real life, I’m sure it was horrible, completely undeserved and I sincerely hope you can recover from whatever happened to you and move on.
That said, this is basically a declaration that you are projecting your own bad experiences on everyone who dares to question what you are saying and on the game itself, even after Vorgus wrote a super diplomatic answer that you clearly didn’t bother trying to understand because you have already decided that the game is this and that and you won’t change your mind.
A book that starts with, let’s say, the genocide of a an entire race doesn’t make the book genocidical or the people who read/wrote it mass murderers. A game that has sexist people doesn’t make the game or the people who play it/made it sexist. We all understand this, that’s why we “handwave and nod along”. All except you. I’m honestly worried right now, worried for you.
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I just personally think a full playthrough is warranted for a claim such as this.
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