Guild Wars 2

No, they are not my friends. I don’t like them. In fact i hoped Marjory would die. And rest of them would blow up with ship!

Well, since Rox and Braham are nice enough to run over and rez us when we’re downed, I consider them “friends”. It’s a little hard for me to look at Marjory or Kasmeer without rolling my eyes, however.

I understand why they left Taimi out of this chapter, though I’m hoping she’ll get to be more involved in upcoming ones.

They are a bit to soft for me. My friends are bad kitten like rytlock or caithe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_literacy#Positioning

We are being positioned to favour these four characters. We are positioned to favour Ellen Kiel and o-Tron. We are positioned to dislike Evon.

The story isn’t one where you decide where you fall, there are sides you are supposed to take and positions you are supposed to have. Language like “your friends” is just another tool to manipulate the player into favouring these new characters (similar to their mechanical role to res you during the hologram fight or their mechanical role to buff you during the marionette fight) regardless of their individual merits or how they strengthen or weaken the overall story. The deck is stacked in their favour.

I agree I like Destiny’s Edge better. They feel more formidable, more like the kind of people that you want taking on dragons and generally making the story feel like it’s about acts of heroism and more about inclusiveness and all the other “very special episodes” that children’s shows centre around. The new characters feel like they are out of a Disney movie (which I love, I just don’t look for that kind of thing in GW2) – they are more about subversive characterisation (both in terms of real world views such as the lesbian couple or the disabled child and in-game views such as Rox breaking the mould of what we expect a charr to be) than they are about portraying Tyria and the story as this place where epic battles take place.

I’d take Eir over Braham or Rytlock over Rox any day. Can you imagine if Scarlet managed to stay alive because Rox prioritised Braham over preventing Scarlet from killing any more people? You don’t need to because that’s what Logan did with Kralkatorrik and it’s one of the most hated events in modern GW2 history (lucky for Rox we are being positioned to like her). Ignore that it didn’t make sense these four were the ones in the final instance (from Tyria’s pov, not from the audience pov knowing they are the “main characters”), look how close they came to botching the whole thing up?

Tyria feels epic when I adventure with Destinty’s Edge. It feels like a soap opera with these four characters.