RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

author=StormCrow
I haven't noticed any degrading treatment of women in his games. Care to elaborate?

That's understandable. The degrading stuff doesn't start until mid to late game, and it sounds like you never made it that far for most of them. If you want me to talk about it, though, I might as well drop a spoiler warning now.

Nearly all the female leads in a Cage game have a bizarre tendency to abandon their established personalities and swoon for their designated "love interest" with jarring suddenness. At the end of Indigo Prophecy, Carla inexplicably gets the hots for Lucas (the man she had been trying to arrest for the entirety of the game) and bones him during an apocalyptic scenario in the endgame. They are strangers, yet Cage wanted his leads to get together so badly that it didn't matter how awkward and forced it was.

Heavy Rain was even worse! Cage thought it was a great idea to have Madison fall head over heels for Ethan and try to bone him right before confronting the Origami Killer. Keep in mind that, when Madison decides to try this, she 1) has only known Ethan for a day or two, 2) knows full well Ethan has a child that is ACTIVELY DROWNING, and 3) was just coming back to the apartment merely hours after narrowly avoiding two instances of death and/or sexual assault.

By the time Beyond: Two Souls happened, I think Cage may have realized how difficult it is to write believable relationships, because he decided to skip the process entirely. I remember one scene where Jodie meets some CIA dude and makes it very clear that she hates him and he hates her. Literally right after that scene is another scene where she is excited to go on a date with this same man and trying to tell Aiden about how much she likes him. If you can believe it, that's as far as actual relationship building goes between the two. How that kind of transition is supposed to endear CIA man (whose name I've never learned and have made it a point to not look up) to the audience is beyond me, but it apparently worked on Jodie.

Speaking of Beyond: Two Souls, this is the part where I have to brush up against the uncomfortable nature of sexual assault. You can go look up the specific instances if you want because I'm not going to describe them here. Suffice to say that Cage had a horrible misconception that sexual assault == character development, because there was... more than one instance where the situation got unnecessarily handsy. If you are going to put that kind of attack in your game, you better have a damn good reason. Cage did not earn good faith from audiences prior to Beyond, and his clumsy attempt at portraying sexual assault did nothing to help.


I want to end on a positive note, so I'll reiterate that as far as my memory goes, the issues I listed above are absent from Detroit: Become Human. Either someone was hired to slap Cage around a bit whenever he tried to write something creepy, or he may have actually learned how degrading his past treatment of women characters was and tried to do better. While Detroit has its own set of problems, I want to give credit where credit is due.

Happy growing older day!

Who are you again?

Thanks, all! Nice to see the positive reception to these changes!

I'm glad you like it, Cash! Yes, taking a rest was by far the best decision I had ever made regarding this game.