WIR? (Spoilers)

This is not the interpretation I get from the original author. It's possible I'm reading the wrong source material, but the list provided here simply lists every bad thing that happened to any female character ever: http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/women.html . The full explanation of the intentions behind the term are here: http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/r-gsimone.html .

Under those qualifications, Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart, and Marilyn Monroe are examples of a WiR just due to the context of their biographies. So is Wendy, a real life friend of mine who was murdered during a botched mugging, who I have occasionally alluded to in my character's biographies as a motivational force for the character.

I see that there are some internet materials for a WiR "Syndrome" which does seem to speak to relationships with men, but the original incarnation doesn't have that requirement.

I've read back-n-forth debates on this subject for years. The people who've been involved in these debates have ranged in "authority" all the way from famous authors down to rabid fanbois. I can easily accept that you have no obligation to accept my conclusions on this matter. But I can ease your mind by saying that people who know more about this subject than either of us are going to be making points similar to both yours and mine for a long time to come.

Agreed, and I actually mention that in a couple of my posts here. I guess I'm specifcally referring to the "WiR Syndrome" outlined in reference to the actually more broad idea of WiR outlined on the WiR website.

Agreed. This all originated in my reply to Smersh's post, which was specifically describing the "syndrome" version of the meme.

The eponymous Green Lantern issue (like the SSA) qualifies as both. Perhaps that name for the meme has taken a life of its own as the "syndrome" sub-version.

As I already mentioned in prior posts, whether the broader "non-syndrome" WiR is indicidive of societal misogyny I am less willing to argue. That comes down to whether female characters as a whole are more likely to have bad things happen to them, as well as what the nature of those bad things are, and whether or not they tend to be inflicted by men. I do think, however, that's complicated to separate from what I'll call the "syndrome" version's "fair use" and the tendency for lead characters to be male. While both indicate disparity in gender representation, and therefore may be related, they have rather different undertones.

If you're willing to make a distinction between "syndrome" WIR and "non-syndrome" WIR then I'm fine with that. But I'm also willing to bet that no one typically cares about splitting hairs over the "non-syndrome" version of this thing when it comes to any extended discussions about this. Even the OP's post was pretty clearly leaning towards the "syndrome" WIR version of this idea. *shrugs*

To continue this thought... how does Miss Liberty's death affect the women in-game?

MS LIBERTY - See various entries above.

SISTER PSYCHE - Her husband has just failed to save the life of their group leader's wife. I hope their marriage is a stable one, because otherwise she'll never trust him to save HER when push comes to shove.

NUMINA - Reinforcing yet again that she can only bring someone back to life within a short time. (Time to level up, or slot that sucker with a few enhancements for range/duration.)

Next interesting question - with Alexis dead and Statesman potentially on the verge of deserting/losing it/whatever... what happens to the leadership of Freedom Corps? There goes the moderating influence on Longbow (and the likes of Ms Lib and Captain Dietrich)...

Waiting to see how this plays out.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

Hmmm...the story is "Who Will Die" they never said it wasn't Statesman who did the killing.

To borrow a Stalin quote, killing a woman is a tragedy, killing men is a statistic.

I think it's becoming quite clear that you're trying hard to be shocked. You called SSA 3, and I quote, "torture porn." That's beyond hyperbole and into abject insanity. If you hate the villain-side SSAs so much why don't you play the hero ones? Because then your indignation wouldn't be as righteous. You're the only one on the forum maintaining this red alert tone of ultra-affected disgust, and this is a forum that loves to hate everything in sight more than most do.

Get a grip, Sam. They didn't design the arcs to subliminally turn you into a serial killer by way of satanic imagery and clandestine subversion. They're bite sized stories in a freaking MMO. Video game. Not real. It's going to be okay.

Thanks for ruining it for me buddy

Next your gonna tell me that life is just a projected hologram and its all 2D info plastered all over the outside of the universe.

Jeez, man I tell ya, you'd think folks would be kind enough to put a big spoiler ahead of stuff like this?

This is exactly what makes it a WIR example.

And like other WIR examples, she's an otherwise capable female character, a hero from the 1960's to at least the mid 1980's, but she died not in the line of duty, with her boots on so to speak, but as a hostage damsel in distress dispatched with no effort (and in the case of the hero arc, off camera/off panel).

Superman died in a heroic 1v1 with a monster only he could fight.

Batman died facing down a god.

Batgirl was crippled in her bath robe by the villain who wasn't even aware she was important, just to get a rise out of Commissioner Gordon and Batman.



.

That's a pretty big fallacy you used up there.

"Villains" are not a monolithic whole with common goals, ideas and preferences. To present "kill people" as the villainous thing to do is, to me at least, a profound misunderstanding of what villains have needed since day one of City of Villains. Check out any FPS and you'll find good, unambiguous heroes killing people. Torture, murder and **** do make people evil and do make characters into villains. They just don't make them into villains I want to play as.

By contrast, what villains have needed since villains have existed in this game is independence. For all time, they have been lackeys and henchmen and fall guys for the various named characters, and regardless of what Darryn might say, this is still the case. A truly interesting, cool villain is independent, free to plot his own schemes and through his cunning, audacity or success is he a great villain. Murder doesn't have to enter into it, not intrinsically, at least.

Example: Let's look at the Teen Titans animated series and resident bad guy Slade, aka Deathstroke the Terminator from the comic books. I'm struggling to remember, but I'm pretty sure that at no point did he actually kill anyone. Excluding that one Zone Sama flash animation, he mostly just manipulated people and ran a sinister organisation which came close to success on multiple occasions. Granted, it's for kids, but it still manages to be very dark at times, very powerful at others, and still have a cool villain I'd play as in a heartbeat. And all of this without needing any "mature" themes.

Pushing your rating once is a sign of an edgy idea. Pushing your rating all the damn time is a sign of pretentious writing.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's not a bad idea. I have a better one, though. How about I play none of them at all? That will solve pretty much everything. Well, except for First Ward and the new low-level content, but I can simply not play that, either. I'm starting to wonder at which point I will "not play" the vast majority of the game. Because it's getting there.

*edit*
And I'm the only one who feels this way? Have you read the thread you replied in?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Wrong.

I'm not really convinced thats the storyline reason behind her death.

In fairness, EVERYTHING that happens in this game is part of some plot to make Statesman or one of his clones do something or other. Killing this z-list, incidentally female, character wouldn't be an example of WiR so much as a continuation of the Statesman is Most Important of All thread going on since forever. Man I hope he is the one who dies--except that if it IS him, it will no doubt be the Worst Death Ever Suffered in History, and we'll have to hear about THAT for the rest of our gaming lives too.

It would have had the same impact on me. Depowering, humiliating and ultimately killing an unambiguously good character, especially if you make it the central point to a larger narrative, is something that should be treated as a very rare commodity. It's something you plain and simple DO NOT DO unless you have a way to make up for it, and make up for it big. And with a story arc promising that someone will die, it looks like they'll make up for it with another depowered, humiliating, devastating death.

When Lt. Sefu Tendaji died, it worked because the character had been built up to be pretty much as close to an unambiguous good guy as you can get, and he had been given many chances to be a hero, both in the literary sense and in the practical sense. When he died, he died fighting to protect the people under his command and when he died it served to strengthen the resolve of Captain Deitrich. Sefu's death, while tragic and painful, made everything simpler, purer and much more powerful. In a single action, this ended the rivalry between Longbow and Vanguard, it steeled Wilhelmina's resolve to see Nemesis fall and it probably made her a better person for having suffered through it.

Sefu's death was tragic, but it was constructive. It was something I hate to see, but having played through the events, it ended up something I would not have changed, because without it, the story would have suffered. Sefu's death mattered, it had meaning, and its results made up for the tragedy it introduced.

Alexis' death is just gratuitous, and all it accomplishes is making things even worse. Even though we didn't know much about her, she still deserved better than this. Maybe not from the villains, granted, but she deserved more from the writers. Regardless of whether this is Markus' son or Markus' daughter is immaterial to the broader result that her character was essentially *****. No, not physically, probably not even mentally, but narratively. Her death was a bad thing, but this bad thing should have led to something good, it should have led to renewed resolve, it should have led to a lessening of infighting and intolerance, it should have led to a greater focusing of efforts and powers. Even though she died an inglorious death, this inglorious death would still have mattered if its repercussions had made up for the tragedy.

But no, completely the opposite happened. We killed a canon character so that we could embarrass another canon character, devastate another still, expose another besides that and overall cause no end of bad things. And we ended the ******* story on it. And I would bet my metal-tipped tail that SSA4 will bring more of the same, because no-one in City of Heroes can be happy or dignified. Everyone has to be dragged through the mud by the hair. Everyone has to be broken, humiliated and devastated. Because that's "dramatic."

Meaningless, gratuitous deaths that serve to only make the narrative darker and darker with every passing step are not interesting to read about. If they added up to something positive, then sure, I'll stick through the dark parts as long as there is light at the end of the tunnel. Only in this case, that light is a methane gas explosion in the distance, coming in to burn me in my boots.

---

I am done with depressing storytelling in this game. If the writers are incapable of producing work that isn't intentionally depressing, dark and relying on downer endings, then I'll stick to CoH and CoV Launch content, at least where that hasn't been replaced with a crapsack world yet.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

We ended the chapter on it, we aren't even half way through the story yet.

These are all good points that the devs should consider when revisiting the subject of Miss Liberty's death in the canon. Merely because she was undeveloped as a secondary NPC and was killed arbitrarily doesn't mean the major ones should shrug it off as just something that happens in the superhero world.

Of course, it would have been better to have developed her as a secondary NPC in the first place or at least given her a suitable final scene. Even if the fridging of a female character is 'for the benefit' of another female character, it still perpetuates the nasty stereotype of women as sacrificial victims, without independent roles or individual worth.

Without the ego of Jack Emmert powering Statesman, he might wind up getting McLeaned at long last. And if Emperor Cole also dies at the finale of the Incarnates trials, then we might at last see the end of the Cole Multiverse Proliferation Effect.

I did read through the entire thread, for what it's worth, and I don't feel that way. I can see points on both sides, but I have to agree with someone else that I think people are perhaps reading far too much into this death at this early point.

I never once had any thought of misogyny or WiR when it was revealed. One big assumption people are making is that it's designed to grab Manticore and/or Statesman and make them react. Sure, that's the most likely/logical assumption given everything (I thought the same of States,) but when one stands back and keeps in mind the constant amount of plot twists we've seen in the content recently, it's just as possible that it will result in Ms. Liberty springing to action while Statesman avoids being rash (it could happen!) That is her mother, after all. Her namesake.

I do agree that Miss Liberty seems an odd choice given her lack of representation in the game outside a single task force, but the SSA is far from finished, so I won't go so far as to make huge leaps in assuming why they chose her, or if it was a cheesy plot twist. I'd rather wait and see what they have in store for the rest of the arc.

My point was that I'm hardly the only one. Not necessarily in the majority, mind you, just far from the only one to feel that way.

Here's the thing: I'm done waiting. I've waited for this game to get out of its depressing rut since I18 launched and I found myself crushing dreams, killing people and having to choose between two doomed ideologies. I sat through First Ward and the starting contacts in the revamped zones, and it's just more of the same depressing, dreary narrative that I'm simply sick and tired of. I don't play this game to bring my own spirits down, so I'm done.

If the SSAs suddenly grow cheery and happy and uplifting in SSA4, then too bad so sad. I won't know about it, because it will be too little too late.

Actually, let me put this another way: I used to be a fan of Naruto, way back when. I spent FOUR ******* YEARS waiting for the resolution to a particular plot thread, and when it finally arrived, it was butchered to hell and back. I'm not waiting for plot resolution ever again. If they leave their plots on downer cliffhangers, then that's the last I want to know about them. And why would I want more? The sales pitch is "Stay tuned, because it's only gonna' get worse!" Ha!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I have read this and other threads you've been posting in. You're the only one accusing Paragon Studios of planning turning your character into a rapist. You know which word I used there.

If that seems like a rational attitude to you, I'd love to know why.

Oh, I guess that form doesn't get bleeped.

Exactly why I said "CHANCE"

They give villains the chance to be the killer and you gripe about it. When that's what redsiders have been wanting.

Wait, you werent the redsider who wanted to kill people? Well then, select "No. I won't be the one to do it."

What to be the villain who does occaissional good deeds? Well look! It's called rogue alignment

All these options to play the villain you want to play and there's complaining.

No. This hasn't ben torture porn. This has been writing the way you didn't want it to go.

I found out my character wouldn't have a choice but to put Katie back in the program? Guess what. I didn't run the arc with my main, because my main never would have done it under any circumstances.