Guild Wars 2

It seemed fine to me. I don’t need some scene where they all decide to form the group. If you followed the story then I’d say it went pretty naturally.

This seems like a large stretch to label it with a sexism label when the group said events revolves around is 80% female by default and 83% female if the PC/Boss is also a woman. Bugs and robots don’t count.

It’s crummy writing to expect us to care about an npc we know little about and barely interacted with but it’s not as though she was killed off simply to propel the story of a male protagonist which is what the term generally means. Especially not when many other npcs, several male, can be seen in the fort and other areas hanging from the same vines. We only care about Belinda because she has a name and a connection to our team.

Killing off redshirts just to tell the audience that “oh ya, this kitten is getting serious and there’s a lot of danger about” is as old and trite as the term “Red Shirt” suggests and is independent of the character’s gender.

Hell, go back and look at how many times they pulled this in the personal story. It feels like someone dies every single time a quest takes place after you make it to Fort Trinity.

tldr, Belinda’s more a Red Shirt than a Woman in Refrigerator.

Reference
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedShirt
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge

Omar Aschi Popp.7496:

Forget Guildwars2, if you met these people in real life, seriously, which one would you hang out with?

Either Taimi or Marjory.

Carighan.6758:

Omar Aschi Popp.7496:

Forget Guildwars2, if you met these people in real life, seriously, which one would you hang out with?

Either Taimi or Marjory.

Rox or Braham.

Or if we expand to include any NPC in GW2, I’d say more likely some of the Priory humans.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Carighan.6758:

Omar Aschi Popp.7496:

Forget Guildwars2, if you met these people in real life, seriously, which one would you hang out with?

Either Taimi or Marjory.

Rox or Braham.

Or if we expand to include any NPC in GW2, I’d say more likely some of the Priory humans.

Probably Marjory.
Or Braham. Because of reasons.

So much Marjoram…
Tastes awfully Holden in here…

Also if anyone was wondering, I would only ever consider hanging with Braham and Taimi. Maybe Rox, maybe. We could all go play pranks on people in Claypool, like that rube Curtis! But then we’d kitten some kitten up in Clovenhoof Pass, cause me and this Centaur, Ulgoth, you might have heard of him… Yeah we do this thing where he’s all “aarhrgrjghr” and I’m all “DIE JAGUAR!”… It’s really fun.

Then Braham and I would make disgusting sexual remarks about Cashmere, but only if Taimi is not in earshot, cause that’s just inappropriate. Then we would do the RIGHT thing and bury Bellinda, with some kittening dignity, and tell her mom.

Oh and also if Logan ever comes around we so gotta kittening bail!(also, you didn’t see me)
But if Eir was around that be ok.

Wait, isn’t that like Braham’s mom?

I understand finding the writing to her death being not as good as it could have been, but finding it offensive? I think someone’s been watching too much feministfrequency. You have to walk a LONG way to find sexism in guild wars 2. The whole game is filled with strong women that don’t use their sexuality as power.

Belinda’s part was to remove Marjory. She was successful.

Now the player-character is going to get real kitten done. Notice how much progress we’ve made since we became the “boss”?

Actually it’s generally not good to kill off characters at all. There’s a time and place, but its rarer than most writers think. It’s thought of as the easymode solution to inflicting some sort of deep feeling on either another character or the reader/watcher.

Personally I’m not too bothered by the way they handled Belinda. Though I was hoping they would do more with her. However, if they did do more with her I’d suggest she not die at all.

Just saying all of these suggestions to have made her more like Tybalt and the others aren’t as grand as they sound. I’ll be honest, on my first playthrough I liked Forgal. When he died I didn’t feel despair or loss, I just felt “oh great, so they’re doing it this way.”

If you want some good examples of death/leaving actually affecting the audience, check out the show M*A*S*H.

DarkWasp.7291:

Actually it’s generally not good to kill off characters at all. There’s a time and place, but its rarer than most writers think. It’s thought of as the easymode solution to inflicting some sort of deep feeling on either another character or the reader/watcher.

It’s perfectly fine to kill off characters. But there has to be at least some meaning intended to go along with it. (The key word is intended there.)

There’s a difference between killing off a character because you could and nobody would miss them . . . and killing off a character because it matters to the characters . . .

And a distant third, killing off a character to annoy your audience (Whedon, take notes).

It was long overdue someone around me died.

The personal story has taught me that NPC’s around me have a 80-85% mortality rate. If you’re a nameless NPC that shoots up to 95-99%.

No seriously whenever I heard:
“We’ll succeed or die trying”; “He/She is the best around”; “We’ve got your back" and especially “I’ll see you back at the rendezvous/camp/base”, I was like: Well, nice to have known you for about 5 seconds.

Next April 1st joke should be giving every NPCs in the currently going Living Story a red shirt. Possibly with a bulls-eye painted on it.

Calling it a “woman in the refrigerator” is a misnomer. That’s a phrase coined when criticizing a comic book for creating a female character for the sole (and often immediate) purpose of harming her as part of a plot device for the male character. The second part (referring to the male character) is important because this phrase defines a form of sexism.

You’re really diminishing the definition of “woman in the refrigerator” by applying it to this situation. There’s no sexism here.

The phrase you’re looking for is “redshirt syndrome.”

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It’s perfectly fine to kill off characters. But there has to be at least some meaning intended to go along with it. (The key word is intended there.)

Well yeah, though Belinda wasn’t really a character. She lacked the characterization to become one. She was more of an object, the letter sent to Marjory to request her presence at home with the family, though done in such a way she could not realistically say no.

It did what it was meant to do – I don’t truly see the big deal. She’s as important to the player character as any unnamed guard is, the name is only relevant to make us understand why her death would cause Marjory to grief.

Evans.6347:

It was long overdue someone around me died.

The personal story has taught me that NPC’s around me have a 80-85% mortality rate. If you’re a nameless NPC that shoots up to 95-99%.

No seriously whenever I heard:
“We’ll succeed or die trying”; “He/She is the best around”; “We’ve got your back" and especially “I’ll see you back at the rendezvous/camp/base”, I was like: Well, nice to have known you for about 5 seconds.

I do so enjoy wasting 75% of my army’s resources all through Personal Story to save people that I know are already dead.
Or otherwise assigning obviously deadly tasks to untrained people with no necessity whatsoever.
What’s that, little craftman asura with no battle training whatsoever? You want to go into the frontlines to explode those bombs while the full batallion stays here to push a button? Sure! What could go wrong? It’s not like the game is prone to forced drama based on lack of common sense or not being given a choice to avoid stupid decisions or anything.

I think the primary criticism is that, for anyone who is well versed in writing, Belinda’s death was overall pretty boring.

The setup was obvious, the execution was poor, and people won’t really remember Belinda a year from now. The writer definitely wanted some kind of emotional response from the player, but when you know it’s coming a mile away, it becomes just another check mark on a list of overused tropes.

Belinda is a prop. She’s has no identity outside of being something sad that happens to Marjory. The story does not treat her like a person, so no one is really convinced that she’s of any importance.

Katai.6240:

The writer definitely wanted some kind of emotional response from the player

Eh? Where do you get that from? O.o
That’s like the last thing I’d interpret into her death.

Maybe the writers just realized they had too many characters in development simultaneously. Stephen King, one of the greatest and most beloved writers of all time, admitted once that when he was writing “The Stand” he realized about mid-way through that he had waaaay too many characters, so he killed half of them off in an explosion. It was a pretty emotional part of the book, and one that really shaped the course of events… but ultimately he had started too many plotlines and had to do something quickly to “trim the fat” so to speak.