How to Assemble a Starcraft Storyline
Starcraft is a multiplayer strategy game. Players choose one of three races —
Took this from http://starcrafthero.com
- The Terrans, who are a bunch of human beings who went all Gilligan’s Island a long time ago and developed their own civilization very far from home, but still appear to have watched Firefly, at least according to their music and character design. Terrans have stuff like tanks, soldiers and mech walkers – familiar sci-fi /military stuff.
- The Protoss (I’ll get to why they haven’t been mentioned yet), another alien race in this part of the universe — ten-foot-tall giants with long lifespans, psychic powers and advanced technology. They aim to produce smaller numbers of more expensive, more powerful stuff (like spaceships that shoot laser beams and units that teleport).
- The Zerg, the aforementioned low-tech alien hive mind. The Zerg hatch swarms of monsters in waves to overwhelm their opponents.
Then the players, either alone or in teams, battle against each other in various configurations over and over again. Terrans fight other Terrans. Zerg fight Protoss. Protoss fight a team of Terran and Zerg. People play as random or play favorite races to get good at over time.
When a game starts, each player has a single base and a bunch of workers, and build first the infrastructure and then the army to destroy the other players’ bases, all while collecting resources and managing an economy and army simultaneously. A Starcraft 2 game lasts about a half an hour most of the time, give or take 20 minutes or so, and each game stands entirely on its own, start to finish, on a map that is developed for its strategic and tactical features and not usually because it is important to the story.
This three-race structure is the key selling point of Starcraft. Each race plays very differently from the other two – much more so in general than in other real-time strategy games – and Blizzard, the gaming company that makes it (A subsidiary of Activision that also makes Warcraft and World of Warcraft, thus the “craft” in the name), continually patches and updates the game to get it as balanced as possible across the three races.
So, what is the main reason to have a story at all? The story is tasked with putting the game in context — adding stakes to the matches, and making each match feel as if it exists in a fictional universe that has some general feel and internal logic.
Why are these races fighting, and why do they fight over and over again in different configurations?
The original Starcraft story and the Brood War expansion’s story do great jobs of answering this question. The Starcraft 2 story bails on this hardcore. It tries to focus on the characters, but it doesn’t do that well either, because the characters are very much informed by why these races are fighting each other over and over again in the first place.
The story of the original Starcraft is pretty complex, but it is built elegantly around the events on one planet, called Chau Sara.
- Chau Sara was a Terran colony that was invaded by the Zerg. So, the humans are fighting the Zerg. Great.
- While the Terrans were fighting aliens they had never seen before, a commander showed up like Paul Reiser in Aliens looking to protect some secret research installation and cover up the existence of the Zerg to support a corrupt and shady government. This is largely responsible for the planet not being adequately protected and eventually falling. So, the humans are fighting each other. Great.
- Meanwhile, the Protoss show up with a fleet of spaceships looking for the Zerg, because they are ancient enemies of the Zerg and hunt them down and exterminate them wherever they are. So the Protoss are fighting the Zerg. Great.
- The Protoss get an order to “purify” the planet, killing all life on its surface, including the humans who live there. The commander in charge of the fleet disagrees with the order. So the Protoss are fighting the Protoss. Great.
- But the Protoss decide to go ahead with the purification anyway, and zap the planet, killing all the humans and Zerg on it. The humans are caught totally off-guard and are furious. So the humans are fighting the Protoss. Great.
All the possible conflicts among the three races in the game are set up in this one event. The only one left out is the Zerg versus the Zerg. They save that for the Brood War expansion.
It’s really elegant, especially because the different perspectives of the various players sets up the conflict in inevitable ways that don’t paint anyone in particular (except the Zerg, but everybody likes the Zerg anyway) as the villain. So somebody who wants to play either Terran or Protoss gets reassurance from the story that there is some legitimacy to what at least some faction on their side is trying to accomplish.
The story then progresses through a series of complex crosses and double-crosses. The protagonist is nameless — the “player” is assumed to be a high-ranking commander of whatever race he or she is playing. It’s an epic military story with a large cast.
The Starcraft 2 Story
The Starcraft 2 story starts with an analogous event – the Zerg invade a planet called Mar Sara, where Marshall Jim Raynor, a hero of the Zerg wars, lives a relatively quiet life of local law enforcement.
- The Zerg land on the planet and kill everybody. So the humans are fighting the Zerg. Great.
- The protagonist and his buddies are rescued from the planet by a spaceship that leads a rebel fleet aimed at overthrowing the Emperor of the humans. So the humans are fighting each other. Great.
Yeah, that’s a lot fewer bullets. The formative events of the Starcraft 2 storyline, the ones that happen early and get everything going, don’t involve the Protoss at all. They are later shoehorned in with a really thoroughly bullshit series of missions involving having to steal rare gas from holy temples and getting some memory crystal with a bunch of prophesies on it that are apropos of nothing and throw the narrative into crazytown for no reason.
The actual underlying story, which you only really piece together gradually through indirect sources and don’t encounter in any major single events, works like this:
- The Dark Voice (a villain who isn’t in the game and you never face from a race that isn’t in the game) is the Big Bad.
- The Dark Voice is manipulating the Zerg to fight the Protoss so he can create super-powered hybrids (which you can’t play as and only show up in a few missions and never in multiplayer) that will destroy the universe and rule over total darkness
- The Dark Voice does this by infiltrating the brain of the Zerg Overmind (a villain who isn’t in the game, because he is already dead, and you never face him and can’t play as him).
- The Zerg Overmind (which again, isn’t in the game) tries to defy the Dark Voice (who again, isn’t in the game) by infesting Sarah Kerrigan, who will have more free will than he does and will someday defeat the Dark Voice (which is a huge retcon and not something we’ve heard of before in the previous games)
- A Protoss guy sees in a vision a possible future where human beings kill Sarah Kerrigan, which prevents her from defeating the Dark Voice, letting him take over the universe.
- A shady human organization lets a former marine out of prison and gives him secret instructions to find and kill Sarah Kerrigan. One wonders how they could ever possibly expect him to succeed, since he is just one guy with a gun and a robot suit, and she has psychic powers and is the tyrant in charge of an alien empire of billions of giant monsters.
- The Protoss and the Zerg are fighting each other over a sacred planet where there is a prophesy (“Prophesy” is code in screenwriting for: “Our characters are about to do a bunch of stuff for no good reason.”) that tells everybody about all this information. Sort of. It is never explained why the Zerg want it.
- The Prophesy is connected with a bunch of artifacts that are scattered around the galaxy. Everybody is trying to find them. It is never explained why they are doing this, since not everybody has the Prophesy, so not everybody could know why they are important. These things eventually make the magical penis that turns Sarah Kerrigan back into a submissive human lady.
- The artifacts were left by the Xel’naga, the progenitors of the Protoss and the Zerg (who again, aren’t in the game, and you can’t play as them in multiplayer).
Whew. Jeez louise.
Okay, so none of this really makes any sense, and all of it hinges on the actions of characters who aren’t involved in the actual gameplay. So it’s doing a really really bad job of explaining Why are these races fighting, and why do they fight over and over again in different configurations?
The story should focus on the races the player can actually play. It should focus on the things relevant to the multiplayer experience – that is its primary responsibility, and if this is done well, the single-player campaign loses nothing. The opportunity cost of keeping the backstory relevant to multiplayer is pretty much nil. And yet the backstory is pretty much totally irrelevant to multiplayer.
Instead…
Instead, the writers decide to do what all sci-fi hacks do these days when their story is too goddamned complicated and they can’t figure out how to fix it — they “focus on the characters.”
Which is hogwash, because it’s not like the first Starcraft game didn’t have characters, or that they focus on the characters less before their own stories are bogged down by unresolved complexity, or that stories that have elegant, well-formulated plots communicate them all through impersonal voice-overs.
I have longstanding contempt for “character studies” as forms of dramatic literature. In case you’re not familiar, the Random House Dictionary defines a character study as “a work of fiction in which the delineation of the central character’s personality is more important than the plot.”
I hate this kind of thinking – because it implies that knowing what happens to people and seeing them do stuff important to them detracts from understanding their personalities. I tend to think quite the opposite is true – that the more you learn about what people do and what they have been through the more you get to see their personalities in action, and the more you learn about what underpins the decisions they make and their priorities. I don’t see “character personality” and “plot” as mutually exclusive – or even mutually discouraging – instead, to me, they’ve always seemed to emerge one from the other as characters make their way in whatever world they live in.
So, perhaps somewhat wisely, somebody early on in the writing of the Starcraft 2 story looked at or formulated the lore around the Dark Voice and the hybrids and all that and thought “Wow, this plot is really alienating and doesn’t involve the player at all. We shouldn’t focus on this – we should instead focus on events that involve the player. We should put the player in the shoes of one of the protagonists so the player can identify with what is going on.” This is great, of course.
When they did, this they should have just ditched all that other nonsense and written a story where the things the protagonist does or experiences are the things that matter, and where the major events of the story explain why the Terrans, Protoss and Zerg are fighting each other and amonst themselves all the time in the fictional Koprulu sector. The story at least starts out trying to shot a ground-level view of an incomprehensibly large conflict, and that sort of difference in scope is sometimes cited to try to justify the unimportance of the player’s actions to the world in which they take place, but even in the context of a grant intergalactic war, the disconnection between what a player in Starcraft 2 playing single-player or multiplayer ends of doing and the story that supposedly explains it is so huge that it’s really offputting and self-destructive.
In the single player campaign, the player spends most of his time raising money to fund his army by doing odd jobs for random people or pursuing side quests. There are a bunch of characters who don’t matter who offer credits in exchange for accomplishing specific tasks. When their tasks are done, they depart and they don’t matter for the rest of the game. The player starts out fighting the Dominion and its Emperor Mengsk, but he gives that up and never goes back to it to go get his girlfriend back. So I guess it wasn’t important. The player at the beginning of the game appears to have come to terms with losing Kerrigan, but by the end he’s ranting and raving about it and has undone all his progress. So I guess nothing that happened before mattered.
Oh, and at the end of the story, the player shoots his best friend in the face to save the life of a genocidal tyrant who has killed billions of people. He does it with zero hesitation, despite continually agonizing throughout the course of the game about the difficulty of his relationship with his friend. And despite the fact that his friend’s suit is rigged to kill him if he doesn’t carry out his order, so it’s not like it’s exactly his fault. And despite the fact that his friend has a bulletproof visor that he chooses not to lower for some reason. And this all happens with people aiming guns at the floor of a cave which is full of rocks, so that it’s almost guaranteed that one of them will be injured by a ricochet.
My reaction, with the rest of the game sight-unseen: How is it possible for Scarface to smoke a cigar with his helmet visor down? (Probably a stupid reaction.)
I’m right there with you. I was like, “Ok, first of all, his suit is going to fill up with smoke. And aren’t burning chunks of cigar ash going to fall back onto his face?”
That’s exactly what happens. He’s just so tough that he doesn’t mind it. :I
Tychus is the opportunistic predator throughout the starcraft-verse. Raynor and Kerrigan are lovers. Essentially the entire story is a love story between Raynor and Kerrigan. Despite all odds they both persist, live, love, etc… As for your take on their story you’re a fucking moron.
This is a joke, right? How is this sexist? Their is an infested terran known as Kerrigan who is taking revenge on the person who left her behind. And the penis thing? Are you fucking serious right now? You may as well say that it’s sexual that the guns are sticks that shoot stuff out XD. Fucking dumbasses.
I like how the game plot that turns Kerrigan into space jesus and refuses to have her face blame for her actions is “sexist”.
Your wife’s son must be proud.
The visor is literally opened….
Thank you for shining a light on Starcraft 2’s terrible writing (the hokey, inane dialogue could also use its own article). The game’s reliance upon characters who don’t appear in the game is a strong point (their eventual appearance in sequences notwithstanding).
I disagree that the plot needs to entirely justify the multiplayer experience, however. I think the single-player campaign could convey a story, interesting on its own, which defines the game’s universe and places the units within a context. That would be sufficient for me. Just as I don’t need a backstory to explain how the Yamato Gun works, so I don’t need a backstory to justify the factional arrangement of my multiplayer games. Such a synchronicity doesn’t HURT, but it isn’t necessary. Still, better unrelated than insulting and counter-productive.
Incidentally, if you read the “StarCraft Lore” for Starcraft 2 posted on the Blizzard site, you’ll realize that the embrace of sexist, cliched, pointless storytelling seems to be a fully realized marketing strategy.
Yeah, there’s definitely room for a whole article series about all the things that are terrible about the Starcraft 2 writing. I kind of hit the wall after the first 4,000 words (as you can tell because I start getting sloppier and my own writing starts coming apart). Glad the comment thread is already firing up :-)
I totally agree that you don’t need to know the full details of the multiplayer experience and that shouldn’t dictate the story – but I definitely think you need to know from the get-go who the Protoss, Terrans and Zerg are and why they are fighting each other. The game kind of takes for granted you already know this, or somehow thinks this really basic information isn’t important.
And yeah, this clearly isn’t a “oops, we put Sarah Kerrigan in a love story, didn’t realize it was a mistake. Our bad.” situation. They really seem to be trying to appeal to a hyper-macho ideal here. Why exactly that is probably does deserve its own article, because it is pervasive across certain genres of video games right now.
It’s a symptom of our culture’s messed-up attitudes toward sexuality that there’s no problem with this terrible plot line and writing, but in the cut scene Kerrigan’s arm just happens to cover up her breasts in a really unnatural pose.
Also, I feel confident guessing that at some point during the writing of this material, somebody said something along the lines of: “No, it’s okay, this isn’t sexist because we’re subverting ‘bros before hos!'” Which just goes to show that just because you avoid one stupid sexist trope doesn’t mean you’ve avoided them all.
Yeah, the whole “it’s okay to exterminate an entire planet of people but not okay to show a boob” thing is _still_ ridiculous.
And yeah, the working title for this article was “The Ridiculous Misogyny of Starcraft 2” – because I really think the sexism isn’t just political or about archetype in this game, it really comes from contempt. I’m not sure exactly where the contempt is coming from — my working theory is it’s contempt for the collaborative creative process (supposedly, believe it or not, the early drafts of the story for Starcraft 2 were much worse and had to be redone fairly last-minute), which gets translated into contempt for the villain of the story and mapped onto some sort of underlying contempt for women.
I’d have much less of a problem if Kerrigan were just a type (like she is when she is a ghost). That’s part of a collective problem but not originally all that bad. But it’s a basic respect thing that they drop the ball on, a basic attitude thing – what is their intention? – and that’s more important.
The Onion nailed an aspect of video game sexism with their recent article, “New Video Game Technology Finally Allows Rendering Of Smaller Breasts.”
I do suspect that we are engaged in a critique of an aspect of the game that Blizzard just isn’t that concerned about. It’s akin to complaining about the scripts of Star Wars or Transformer movies. People buy Starcraft because of the multiplayer, not because of the script. Bad games with good writing don’t sell. It probably just isn’t a company priority. I also suspect, based upon the results of the Blizzard fan fiction story contests, that Chris Metzen, one (maybe THE?) head Blizzard writer, is just a terrible writer.
Still, as consumers, we’re allowed to critique and complain, and maybe as gamers get older and more diverse, demographically, studios will start paying more attention to game writing. Until then, we’ll take the balanced gameplay and bemoan the tired motifs.
I don’t think Blizzard should be held to the same standard as Michael Bay. The campaign for Warcraft 3 proves that Blizzard is more than capable of making better stories than Michael Bay they need to have their feet held to the fire on this.
I’ve seen a recent string of complaints about the sexism in World of Warcraft related to a particular quest chain in the new goblin starting area. While I didn’t notice it myself (it seems to play better if you’re playing a girl gobbo), I can certainly see why people have a problem with it. Add to that other problems the game already has drawn fire for (from chainmail bikinis to the lack of female characters in the Lich King victory statue) and then throw this on top, and what do you get?
I’m sorry to say it, but I think it ends up with something like “a game company just like every other game company out there.” Despite the large number of female gamers, especially in WoW, there’s still a perception that only teenage boys who are only going to play hot female toons or hyper-steroidal male toons.
Even if that were the case, is catering to that good? What are we teaching boys? Not only that women are an object only of sexual desire etc, but also that the only way to be a real man and get respect is to be totally muscle-bound and able to tear people apart with your bare hands. Even if the boys are lucky enough to avoid the anti-female messages, what luck do they have accepting their own bodies and place in a peaceful society without a lot of mental hang-ups?
Yeah there is a whole lot of poison in the entire package for young people to get stuck on. But if Blizzard a company that actually cares about quality and writing good stories (well at least they say they do) can’t be prompted to change than who can? And sure in wow there are quite a few things that are sexist but there are things that are subversive and positive. Like in twilight highlands there’s one quest chain leading you to save a dwarf maiden who’s been abducted by ogres but when you get there she’s already defeated her captors and leaves you following behind her. I just hope that the people who write those kinds of quests are the ones that get promoted with in the company for their originality.
Good article, reflect some of the thought I had about the Starcraft II plot (along with with some other trend in writting) although the sexist and the awful plot could have been two separate article all together because they don’t quite manage to feel like they are the continuity of each other.
Now if there one thing I was to see get rid off (or at least put on the shelf for a while) are any recombinaison of “Ancient aliens left artefact, backroom manipulation, cyclce of destruction, humanity special!” In the last decade pretty much all the Sci-fi set video game had some variatio on it along (and BSG can be include in this)
For some reason everything goes back to ancient alien and I’m sick of it because it make for Sci-fi univers that have no real dynamic of their own and are mostly dependent on plot coupons. This article comparing Starcraft I and II I think make a good exemple of my point.
Yeah, I liked Babylon 5 as much as if not more than the next guy, but it seems like every single other frickin’ Sci Fi property out there is now Babylon 5, with ancient semi-mythological aliens setting the unnecessarily complicated wheels in motion for people in the world to follow either blindly or melodramatically rebel against.
Brilliant! Loved your points on how video game writing should be linked to the game play. Seems like no one knows how to write for an empathetic medium.
It is incredibly premature to assume that Jim actually shoots his friend. I think we’ve all watched enough bad sci-fi to know what it means when you hear the gun shot but don’t see the bullet wound.
I’m fairly sure that Tychus Finly (spelling?) is one of blizzards mascots. I feel like they might feel bad shooting their mascot off in game canon.
“Incredibly premature?”
I mean, I wouldn’t be that surprised if they retconned it and brought Tychus back through some crazy contrivance (like Raynor managed to precisely shoot Tychus’s suit with a revolver while spinning around during a fistfight in precisely the spot so as to disable the kill swich put there by the Moebius corporation, and then Tychus walked out of the cave ten minutes later and they decided not to show it for whatever reason), but the scene isn’t _that_ ambiguous.
“Premature” – because of the way video games and comic books work, sure. “_Incredibly_ premature?” I don’t know about that. :-)
I’ll split the difference and call it “fairly premature”.
That sounds fair :-)
See also: Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III. Why does there have to be a prophecy? Who made the prophecy? A prophecy has to have a prophet, right? Does everyone actually believe the prophecy, or are there doubters? Balance to the Force? Seriously?
Can anyone come up with positive examples of prophecy used in storytelling?
Minority Report? Would the precogs be considered “prophets?”
Maybe. Probably not. I mean, even if they are, if the movie is actually _about_ prophesy – like if you made a movie about Samuel or Elijah or Tieresias – prophesy would probably play a slightly different role. Like, it would have a reason to exist, even if it caused people to act nonsensically.
It’s when the existence of prophesy is just kind of ancillary to the realities of the world, when there is very little about the world other than the relevant scenes to make you think prophesy would exist or that people would justifiably take it seriously – that’s when it’s at its worst.
Like, you can have an action movie where people fight with swords, and the only sign of the supernatural in the whole movie is a prophesy, and everybody in the know seems to know the stuff is legit – even if there’s no reason to believe it.
It’s part of what I liked about the Dark Knight – the Joker actually lied to people (about the origins of his scars). People lie all the time in real life, but they almost never lie in movies unless they are being obviously ironic or _super_ nefarious. This is tremendously unrealistic.
Like, if there were a romantic comedy and one character went to a psychic, and the psychic said you really need to be with person X, and the protagonist just said “you’re full of crap” and was right and it was never acknowledged again. No, that can’t happen, because if the psychic says something it’s either true because psychic powers are real or it’s true by happy coincidence.
The laziest part of prophesy is how calling it prophesy confers authority on it, and when people question that authority in movies, it’s either an empty exercise in theatricality or an overwrought act of personal rebellion. It’s never how it is in real life – which is that prophesy isn’t real and people shouldn’t believe it.
The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. Fantastic twists with that one. Generally speaking, though, prophecies make for bad story-telling, even if they didn’t start that way. Harry Potter sure didn’t need one. The kid had enough motivation to tackle Voldemort without some pseudo-mystical crap thrown in.
Wasn’t the prophecy in Harry Potter motivation for Voldemort to attach Harry’s family instead? But then again the whole prophecy as a justification for attacking a baby is kind of over used. i think the Bible used that one a few times.
I did like how in Harry Potter real prophecy was treated as a rare commodity and everything else was treated like fluff well at least by Hermoine.
Yes, the prophesy in HP was a somewhat convoluted motivation for Voldy. Part of the “big deal” with the prophesy was that it could have been either Harry or Neville because they were both born under the right conditions, but Voldy, for whatever reason, picked Harry. I haven’t read the books dealing specifically with it in a while, so I can’t remember if it’s ever revealed whether Voldy had intended to kill both babies to cover his bases and just happened to stop by the Potter residence first, or if he just assumed it was Harry and not Neville.
There are at least some “rules” with regards to prophesy in those books that at least make it a little less arbitrary and more plot-pushing. The fact that only certain people can touch the balls they are contained in, for example.
The sheer number of illogical decisions made in the Harry Potter books is staggering. While I am not typically an advocate for fan-fiction the story told by Less Wrong in a href=”http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality”>Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is actually considerably more consistent than the one told JK Rowling.
Ooh, ooh! I know this one!
“The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter” from Good Omens. Also partially answers the question of, “If you’ve got such great vision in your Third Eye, then why are you dead?”
This was really ruined the story for me in the Starcraft 2, the whole prophecy bullshit though I still enjoyed playing through the campaign very much. The second thing was pretty almost everything about Raynor especially when he choice to save Kerrigan instead of killing her….wow Blizzard really screwed that up…what ever happend to his promise to kill her after she killed Fenix. After the ending I could only thing of one thing…Fenix must be rolling in his grave. Good job, Jimmy-boy.
If you don’t understand why Raynor shot Tychus at the end, I recommend going back and playing through Zeratul’s campaign.
Well, I obviously know the justification they offer for it. The justification is that that Raynor should shoot his best friend in the face because a virtual-reality crystal relayed to him a story about a prophesy that if he lets the person who has hurt him most in the world die, then an unnamed evil villain will bring about the end of the universe. To somebody as sentimental and invested in personal relationships as Raynor, this seems like inadequate reason to murder your best friend – especially before even making an attempt at reasoning with him or coming to a different solution, especially since Tychus doesn’t really have a choice and thus doesn’t really deserve it.
Raynor is a white-hat cowboy. No matter how bad things get, white-hat cowboys don’t like to solve their problems by shooting their best friends. It happens, but rarely with such gusto and lack of hesitation.
For an allegedly character-driven piece, it feels really out of place.
How about another point of view on this –
A few missions before they get to Char, Tychus gets rowdy in his robot suit in the bar, and Raynor kicks his ass, country style, without power armor. There are all sorts of innocent people around, and Tychus could have very easily killed a whole bunch of Raynor’s soldiers. But Raynor basically just shows him what’s up and shuts him down – while at a tremendous tactical disadvantage.
At the moment when Raynor shoots Tychus, he has already deflected the bullets with his power armor, flipped around, and has him taken by surprise. The more in-character thing for Raynor to do is _clearly_ to kick Tychus’s ass twice as hard as he did in the bar and disable his power armor. He clearly is capable of it, especially since the odds are evened up at this point. Yeah, maybe eventually he’d be forced to kill him, but it didn’t seem necessary in that moment.
It’s not like shooting Tychus is a last resort. He had all sorts of options. But he goes right for the bullet in his best friend’s face. That’s not what a hero does.
Technically speaking, we don’t know for a fact Tychus is dead. Just sayin’.
I would say that you’re drastically oversimplifying his relationship with Kerrigan. Additionally, his relationship with Tychus has been strained repeatedly, and in the moment he’s got a chance to finally save his Sarah, his “friend” betrays him and reveals he’s been working for Raynor’s archnemesis, Mengsk himself – I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that would push ol’ Jimmy over the proverbial edge.
I’d classify Raynor as a gray-hat at best, given his history. Maybe aspirations of white hatting it one day, but it’d be a very dirty white.
I feel like this is a case of “OH NOES, THE SEQUEL DOESN’T REHASH EVERYTHING FROM THE ORIGINAL SO ITS BAD!” combined with a little “OH NOES! MALE CHARACTER DEFEATS FEMALE CHARACTER! ITS SEXIST!” hysteria. I usually enjoy you guys, and I can agree with you that the writing wasn’t as good, but complaining that you don’t understand why the races are fighting after the full story of the original Starcraft is a strange complaint, and to call it sexist is straining pretty hard to the point of almost being some sort of meta self-mockery of the very concept of overthinking a video game.
Or is that the point? Did I miss the joke here? Hmm.
I don’t know the SC universe/metaplot as well as Fenzel. But whenever a powerful female character’s “redemption” involves her being carried weak and naked in the male hero’s brawny arms, the argument for sexism isn’t “strained.” There’s at least a case.
Given that the character is naked at all times, being a Zerg, it’s hardly unusual that the reversion would result in *gasp* nudity. If anything, I would think that the rape and dominance subtexts of the Zerg infestation of her body and mind would provoke cries of misogyny, not the freeing from said alien influences. There are also a couple instances in the original and SC2 where the original Kerrigan shows through briefly, to ask Jim, her former love, to save her in one case or showing uncharacteristic mercy, so it’s not even a case where you can claim he’s really doing her harm or overriding her true self.
“Given that the character is naked at all times, being a Zerg, it’s hardly unusual that the reversion would result in *gasp* nudity.”
This is a big stretch, and I’m not really willing go here with you. Sarah Kerrigan lying there naked is not presented as a neutral circumstance. It is heavily symbolic.
I mean, if this were real life, and somebody was invested by Zerg and turned into a monster, and then they turned back, and they got arrested for being naked, I’d be like “Cut that person a break! Of course they were naked!”
But this isn’t real life. Writers don’t stand in opposition to their story the way people stand in opposition to reality. They choose what exist and what to show and what does not exist and what doesn’t show.
And it certainly isn’t portrayed neutrally, as just a natural consequence of being de-zerged. It’s presented as a sexual reunion between a He-Man and a helpless, supplicating woman. The way he carries her is right out of a romance novel or a Clark Gable film. It isn’t neutral at all.
And Starcraft 2 doesn’t depict her infestation as something that happens to her unwillingly. She submits to it willingly – it’s clear from the look on her face that her greater disappointment is to be abandoned by the men.
Now, _if_ the infestation were depicted as a rape, and _if_ the nudity were depicted as neutral and just a consequence of de-infestation, _then_ you’d be on-point. But they aren’t, so I don’t really agree with you. Like, I can imagien an SC2 that works the way you describe, but it isn’t this one.
I think the moments of mercy are interesting — and that’s why I brought them up in the article — the times where Raynor thinks he can save her, but he ends up being manipulated. It’s not clear at all that Kerrigan isn’t just tricking him. I think that’s part of what makes her character interesting.
Starcraft 2 portrays her submitting to her oncoming death in the wake of betrayal by her captain, Mengsk – it doesn’t really touch the issue of her infestation, that’s all covered in the original Starcraft.
I think the bit about it being “straight out of a Clark Gable film” is probably deliberate, but I don’t think the core of that moment is a sexual reunion. It’s a rescue, with a twist: for the first time, the indestructible Queen of Blades is vulnerable, and Raynor finds himself in the position of having to kill his old friend to save her from his exploiting that vulnerable moment. Where you think I’m not reading enough sexuality into it, I think you’re reading too much.
As an aside, personally I wish they’d kept her around as the Queen of Blades a bit longer, as I definitely think that her character was more interesting in that role than as a flirty ghost. However, I give Metzen and Co. a fair bit of credit for past work, and I think they’ll manage to do something pretty cool with this in Heart and beyond.
This really is two articles: the “here’s why the story for Starcraft 2 fails and what I would keep in mind if I were writing a Starcraft story” and the “Sarah Kerrigan used to be an awesome feministic character and the new game debases her and makes her look a lot more passive to a degree that makes me uncomfortable” story.
I lumped them together because I tend to do this – I make my articles too long and cover too many topics. Would have been smarter to separate them.
And I focused on the Kerrigan stuff first because I think it is somewhat more interesting to people who don’t know or care about Starcraft at all, and because I want to be gutsy and post controversial opinions (though sincerely held ones) in the hope of driving discussion and excitement.
Did I make the whole thing a little bit too angry on purpose and oversell my case a little bit? Yup. That’s sort of the joke of the site – overdoing things. So I did that on purpose.
Do I think this stuff is _actually_ important? That’s a hard question. I think the Kerrigan stuff is important, yeah. I think Starcraft is more important than people often think it is because it is so central to the lives of so many people. It isn’t just a normal video game.
I mean, if you knew enough about Counter-strike to track its influence on culture, I think you’d get some pretty impressive results. These phenom-games that transcend regular amusement for more than a decade are important. They’re more than just the latest thing.
As for complaining that I don’t know why the races are fighting, two things:
1. I think the complaint is justified. Brood War came out in 1998. It has been a _long time_ since we have heard anything from any of these characters, and the situation at the end of Brood War was complicated, unstable and in flux. I think 12 years between an expansion and the next sequel is long enough that you owe it to everybody to check in again and explain everything.
Plus, the game ought to be able to stand alone, and it really doesn’t.
This doesn’t take much – just think of it in Mortal Kombat terms — “We’re having another tournament, and everybody is showing up!” is probably good enough to at least cover the basics. But they really dropped the ball on this, especially with the Protoss.
2. The fact that the story doesn’t deal with why the races are fighting each other is part of what makes the core of the story bad, which then manifests in other ways. If you fix that, all of a sudden a lot of the other problems in the story start to go away – the missions against Protoss don’t feel as irrelevant. You probably have to replace Kosh ad the doctor lady with characters who actually matter.
So it’s not that this complaint is in and of itself a huge deal, it’s that it’s the core issue of a larger series of complaints about the story that I could have gone into in more detail but I didn’t want to whine for another thousand words.
I wanted to save that for the comments :-)
The only time you really run into the Protoss in the campaign is the mission where you’re violating their shrine, or where they’re trying to purify the Zerg infestations and your friends happen to be in the way. In both cases, the motivation is pretty clear as to why you’re in conflict with them.
As for saying it should stand on its own – well, as a game, sure. But as a plot, this is the 3rd in what will be at least 5 parts of a larger story – the story of Brood War certainly didn’t stand on its own without the original Starcraft, and I wouldn’t expect the sequel to Brood War to stand alone in that regard either.
Before you compare it to Warcraft 3, realize that War 3 took place 20 years or so after War 2, and shares no main characters with its predecessor. Starcraft 2, on the other hand, centralizes its story arc around the same protagonist and antagonist from Brood War, only about four years after the defeat of the UED.
Brood War was an expansion pack, though, and it came out a year or two after the original. This is a whole new game that came out 12 years after that.
The UED is barely mentioned. There’s every reason to believe we don’t know who they are at this point. We barely find out who the Dominion is, and the Confederacy is mostly mentioned in the mercenary flavor texts.
The Protoss missions aren’t difficult to grasp, that’s not the issue. The issue is that, if you treat it like a standalone game, the Protoss have very little reason to be in the game at all. They’re positioned like being able to play them in multiplayer is some sort of fun bonus, like playing the people other than Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Pod Racer for Super Nintendo.
But the Protoss are a huge part of multiplayer. They cost a lot of money and time to develop for the sequel. They are a big selling point for the game. It doesn’t make sense that their participation in the storyline is so tangential.
I guess I don’t like the “one race at a time” model for releasing these Starcraft games. The way I see it, if you’re doing that, do it Matrix-style, where you make the games simultaneously and release them in quick succession. It really doesn’t feel like a complete game if Terran is the only race you play a lot and the other two are afterthoughts.
And I think the shortcomings this creates are really apparent if you play bronze league multiplayer on battle.net. The story totally affects the level of fun and participation in the multiplayer experience.
Thanks for commenting, by the way :-) Part of posting this was to start conversation, and I want to let you know that I don’t mean anything serious by riffing on this stuff. I definitely appreciate the candid criticism from somebody who knows what they are talking about regarding Starcraft.
See, I totally disagree with you there. I view the multiplayer as totally separate from the single player. You use different units, different races, different maps, and have only one objective ever – kill everything on the map that isn’t you. Yes, they’re the same mechanics and visuals, but that’s about it. From that standpoint, the presentation of the Protoss and Zerg is not problematic at all for me. Maybe I’m jaded from being so into the Pro scene in BW and SC2, but the mutliplayer is totally detached from the story practically speaking, and viscerally I don’t feel any sort of attachment to the story playing multiplayer – I just want to DT rush and laugh as the other guy calls me things I won’t repeat. Also, I’m not sure what your comment about the Bronze League meant. Are you suggesting I would find the supposed shortcomings more or less impactful as a higher ranked player?
As far as the multi-part game goes, I didn’t like the idea but so far I’ve liked the execution. In the original Starcraft, you had 3 10 mission long “episodes,” one for each race, each telling part of the story, chronologically following each other. Think “movie trilogy.” Brood War did the same with 3 more episodes. Now Starcraft 2 brings a single further episode, but it’s three times as long and gets further into the individual characters. It’s a stylistic change, but I kind of like it. You get to really see Raynor fleshed out in a way the original game only sort of touched on.
It was certainly a surprise seeing this show up today. You’re completely correct in your earlier statement that Starcraft is more than just another video game; it’s been a significant chunk of my life for the last 10 years that no other game can compete with. So, sure, I get a little ornery when people start throwing words around like sexist ;) But aye, it’s been fun talking about it at least.
Okay so it ends with Raynor carrying naked Sarah away to be his girlfriend again, and she’s done all these terrible things while she was with the zerg and she’s just going to get away with it? Even if she wasn’t in control she should still have an epic case of survivor guilt and probably need a lot of therapy.
This storyline seems way too much like Jaina and Arthas in Warcraft, only reverse the sexes and this time one is saved instead of finding redemption in death. Nobody would have bought it for one minute if the Arthas fight had ended with Jaina teleporting his naked body out of the frozen throne into the sunset, but the other way around it’s considered believable?
Other side of the coin: Nobody would have made a fuzz if Jaina had teleported Arthas’s naked body out of the frozen throne into the sunset, but the other way around, it’s considered sexist?
Let me tell you what I see: I see an ex-zerg badass quite weak and exhausted. Barely able to even focus on the world around her. Then there’s the guy who, at some point in the storyline of the games, loved her. Please, do tell me how you’d carry her. Slumped over your shoulder? Or maybe Raynor should have brought a change of clothes for her in case he succeeded. You know, so she can cover herself up.
I agree the world of videogames is incredibly sexist, at times, but in this last scene, I don’t see it.
The issue isn’t with how he carried her. If the genders were flipped and she was a he I think the whole scene would have probably been considered emasculating.
Guess we’ll have to disagree with that.
So woman rescues vulnerable man and rides off into the sunset is something that happens alot in movies and games????
One thing to consider: For Jim Raynor, the original story wasn’t so great. I haven’t played it in a while, but I remember him as being whiny and generally useless. I would not have wanted to play for 40 hours as the the bald guy who’s mouth was constantly writing checks that his ass didn’t have the funds for.
So, Jim needs a little retconing. If the voice actors weren’t the same, there’d be nothing the Jim from SC 1 and the Jim of SC 2 had in common. He doesn’t look at all the same and generally doesn’t act the same.
New Jim is by one idea, “I was responsible for the genocide of an entire planet” and since this is a lot to deal with he’s reduced the response to, “If I save Sarah, everything will be fine.” Piss on protoss religious shrines? Fine. Make a deal with the very government (Mensgk’s Son) that he’s supposed to be fighting? Show me where to sign. Take your men on a suicide mission to the alien stronghold? Only after I’ve had my whiskey.
Jim’s salvation is so wrapped up in saving Sarah, shooting Tychus seems perfectly rational to him. He’s Ahab (maybe, Moby Dick is still on my to do list). “It’s a damn shame.” Tychus sees the madness in it. Tomorrow when Jim wakes up, he’ll still have helped murder a planet. Man, it would have been a lot cooler without the prophecy crap. Then all we have is a guy who’s become so deranged with guilt that he can’t see anything wrong with one more death on the pile.
The short version? This ain’t Sarah’s game. It’s Jim’s. I think we’ll see a lot more of the Sarah fans want in the sequel, if for no other reason then Blizzard sad stories full of woe. There’s nothing sad if Jim’s attempt at redemption actually worked.
Wow, I’m showing up quite late after the battle, but I just wanted to say that as much as I agree with Fenzel’s article, your post here is a great analysis. It’s really obvious when you point it out, and it is true that the prophecy crap just blocks the saving-Sarah-obsession. Awesome.
I will agree that the writing in Starcraft 2 is quite bad but I don’t think it was any better in the original. Back when the characters’ faces were little more than looping animated gifs it was not as noticeable.
I’ve always considered the single and multiplayer aspects to be separate. I can’t think of any multiplayer games outside of an MMO that have any real story outside of lore on a website or in a manual. Why are the terrorists trying to bomb this empty desert town? Why are Red and Blu fighting over the barn and train station? In Street Fighter you’re fighting against another player just to see who wins, but in single player you’re climbing a ladder to face Bison and whatever end to the flimsy story for your character.
I would also disagree that the New Gettysberg cinematic makes Kerrigan look weak or like a damsel in distress. The dialogue is taken pretty much directly from the original game and Kerrigan fights until she realizes she is surrounded with no hope of escape or survival. She looks up to the sky with a defiant “f**k you” expression it’s a heroic death a la Vasquez and Gorman in Aliens.
Though I do wish they had left Kerrigan as she was so we could play as her being, to use her words, “pretty much queen bitch of the universe” in the next game.
Yeah, it’s very possible I have “Thundercats Syndrome” and am holding newer stuff to a higher standard than I ever held higher stuff.
Instead, the writers decide to do what all sci-fi hacks do these days when their story is too goddamned complicated and they can’t figure out how to fix it – they “focus on the characters.”
Thank you! I keep trying to tell people this, who sanctimoniously promulgated that line about the finale of Lost, that it could either be about the island or about the characters (with the clear implication that people who like a finale that, however sentimentally, wrapped up the characters’ stories were morally superior to those who were annoyed that so many of the show’s questions were answered only with “Because it’s magic.”) That division only points to the failure of the writers to properly integrate characters with plots. They should be inseparable. Is it possible, for instance, to imagine a version of “Silence of the Lambs” where instead of it being Hannibal Lector that Starling visits in that prison, it’s Stephen Dedalus from “Portrait of the Artist as Young Man”? Or Holly Golightly, or Yossarian, or HAL 9000, or Napoleon the pig from “Animal Farm”? (Although the latter 2 are murderers, so maybe Starling could indeed interview them in prison someday.) It’s just like Henry James said: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”
Points are all well taken about the generally lazier/shoddier/more sexist writing in the game. I think it says something that I didn’t really care about the cutscenes this time around and was just trying to play through all of the missions. It made me like Jim Raynor a whole lot less. Also, I think “focus on the characters” plural is a mistatement of what Blizzard did here. They focused on one character, Jim Raynor, to the detriment of every other character in the Starcraft Universe.
I do disagree that Blizzard needed to somehow justify the multiplayer via the single player. Starcraft multiplayer has taken on a life of its own over the last however many years and it’s pretty much an end in and of itself at this point. There’s no shortage of people on the ladder (in all leagues, even up to diamond) that don’t have the achievement for finishing the campaign. This is especially true with the advent of all the shoutcasters on YouTube, the pro scene in South Korea and the burgeoning pro scene in the North America and Europe.
Say could Valerian Mensk provide a better POV character for wings of liberty? Raynor going against Mensk could have still be there, but Valerian has reason to fall either way from what I gather
That’s a cool idea. I remember reading that the writers didn’t want to finish the rebellion story because the last game was about Arcturus, and this one wasn’t supposed to be. So making it more about Valerian would have been pretty cool. You could have started doing missions on behalf of your dad, shutting down smugglers and rebels and stuff. But eventually you’d figure out shady shit was going on, when, say, Zeratul let you know he was using the Zerg against people.
Wouldn’t sell as well, though. You’d have to redesign Valerian as a character. Make him a little bit less effete.
But hey that’s doable.
Plus a valerian as protagonist kinda ease meeting him, he only show up in the last part of the game and I don’t think he’s even mention till there. While Starcraft (and blizzard game in general) often have a “all in the manual” thing going on. Only playing the game the guy kinda come out of nowhere.
Plus he didn’t really leave a good impression when he explained the reason for his plan
“I’m going head first with a pretty big bulk of the Terran armies, in the middle of both Zerg invasion and pratical civil war to decapitate an ennemies no one was able to beat on an inhospitable planet teeming with the most violent and viles creatures in the galaxy mainly because I have a good impression thoses ancient aliens artefact no one used will work”
“so why do you do this?”
“Cause I want to reassure people I’ll be a good emperor! What do you say guy who want to abolish the system”
Yeah, Valerian’s plan is kind of stupid. Okay, really stupid. And poorly timed. And it involves the totally wrong people.
I like how when you meet Valerian you have the option to do other stuff than help him at first, but eventually you have to help him. Ah, the illusion of nonlinearity.
The high priority he gave to the plan Probably show how much faith Raynor had in Valerian
Hell he probably left him around the Char in the hope the zerg would take care of him for him
Okay I couldn’t finish this petty article for frustration with what I was reading. I just wanna say that your whole angle on kerrigan seems like a biased stretch. Kerrigans personal story is how she isn’t defined by Raynor, she has her own destiny and the beginning of the zerg campaign is her realizing that. In the first campaign she’s terrifying because shes powerful, she’s not the enemy because she’s a woman, she’s a threat, which from an objective viewpoint is a compliment. It’s hilarious you compare the artifact to a dong, and what kerrigan emerges from to a vagina- it shows how desperate you are for content; it’s like you went through the campaign from start to finish looking for anything you could use. You can’t objectively enjoy the story if you’re determined to rip it apart from the start, and you sure as hell aren’t qualified to report on it. The artifact is a reference to obelisks and as for the vagina door, well the zerg are wholly organic and how many doors can you make from flesh that aren’t reminiscent of a vagina. You’re mad they use dongs, your mad they use vaginas, you choose which ever angle suits your purpose.
I am a feminist, go ahead and tell me I’m not but while kerrigan may be needlessly scantly clad at times (and all videogames do need to work on that) she’s the most powerful person in the universe (screw amon) and her journey is an escape from the worlds of different men into one of her own.
LASTLY I could patiently reword my arguments to be more professional but I think my current format reflects the lack of quality in your own work, at least it’s somewhat succinct.
“I remember reading that the writers didn’t want to finish the rebellion story because the last game was about Arcturus, and this one wasn’t supposed to be.”
Wait, both the first and third installments will have a Terran main character? I thought the third campaign was supposed to be a Protoss campaign?
Oh, no, didn’t mean that. I mean that the Terran political plotline of Starcraft 1 is about Arcturus Mengsk and the Dominion. They didn’t want to make Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty about Arcturus Mengsk also, which is why they make Valerian an important character – read that in an interview with Blizzard people.
Supposedly, the second and third episodes of Starcraft 2, which are called “Heart of the Swarm” and “Legacy of the Void” will be a little more outside the box than Wings of Liberty was. “Heart of the Swarm” will supposedly be about Kerrigan and have RPG elements where you play as her and build up her stats and mutations so that you can lead bigger and better armies.
And “Legacy of the Void,” which is way off at this point, will supposedly be about Protoss internal politics – factions and gaining influence and stuff. For example, in Starcraft 2 you’ve got a bunch of units that are Protoss from Aiur (like high templar, zealots and immortals) and a bunch of units that are Protoss from Shakuras (like stalkers, dark templar, and void rays).
Supposedly in the expansion there will be more divisions like this — you will play as Zeratul, and you will have to make choies that make friends or enemies with the different factions, which will change which units you can use – with the goal being to eventualy unite all the Protoss – I guess against the Dark Voice or something. There aren’t any reports I know of that say the game is even in development yet.
I think it was the same interview where I read that they want to think about the Zerg and the Protoss more differently from Terrans than they have in the past – that it doesn’t really make sense for a Protoss story to be so similar to a human story.
The different single-player campaign design concepts will probably also be used to help justify the full-game price tag they’re putting on each game, rather than the expansion price tag. Hopefully they will be worth it (While it’s hard as a working adult to really care that much about the extra $20 – I know I would have cared when I was younger.)
Of course, a lot of this info is probably outdated – I think a lot of it came from the 2008 announcement of Starcraft 2 in the first place, and a lot has changed since then (like the expected price points). So who knows how things are going now.
@Tersa: Sorry, It seems we reached maximum depth with respect to comment replies, as I can’t seem to find a ‘reply’ link until your last comment. Quoting:
“So woman rescues vulnerable man and rides off into the sunset is something that happens alot in movies and games????”
Happens a lot? No not at all. Is it emasculating? No, not at all.
Okay so if a woman saving a man isn’t emasculating then why did the makers of Salt feel it was necessary to make changes to the script so that Salt’s significant other wouldn’t need saving after Salt’s lead was changed from Tom Cruise to Angelina Jolie? http://jezebel.com/5523000/salt-a-pro+woman-flick-with-a-sexist-twist
Our culture seems to think it’s emasculating. In an ideal world I agree that it wouldn’t be emasculating. But unfortunately we don’t live in that ideal world. There still seems to be a lot of baggage with these types of story lines.
Sounds to me like you hit a really good example of sexism in films. Does that make the concept *itself* sexist? As in, is a man getting rescued emasculating, by its nature, sexist? I’d say most people would respond ‘no’ The director of that movie, who is obviously rather sexist, responded ‘yes’.
Let me make myself perfectly clear: Yes, western culture is rife with sexism. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t many people out there who aren’t. Noyce made his position stupidly clear, by stating his actions were to prevent emasculating his character (even though, in both of our opinions, getting rescued would not, in fact achieve such a thing). The problem in the case of Warcraft, is that the scriptwriter didn’t go off and say “Hey, if Arthas is rescued by Jana, it’s emasculating”. Ergo, both of our positions on the subjects arise from our own perception. I choose not to look at it in a sexist way. Likewise, I choose not at the last scene of Starcraft II in a sexist way. I see what I see, and I interpret it as I see it. If The people at Blizzard were to walk up to me and say “dude, rescuing naked chicks is like, totally hawt”, then I’d have to change my stance on the subject. In the meanwhile, I guess I prefer to believe people aren’t that misogynistic until proven wrong.
Not to be a boor or anything, but the formally stated intentions of the people doing it are among the worst barometers possible of whether something is good, bad, right, wrong, in pursuit of one political agenda or another, reinforcing of a prejudice or exacerbating of a social problem.
What the person talking prefers or is more comofortable with is one of the other worst ones.
Healthy skepticism of the political effects of creative speech is important, but I don’t think your stance here is robust enough.
Comofortable? wow, I fail at typing life.
I do think you are underplaying the Fool/Magus archetypal relationship between Raynor and Zeratul post BW. That then lends more credence to Zeratul’s word over the actions of Tychus, a known thief and liar.
As to the “prophesy”: I think this was an attempt at foreshadowing events in the last 2/3rds of the narrative. In building up some anticipation for the Hybrids and perhaps the return Samir Duran, this will help propel the plot toward a climax where the original races are nearly defeated, The “Tower” archetype. Just keep in mind that the story is far from finished. Criticizing it now is akin to the Boeing designers calling the stealth fighter mock up the hopeless diamond. Yeah its ugly, and a bitch to handle, but it’s form did prove to be an essential part of its function once flight testing began.
I haven’t played SC2, but nod in agreement about your statement. I actually did a write-up on sexism in SC1, and I think the trend of sexism in StarCraft really hasn’t changed. It’s just that 2’s story hasn’t completed and/or isn’t very good in comparison in to StarCraft 1. Anyways, the write-up was originally posted on tvtropes Forum, so there’s going to be some links to their articls, as well as SC Wikia, which I used as reference:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUsl5lUr65aYZGNocm5wOGtfMTQyOWNrNDZjZmQ&hl=en&authkey=CM3E2PsG
you have a lot of nerve condemning one of the greatest games of all times. If Starcraft 2 is dissapointing to you storywise you must hate everything. It doesnt have one of the highest pc game ratings of all time for nothing. I give this a huge thumbs down
Thank you for this brilliant peace of rhetoric, wherein you make your case clearly and address relevant arguments with relevant objections and references. Keep it up!
Allow me to paraphrase: “I like Starcraft and you’re a big doodie head, waaaaaaaaaaaah!”
Wow, I’m a fan of Starcraft II, and this comment is really stupid. I think you paraphrased it the best, Dave.
While you do bring up some good points, you’re taking apart a story that’s only 33% complete. Blizzard still has yet to release the latter 2/3rds of the story. Not that I’m saying it will make it better. I just hate to see people go off half-cocked.
I liked this article. I am a big fan of both Starcraft 1 and 2 and a big part of why I like the first game was the story (I didn’t have internet at the time so no multiplayer for me). I was particularly disappointed with the inclusion of prophesy (totally unneeded) and the deinfestation of Kerrigan. Also, the dialogue was often clumsy.
The reason they felt that they had to deinfest Kerrigan was because they wanted her to be the character for the second part and so they needed her to have a giant reversal so that we can build up her forces (no point in playing a character that can destroy everyone at the very beginning). But why couldn’t they have diminished her power some other way? Have a hybrid take control of the swarm from her? Have a massive hybrid invasion destroy most of her forces? They we could have played a baddass villan for the second game instead of a disturbed daddy’s girl. The answer is probably that neither of those options involve her being saved by good ol Jimmmy. :(
Well I still have hope that they second part will be good. Hope springs eternal.
A very nice write up of some of the major contentions I share with you in regards to the narrative and characters of SC2.
Reading the discussion here, especially the Valerian part, I came to an epiphany about the whole misdirection of the story of SC2 and the mussed opportunity of what might have been.
Character driven narratives are not necessarily a bad thing as long as the development is intertwined with the progression of the plot, the major mistake was having the focus being on Raynor.
Wings of Liberty was 12 in tbe making and by now even veterans of the originals are hard pressed to remember the intricacies of the plot and relationships between the characters. Raynor is especially burdened with the events of the previous games, but WoL picks up like nothing has happened, as if we’ve all played the games, read the manual or some of the god awful books. That’s a big no-no.
Raynor’s goals and motivations seem arbitrary if viewed through the eyes of a newcomer. Too many characters and concepts of the universe are pilled on too quickly so that you’re left confused and disinterested.
Enter, the Valerian character. Valerian in WoL is horrible fucking schlock, the way his background and looks match that of Arthas is laughable, but the concept of his character has potential.
Imagine if the game started with a young, naïve female Princess being given her first commission by her dad, Arcturus. She has lived a sheltered life because of her background and she experiences the universe and its characters gradually alongside the player.
Throughout the story of the game she comes to learn the real nature of her dad by meeting Raynor and eventually is convinced by him what a horrible A-hole her father is, that the Dominion is a sham and that she has been manipulated by Dad all along.
She takes control of her fate and works to overthrow Arcturus with the help of Raynor. This development sparks an interest with another former pawn of the Emperor who also took control of her own fate, the Queen of Blades. There would be an interesting relationship between the Princess and the Queen, the first rising to wrong a right and set free her people the second using her won freedom to enslave and dominate. It’s almost Shakespearean.
This is obviously only the frail skeleton of a narrative, but if properly written could have proven a great way to start off what money-grabbing Blizzard intends to a three parter.
This sounds great. I suggest you get writing, good Sir!
“I’m curious what people’s reactions to it are, with the rest of the game sight-unseen.”
OK, so I’ve never played either of the Starcraft games, and know nothing about the backstory. Here is what I saw:
Two guys find a naked woman. They seem to recognize her. One guy smokes a cigar inside a closed helmet, making him obviously the “bad cop”. The “good cop” wants to save the woman. The bad cop is under orders from the nebulous Authority to kill her, though he seems sort of ambivalent about the act either way. Good cop shoots bad cop, good cop takes away naked woman.
There is not really enough information here to make a conclusion about the scene’s meaning. Interestingly, the most important missing information has nothing to do with the woman, the good cop, or the bad cop. It is the answer to the question “what is the nature of the nebulous Authority?” Clearly, the Authority is brutal, but why?
There are two choices that matter for interpreting the scene without any other context. The first is that the Authority is corrupt and evil (and this is the more heavily implied, thanks to the “deal with the devil” comment, even though the source of that comment is suspect). In this case, the Authority wants her dead for a nefarious purpose, so the good cop acts heroically in saving the naked woman.
The other choice is that the Authority has a really good reason for wanting the woman dead, that this is the “lesser evil”. If this is the case, then the good cop is actually selfish, saving the naked woman for his own purposes, while ensuring that the “greater evil” occurs (though he may not be aware of it).
So, when you supply the actual context of the game, does this become any clearer? Well, the storyline you mention strongly suggests the latter. Regardless of how this woman was betrayed and captured, if she really becomes “one of the most powerful individuals in the known universe” and controls an entire race “known to ‘infest’ their enemies, exerting a sort of biological mind control on them while turning them into monsters” then it seems extremely likely that the Authority has a great deal of moral ground to stand on by thinking that killing her is the “lesser evil”.
In particular, if there is even a slight chance that “rescuing” her and bringing her into human space is part of some elaborate trick to “infest” humanity, then any government would have to be complete idiots to allow her to live.
So, given that, it seems likely that the good cop is “getting played like fiddle by a totally legit badass because he is dumb and sexist and keeps underestimating her”.
I suppose the point here is this: the ending to Starcraft 2 is sexist if and only if you assume that the naked woman is exactly the victim she is presented as. But making that assumption is, itself, sexist.
If, instead, you assume that the naked woman remains “a totally legit badass”, playing the victim to further her own hidden agenda by taking advantage of the misplaced compassion of one human dumbass, you see a much different ending.
But what do I know.
You misunderstand completely.
She was “one of the most powerful individuals” up till about five minutes before that scene, when she got blasted with the alien artifact and rendered powerless. She is no longer a threat.
And up till then she’s been such a badass that it takes all the bad guys in the game working together and manipulating the good guys to help in order to bring her down, and they only win by a narrow margin.
As for the betrayal cut scene, it would be more impressive if you knew that she had just led a ragtag army in fighting off two massively superior forces at both fronts before being abandoned at the last minute.
She only loses when the odds are impossibly, overwhelmingly against her.
Wow.
There are just so many things wrong with your analysis. Or else just distorted.
Most have been addressed already. I might comment more at length on them later, but I’ll acknowledge your most valid point: the penis symbolism of the artifact. You’re right, that was unnecesary.
Let me ask you one question: if the artifact had been an orb or a ring, would you have had a problem with it? I think it would’ve been an improvement.
There are indeed a lot of cases of sexism in games and they need to be addressed, but this isn’t one of them.
What the heck, a couple more points.
The storyline makes perfect sense if you pay attention (and aren’t too busy complaining about xel’naga penises – penisi?). The characters’ actions play a vital role in the way the action plays out – you see the on-the-ground action rippling in the corridors of power via news broadcasts. None of the missions are just about about collecting money. They all advance the story in different ways.
SPOILER/SPECULATION
It’s obvious the people behind Mobius are working for the Dark Voice and are breeding hybrids. It’s also obvious they’re playing the Mengsks against one another and against Kerrigan, Arcturus is financing their breeding plans (as revealed in the secret mission) probably because they promised him an invincible army, Val is assembling the artifact as part of his ego-boosting victory, and they all want Kerrigan out of the way. They chose Tycus for their trigger man because Raynor would trust him. He was to insure Kerrigan was not just de-powered, but killed.
In short, yes we’re only given one perspective, but it makes the intrigue that much more exciting.
Here’s a tip: try imagining that alien super penis as a ring. You might actually start to enjoy the game.
Now that I think about it, this discussion has made me all the more excited about SC2, when you consider that Raynor and Co are being used as a tool by the bad guys to destroy Kerrigan.
I imagine Heart of the Swarm will be a fun ride. I’m hoping for flashback missions with her as a playable character in full Queen of Blades mode as we see some of the new Zerg invasion from her point of view. We’ll get to know why she wanted the artifact and what she wanted to do with it.
Then we’ll get to play her as she regains her Zerg powers and continues her missions, but with a new consideration for Terran and Protoss life.
She’ll be a genuine hero. A sci-fi Xena without the campyness. How’s that for character development?
“Adding sex to a story in a lazy or contemptuous way more often than not leads to adding sexism, as the contempt for the subject matter translates into contempt for women and progressive gender identity in general.”
-I’m a bit put off by the implication that “contempt for sex” translates into contempt for 1. women specifically and 2. “progressive gender identity in general” (which… I’m not entirely sure what you mean by it) but NOT 3. men in any specific way.
At the end of the article there’s even an allusion to the way the story’s sexism is also specifically contemptuous of men, in the implication that they have nothing better to do with their time, or aren’t psychologically strong enough to do anything other, than obsess over women, fight and kill each other over women, etc. Why focus on the insult to women and act as if it were the only noteworthy part, when bad writing and writing infused with bad attitudes harm everyone?
I’m still waiting for the mainstream womens’/gender/queer studies contingents to really realize that sexism etc. aren’t a patriarchal conspiracy to keep The Woman down, that it’s a remnant of old survival techniques that are no longer necessary in our society and hurt everyone, male or female, who remain bound by them.
As a feminist I feel, really, really horrible saying this but I think you’ve over-thought this one. You have two arguments which have very little to do with each other. Your first argument is that the story in Starcraft 2 was poorly written. Agreed. Your second argument is that the story is sexist. I disagree. The in-game “banter” between Raynor and Kerrigan in Starcraft is indicative of mutual attraction, perhaps but it’s never stated if they’re even dating or intimate much less if Raynor, or Kerrigan, want to settle down and start having kids. This makes your comment about the game’s message being one of “wives submit to their husbands” an incendiary red herring. There’s nothing to suggest that Raynor want to do anything more than save someone he cares about and possibly stop a dark plot for galactic domination by evil (again, I agree, poorly written story). In your synopsis of Brood War you admit that he’s been trying to help Kerrigan for a long time before she became a mcguffin.
I agree that it was a spineless move to make the whole and game about saving Kerrigan and even worse to have Raynor succeed in doing that. It’s trite, it’s cliched, and it’s cowardly on the part of the writers. But it is not sexist. Raynor clings to the notion that Kerrigan is not acting of her own free will as the Queen of Blades. He believes that she is either still suffering the effects of the Zerg infestation or that she has been driven insane by the traumas she’s suffered (the Zerg infestation was basically a rape). Raynor wants to deprive her of her powers not because she’s a woman but because she’s become a homicidal maniac. He goes up against several male antagonists for the same reason. She spent most of Brood War using her Zerg army to try to get revenge on all humanity for being abandoned to the Zerg. She also tried to carve out her own empire using methods that would make Catherine the Great cringe. Brood War seemed to suggest that Raynor was wrong. Kerrigan had decided that she was going to parley her betrayal and violation into becoming one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy. For better or worse, the woman Raynor knew was dead. So, once again, there’s bad writing in Starcraft 2 with a retcon, or an example of willful ignorance, to make Raynor right. But it doesn’t change the fact that he believes he’s trying to save someone he cares about. He might be wrong, doomed to tragic failure, or blinded by emotion but he’s not being sexist. He wants her to stop destroying worlds, not get back in the kitchen and make him a sandwich (although we all know that psychic super-soldiers of the future make amazing sandwiches, sex notwithstanding).
You say that she’s been retconned from strong, female character into damsel in distress and offer the clip of her betrayal as proof. She’s a super-solider but she’s facing down an entire army of Lovecraftian horrors alone and she would like to know when she can leave. That she’s trying to crack a joke in that situation is cliched but anyone else would curled up a fetal position long ago. Being a strong female character does not mean being a woman alone.
There’s another issue I’m glad you brought up: the biggest reason this had to be Raynor’s story and not Kerrigan’s was the simple fact that, no, Kerrigan does NOT have free will.
Although the Overmind which serves as the loci persona of the Zerg biological imperitive is dead, that imperitive still exists and utterly dominates Kerrigan. It’s not a question of whether she’ll try to take over the universe, only what methods she’ll use. One could argue that her human personality and experiences would influence those methods, but she does not have the choice to NOT try to infest the universe and carry out that imperitive.
It’s why Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer could not have had his own series while he was still the soulless Angelus. He didn’t have the choice to not be a mass murderer. Kerrigan did not have the choice to not be a genocidal tyrant.
And if you ask me, that’s the real cop-out, since it neatly absolves her from all her actions as a Zerg. Yet it’s still and interesting storyline and I eagerly await the continuation.
So looking back on this article now, what are your feelings? I am reading it for the first time today in 2017. Does it strike you as shortsighted that you would jump the gun like that? I dont really know if I can see the “sexist” overtones as much now that the whole story is together. Every expansion’s story arc needs to end with the highlighted race on a high note. In WoL, Jimmy “killed” the queen of blades. Sure she didnt actually flatline, but the queen was taken down what he assumed was for good. Then HoTS continued the story and returned her to her Zerg Leader status, sans Amon’s maddening, evil influence but true to the original form, and the story never made her any “Softer” even as a human.
She was never a damsel in distress, if you recall the final terran mission “All-in” toward the end the Sarah Kerrigan underneath the queen of blades reached out psionically to encourage Jim to keep going. The real her, without the influence of the void, wanted to be cleansed by the artifact and freed from the dark ones control. She only reinfested herself to avenge Jim, throwing away her future and instead ended up being a savior to the galaxy- one that was ultimately willing to sacrifice herself in the end to the uncertainty that becoming a Xel Naga would bring, not knowing if she would be able to turn back after Amon’s defeat. Even when Jim tells her not to change herself again, she shuts him up and says she knows what she has to do. She was powerful, important, motivated and self-reliant. I dont think she could have been less of a weak female trope at any point when you look at the story knowing all the details.
In all it wasnt a “bad” article it just seems like a bit of a stretch, and with hindsight I can say for certain that the criticisms leveled here never came to fruition. She remained the most powerful force in the galaxy, to the very end. I dont mean any of this as an insult to you, and I hope it doesnt come off that way. I just want to be clear about how things really happened, vs your assessment of the situation.
Haters gonna hate. Heaven forfend that a man would want to save his friend from an alien infestation (which the reviewer calls “power”) and protect her from bad guys in his own circle. Kerrigan is after all a soldier, and a good one, who got used the way any other soldier might have been used in battle and as a strategic pawn. The reviewer desperately needs to reshape her friendship with Jim as something unnatural. Something that must change. Yeah. Let there be no good feelings between the sexes. So how about this instead? We can all be poisoned by powerful forces, but we can also be redeemed, and under all the infestation of rhetoric and hating, we’re all good underneath. Not just women or feminized males. Starcraft rules. Don’t project your problems onto it.
Six years on, I find myself wondering how you reacted to the way the storyline ended.
A shame there isn’t an updated version of this article commenting on the expansions. I actually think that Wings of Liberty is the best of the three, not because it’s good, but because Heart of the Swarm is just that awful a narrative mess full of retcons and inconsistent characterisations.
WoL at least has a few choices, something I expected to be expanded upon in HotS.
For instance: Giving the player the choice of whether Kerrigan should hold on to her humanity, or go back and completely embrace the Zerg would have been much more interesting than the silly schizo mess it actually was, where the player’s only choice was mission orders as if that mattered when they could all be played anyway.
Kerrigan was my favorite character, and they really ruined her.
A lot of the time I got the sense that the developers was much more interested in writing Warcraft 4 rather than Starcraft 2. Considering the prophecy garbage, cartoonish fights like that stupid super saiyan battle against Narud in HotS, the whole primal zerg, especially the one sounding like a Warcraft troll or something.
When I played Legacy of the Void, I found myself just not caring about the Protoss, despite finding the characters and lore interesting in the first game, I hated everything related to Amon.
is garbage.
your writing
is no good.
your head was so swollen when you wrote this
I tend to disagree. The writing of the article was well done and just as well thought out.
It’s just that I tend to disagree with the central point of why SC2 was terrible. It wasn’t “sexist” … and dear god the SJWs really need to start locking themselves away rather than picking apart EVERYTHING as sexist or racist or phobic.
SC2 was bad because it was WC3 … in space. The final mission from the LotV expansion (not the epilogue part of it) was essentially the Warcraft 3 “Battle of Mount Hyjal” mission. All three races fighting together against a super-bad. The only difference is that unlike the Hyjal mission in WC3, you don’t control a different faction each “phase” … just the Protoss (IIRC) and souped-up Kerrigan’s laser firing.
The whole concept of turning Kerrigan human again wasn’t really to “domesticate an out of control woman” … it was to provide a redemption story for one of the universe’s most vile mass murderers. What’s more, we even got a pseudo-redemption story for the Overmind. He wasn’t evil, apparently … he was just slightly less good and had more foresight than the Protoss and Terrans while still being under the control of something more powerful.
If they really wanted to go more into the Hybrid seen in the BW bonus mission, there were so many good ways of going about it that didn’t have to resort to Archimonde … ahem … I mean some all powerful being trying to destroy the universe because he thought it sucked.
And there are dozens more problems with the story, some of which branch off that point, and some that are self contained. But that doesn’t mean that the story is sexist … just that the writers need to be fired for lack of creativity.
I meant to add that the redemption story for Kerrigan was completely uncalled for. She was perfect in BW, and they ruined that by having to humanise her. They should have just left her as the mass murderer who, MAYBE had to work with the other characters again against a common foe before betraying them. Because that’s who the Queen of Blades is.
That wasn’t who Kerrigan was though. I think it made a lot of narrative sense to bring her back to humanity. She was transformed into a genocidal maniac by Mengsk’s decision to leave her behind to be infested and it seems entirely appropriate story-wise to conclude her story with her regaining her humanity and ultimately combining both of her selves into err… a super saiyan… ok to be fair that part was as derivative and lazy as when Sonic did it, but the core concept they had at the end besides that bit still worked fine imo.
The moment you said that Jim Raynor “is continually disappointed by the fact that no, this woman does not exist as an erotic object, but is in fact a totally legit badass who is playing him like a fiddle because he is dumb and sexist and keeps underestimating her.”, I knew you had missed the point.
While not a wonderful character by himself, Raynor’s sadness doesn’t have to do with him not being the object of Kerrigan’s affection. It has to do with the fact that she was a loved one, and seeing her corrupted by the Zerg as she was (because, if you know ANYTHING about Starcraft lore, you know she is unique in that she kept her will), seriously throws him off center: he still sees Kerrigan in the Queen of Blades, and he still loves her, but she is no longer human. The Queen of Blades is a monster using her skin, but deep down, he hopes the Kerrigan he loves is there.
Certainly, it’s a love story. But man, seeing Kerrigan as a “damsel-in-distress” and Raynor solely as a macho hero that only goes through the motions to prove she still loves him is pure SJW crap.
I know I’m 7 years late, but I sure hope you’ve played the rest of the trilogy. That way, you must have noticed just how wrong you were.
Artistical you’re trying to be logical to people who see sexism, mysoginy, etc behind every stone and tree, but a good try though.
So true. Lmao, fucking gross sexism? How about thier disdain for anything with a penis Bahahas
So, I was scrolling through the interwebs googling stuff when I found this hilarious gem of an article. NoW this article is long as crap and I disn’t feel like reading past the first page, so this is all responding to stuff on the 1st page. Now, let’s break it down:
1. You kinda skimped out on talking about how Kerrigan became leader of the Swarm in the begining; The Overmind gave her free will so she could lead the Swarm in the event of its death (later you figure out it’s because of some other stuff but still) When Overmind died, now Kerrigan controlled a lot of stock in the Zerg economy, although there was some stuff going on with that second Overmind and stuff, Kerrigan was undeniably the primary leader of the Zerg. She didn’t overthrow the Overmind, when the Overmind died, it was then a free for all amongst the zerg for who shall rule them all and Kerrigan won.
2. Raynor didn’t just want to screw Kerrigan. Although I too believe SC 2’s story to be utter crap, I don’t think it’s ‘sexist’. He legitimately fought battles beside this person and now she’s a brainwashed murderer. She may have some free will left, but she still has to underlying motive of, “KILL EVERYTHING!” If you could bring back a close friend that died, I bet anything you’d do it, so why fault Raynor for doing it, and also saving billions of lives that wouldve been lost if she were left alone.
3. Raynor didn’t strip Kerrigan of her power and thats it. He got rid of all the zerg crap in her, but she also now wasn’t bound by the Zerg motive of, “KILL EVERYTHING,” and she still was a powerful person given that she is a powerful ghost (and, as we see later, she can even control the Swarm to a degree)
4. Blizzard sells the Zerg and Protoss campaigns as expansions because,
A. Look at the Original Starcraft
Campaigns, and compare their
individual length to the SC2
campaign’s length
B. The expansions came with
multiplayer updates as well
C. Starcraft 2’s Campaign quality,
while not good in story, contains a
TON of new gameplay
5. Also, that keystone joke was hilarious!! You weren’t serious, right? Because that would be a pretty big stretch!!
6. The reason most of the Terran units are Male is because of a little thing called RESOCIALIZATION. This nifty thing is where the government aka the Dominion/Confederacy (both did it) would take convicts and brainwash them into serving. Like using resocialized Pyromanias as Firebats and actually insane people as Reapers. Of course that’s mainly for the bio of the army (excluding Ghosts), but that covers a large majority of terran units leaving Hellions/Hellbats, Cyclones, Seige Tanks, Thors, Widow Mines, Vikings, Medivacs, Liberators, Banshees, Ravens, and Battlecruisers
Ravens and Widow Mines are Robots, so yeah.
Seige Tanks and Battlecruisers came from Starcraft 1, so they couldn’t just randomly change it so I’m going to exclude them.
So now it’s at a 3/4 Women to Men ratio for new units that aren’t covered by lore.
Just claiming something is sexist is a bad idea, especially if you don’t know entirely what you’re talking about and your ‘proof’ is that sparse.
I can say with utter certinty that the author of this article has never served in a combat unit. He totally misses the entire point of what exactly the nature of the bond between Jim and Kerigan is. Jim is not some rabbit horn dog who invades entire plantes to get get some. Thats not even reasonable to suggest. Jim is leader who lost a soldier and is trying to make sure he doesnt leave anyone behind. Figurativly, or literally. Jim would have had an easier time with it has she just died. Instead she BECAME the enemy.
On a side not I notice the author doesnt reaspond to comments that dont stroke his “Phallic object”. I bet he fesls real dumb now that further in the expansions it was revealed Jim saved Kerigan so that she could become the most powerful being in the universe and go on to save everyone, only comming back when she was damn good and ready to do it.
I notice he has not deleted or updated this article to mention that he did, in fact, jump the gun and “Erupt” a bunk of “Woke” BS that turned out to be totally wrong. What a joke. Nope, just leave it up there, unedited, no corrections because hey, any article claiming anyone is sexist, right or wrong, must be a good thing. We can never hav etoo many ballless wonders complaning about imaginary sexism where there was none, in fake universes designed to entertain mostly males. Nope. Never enough.
Interesting comment about the author not serving in a military unit and therefore not understanding the bond between people who have fought and bled together. It’s worth considering, but Raynor shoots his best friend for this woman, and he and his best friend have also presumably fought and bled together…
(Also, although I agree that seeing sexism behind every bush and tree is often incorrect I don’t think it’s a bad thing to look at something and consider whether it’s sexist or racist or has some other non-obvious negative message. I’m not too familiar with Starcraft myself, but I don’t think it’s bad to examine the game and test it for sexism, whatever the actual result turns out to be.)
Ok, I have read the first sentence of this article and already know that it is a waste of time to read the rest. The games are a form of art! You cant politicise art!
If you believe that art (video games) should be subject to political scrutiny (social or otherwise) then you are simply a person wanting to take away artistic freedom (or suppress free artists) and therefore not worth listening to.
I think you may be confusing “art” and “entertainment.” I’d argue that if it ain’t political then it ain’t art. If all you want is a fun romp of male power fantasy, then maybe you don’t need to consider its portrayal of men and women and the game’s wider effect on society because the only point is to enjoy yourself. (I’ll still disagree with you, but it’s a more solid place to start a debate.)
However if it’s real art, then it’ll have real meaning and a real effect on the world beyond the inside of the game. And in that case, we should think about what that meaning and that effect actually are.
Frankly this entire article is written poorly, with such blunt and awful words. I feel like you fail to realize that Jim Raynor is the main character in WoL and Kerrigan taking advantage of him only makes him want her more. I honestly couldn’t read much more of this terrible writing so I’m just going to say that having a woman as the strongest person in the galaxy doesn’t sound that sexist but ok in essence
Overthinking it is definitely the right name of a website for this article to be on. Christ if there was a poster image of a soy it’d be this dudes picture.
The whole article is such a classic reach from this extreme minority of twitter warriors, especially considering how classic narrative and design with intent (why Kerrigan is now a “victim of misogyny and patriarchy” – no, by the way, that’s not what’s happening) seems to have been a lacking set of education in favour of repeating the same key phrases and self-affirming pat on the back armchair rhetoric.
But even then, people are entitled to their delusions.
But the very end of this article’s first page just made me think this was unoriginal npc satire to be honest. Really; her leaving a Nydus worm is a representation of an evil vagina, and the Xel’Naga artifact is what you’re trying to reach as a penis? Jesus christ dude. I hope you get laid.
What a bunch of cucks you people are. Go get pegged
Its so good to come and read this huge piece of crap, oh god this guy really wanted to get girls playing the feminist crap, only to be left by the average chad… I actually loved the game story, for the first time I enjoyed using Kerrigan and the zerg, she was freaking powerful and the race really plays like and endless swarm on the campaign, and to be honest, its really a stretch to call her a damsel in distress when she was the most powerful hero on the game and in the lore, and please dont get me started on the xelnaga artifact… Does this idiot thought of how boring of a mission it will be if you can just push everytime you want, and he will probably make a big rant if the the thing was a circle about how the man abuse the mighty hole for their own end withouts taking into account the circle feelings of pleasure or god knows what crap he could pull out of his very own special holes… If this huge idiot wanted to write about a bad female character, he should talk about Raszagal’s daughter, who was kinda weak comparing her to Alarak and Zeratul
Man you people really dont get it do you. The Starcraft Saga both 1 and 2 are awesome. The points raised are non-sensical and childish at best.
SC2 story is bad, writing is awful, characters are one-dimensional.
You really have to be naive and uneducated to whine about sexism in Starcraft. People like you are doing it just for the sake of igniting more conflict, and if you are not aware of that, well – there is no bottom in how low a person can fall.
People like you are the reason why everyone who is not familiar with feminism flips the table when they hear the very word. Thanks, a lot for hate mongering.
Fancy doing an article on how “sexist” it is to name a city Sacsayhuaman, or a lake “Titicaca”? It doesn’t need to be so long as, “ain’t nobody got time for Dat!”
So, I will say you’re wrong on a few points, but maybe you do not remember because not everyone got to see it.
In starcraft 1 brood war in the protoss campaign you actually meet. If I remember correctly Dr. Narud or actually in this form it was Samir Duran. the gentleman who is known for creating hybrids and he was talking about serving a higher power. I believe they had the idea for making Kerrigan human again and making her into a higher being for the entire. Time, the story is there just need to look. And little fun part as well Duran and Narud spelling is flipped I’m quite certain they were the same person so I think they planned this the whole time
Kinda of ridiculous to claim it is sexist to have Kerrigan as vulnerable after a scene where she basically molted into a new body like a damn space worm. I mean, yeah, the story was terrible, but I think it was a great idea to show that this uber-genocidal space demon badass does have moments of utter desperation, like us all. It makes her genocidal moments that much more weighted. And is it really sexist for Raynor to be a hopeless romantic? He may be an idiot but I think it is pretty clear to all involved that he stands no chance of dominating the Queen of Fucking Blades – if anything Raynor consistently shows that he would be a-ok with being her little bitch boy at basically any cost. Just my 2c
Imagine living in 2011 and coming away from WOL with the idea that “the artifact was a glowing penis that ‘took away her power’.” Nevermind the fact that she was space monster Hitler who was transformed into the Queen of Blades entirely against her will and was in no way controlled by her previous self as her Zerg personna entirely consumed her being. Then there’s the obvious fact that that the artifact in no way looks like a penis unless you diced one with a french fry cutter. I shudder to think what julienned carrots remind the author of… they must be indistinguishable from little orange dicks to him. However, maybe the author has measured their opinion since 2011, which was perhaps the nascency of the type of hyper-feminism that gave us such unabashed calls to abandon rationality with with slogans like “the future is female” and “believe women”, i.e., nonsense slogans that demanded subservience to bullshit (which, to draw a finer point here, were unlike other progressive slogans of the decade that made sense, like BLM, which actually call attention to an issue without demanding irrational deference to an ideology). 10 years on, we’ve seen the backlash, we’ve seen everyone retreat to their ideological camps, and clearly this kind of overreach did not help. I wonder if anyone today that felt so bold in 2011 regrets their failure to measure their words, perhaps if they did, we’d still have a society governed by reason, not a tribal one teetering on the edge.
I don’t remember the slogans “the future is female” or “believe women” and I was an adult female in 2011, but even now they don’t seem like bad slogans to me? Unless you’re reading them as intending to elevate women at the expense of men — I guess you could maybe see “the future is female” as excluding men (“Men don’t belong in the future! ONLY WOMEN!” is indeed a pretty ridiculous concept), but “believe women” seems harmless enough albeit wishy-washy (“Women exist!” or possibly “Women can do things!”).
Sexism didn’t vanish from society in the last 10 years, so this article still feels relevant to me; asking people to acknowledge that sexism is a real thing isn’t wrong, and I resent the idea that pointing out potential harm from inconspicuous (or not-so-inconspicuous) sexism caused our current political climate (now, or what we had in January). Refusing to listen to others has had a much greater role in getting us to Where We Are Now than talking about our (sometimes sexist) problems did.
Whatever you want to say about the Starcraft sequels that come next, there was enough in Starcraft 2 to talk about the portrayal of women as potentially sexist. How physically strong and domineering Sarah is doesn’t matter if everything she ever accomplished was the direct result of her dancing at the end of a puppet string for some space abomination and ultimately getting freed by her ex-boyfriend. (If I’m messing up the details or missing nuance here, I’m writing the Starcraft portion of my response based on (1) this article; and (2) people’s responses to this article.)
This definitely reads like the person writing this article is getting payed to find every possible link that would paint the writers of starcraft 2 as misogynistic while paying about 25% attention to the plot. Idk why anyone in these comments thinks tychus was jim’s “best friend” considering they actively butted heads, disagreed with each other whenever it came to significant decisions, and are all but at each other’s throats at more than one point in the game, with jim literally risking electrocuting him to death to stop his drunken attempts to murder jim. There’s no reason to believe they’d be anywhere near each other if tychus didn’t have a job to see through in the form of killing kerrigan when she’s finally vulnerable. It’s also just wild in general that characters are forbidden from having flaws as if jim hasn’t been drooling over kerrigan since the first time they interacted in the first game, which kerrigan lightheartedly reprimanded by calling jim a dog and that was immediately their established dynamic that kerrigan had with no one else.
The reason the races are fighting has never been confusing to me at any period of any of the sc2 campaigns, and like in sc1, the zerg attacking a world on sc2 is pretty normal considering their entire overriding directive in sc1 was to kill all things that aren’t zerg.
Raynor is a domestic terrorist to the dominion, and any time he steps outside a building he can realistically expect to be met with a hail of bullets considering he’s the entire empire’s #1 enemy.
All of these motives are explainable, and jim’s alcoholic obsession with kerrigan is pretty obviously a direct result of the trauma involved with having someone who’s at the very least your crush and the very most your actual romantic interest ripped from your life, twisted into a lovecraftian horror, then unleashed on the world to then murder your friends and attempt to hunt you down.
In sc2, Jim isn’t supposed to be a good person. You aren’t supposed to idolize him because he’s a drunk selfish asshole who’s been bumming around with a legion of troops who expect him to be a leader because he’s sad that his almost girlfriend is a literal monster from hell who has a kill count that shoots into the millions.
His entire personality changes throughout the game, which is a significant theme throughout the expansion, and by the end of the story he’s MUCH more like the jim raynor from the first game, the dude who stayed on the front lines of an entire planet being overrun by zerg just so that a bunch of aliens he has no real reason to care about can make it through the warp gate and off the planet safely.
Obviously sc2’s story isn’t great but literally all of it was foreshadowed in sc1 or broodwar to some degree, after finishing my most recent playthrough of sc1, broodwar, and all of sc2’s campaigns. Jim and kerrigan have been an implied item from the very first mission they encounter each other, through novels, and still into sc2. And even though Kerrigan was a ghost, one single ghost who’s seen on screen running out of ammunition after firing several shots can’t hold off an entire swarm of zerg when the outpost she established has fallen and she’s the only person left alive in the entire squad.
She’s not helpless in the cinematic because she’s a woman, she’s helpless because she’s a person who’s been stranded on a space platform with no evac, a mass of dead comrades and millions of gigantic insect creatures closing in, after spending the entire sc1 story being an abject badass who crushes every single obstacle in her path, and she continues to do that when she’s infested.
Don’t really think that the “Artifact” looks like a dick.
People here seriously defending SC2? Blizzard as a game company tells shit stories, this isn’t really a thing up for dispute.
Nobody is disputing the shit story. I enjoy the multiplayer gameplay, and the story has nothing to do with the that
Honestly this whole thing reads like it was written by someone who has not played SC or SC:BW and definitely missed the point and even suffers from their own sexist biases, kerrigan has never been week and if you actually took the time to play the game yourself and play the zeratul missions in WOL then you would learn that kerrigan is the key saving the universe from a being within the void that is basically patriarchal angry a god trying to destroy everything because they can which if you had actually played the game instead of watching cinematics with no context then you would have known that and that’s the biggest reason raynor tried to save her granted his past with her is a major motivator that is the real reason why jim saves her especially in the later series of the game in HOTS and LOTV if anything the story sets kerrigan up to become a strong force to be reckoned with that has the ability to take down and KILL a murderous patriarchal god trying to destroy and make everything in its image…. sounds like a strong feminine lead to me bud.
Should probably actually play the game in its entirety before writing something like this because it is such a bad take and honestly proves that you as the author have your own biases that are not based in reality let alone it sounds like the author has their own sexist bias against a woman slaying a patriarchal god and how can a protoss artifact resemble a penis?? they don’t have any and grow their children in tanks with the DNA of a male and female protoss and its not reproductive DNA.
this author should really play the games they write about instead of making half-assed assumptions.
Obviously, thinking a game’s story as a projection of society, doesn’t fit for you to live in chill, so chill.
What do you care for a game? Don’t play it.
When it came to the Starcraft franchise, to me its all the about the gameplay the story is mostly ass.
This is the most retarded take I have ever read in my life. Even stubborn orthodox christians make better arguments than the multiple stretches you made to say the xel naga crystal is a metaphor for a penis.
What a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. Go read a fucking book dude.
This is just toxic, I mean, the article… the game is just a game, with or without Blizzard, SC2 is a game
What are you going to complain next? Super Mario?
I used to watch movies and tv if I want a good story. But then all the tv and movies went woke. Progressive social politics are ruining the world. They are more destructive than your perceived sexism. Please just let us play our violent video games with sexy female characters in peace.
Okay, fair.
I like movies and tv having woke messages, and I 100% disagree about progressive politics ruining the world/entertainment (probably because I’m someone who wasn’t represented by a lot of “non-woke” works, and because I believe that if something can’t survive being examined then it isn’t true or real) but I’m clearly a different audience than you are with different needs, and I respect that.
The person who wrote this definitely didn’t play Starcraft the mission the betrayal cinematic comes from not only doesn’t portray her as a “ damsel in distress” just a soldier who (rightfully so) doesn’t want to be eaten by zerg especially with the knowledge she was sent with a strike force and shes all alone in the cinematic if watching your fellow soldiers die and waiting for an evac that wont come makes you a damsel in distress then I don’t know what does and I know you wouldn’t care at al if Raynor was on her place for the scene given how much of a stink you made about it
Y’all also wanna talk about how at the end of the game Kerrigan literally becomes a goddess? Or does that disprove your stupid point?