We Are Terrible Parents

Feminina O'Ladybrain

May 3

Minor spoilers for a side quest in Horizon: Forbidden West

Butch:

Did the sisters quest. Before we dish on that, I need help with this gauntlet thing. They said "the discs come back, and, after a few times, they go boom!" This sounded great. However, I either did not notice them come back, or I could not get them to come back. I could fling them, and they whacked the thing, and hurt the thing, but they did not come back, nor did they BOOM. What am I doing wrong?

Anyway, with the exception of the large beast that probably would have been easier to kill had I used the new thingy correctly, that was a good quest. Well, it was, as you say, a nice portrayal of characters. Quest itself wasn't all that special (follow tracks, fight, follow more tracks, get killed a lot because fuck if you can figure out how to make something BOOM).

Boomer was pretty great. You're right: usually, in a game, when someone has a mental difference, they're really nuts or an object of ridicule. They certainly aren't smart and productive just...different.

I also cannot, for the life of me, think of a single character in any game that takes place in a "non-real" world that portrayed a character with a real world condition. It's pretty clear that Boomer is autistic, right? That's a real thing, portrayed realistically and respectfully. When have we ever seen that? The closest I can think of is Lena, the cryptozoologist's wife in DE who was in a wheelchair.

(Note, dear readers, I'm going with "respectful" portrayals, here. The controversy over the way that dwarves have been portrayed in fantasy stories for years is a whole thing unto itself.)

Feminina:

Yes, I really like the portrayal of Boomer. She's different, but it's who she is, and her sister (and as far as we can tell, other people, although we don't really see her interact with other people) accepts her, respects her skills, works with her differences, and loves her as she is. It's obviously not always easy, so they're not completely sugarcoating the challenges of living with someone who doesn't relate to the world the way most people expect, but that's her sister.

This game actually has a number of things going on with portrayals of mental and physical differences...there's Boomer, but also Kotallo, who's lost an arm and regrets it but is carrying on, and the kid who was blinded by acid, and another character you'll meet later on who has something going on. It's clear that things happen in the world, people are different, it's not always easy but it's something people deal with as best they can: it's not the tragic end of their story, it's just a thing that happened.

There are different settings on the gauntlet--I have mostly had it with the disc coming back, rather than going boom: I think they might be different. It will definitely come whizzing back around, so I don't need to craft more ammunition quite as often. The large beast was still damn hard to kill, though. I'm not sure there was actually a setting that made it a piece of cake. That might have been part of Boomer's thing, judging this horrible, difficult monster as a fun challenge? Anyway, did it. And I use her gauntlet fairly often when something is weak to acid.

Butch:

Really good portrayal. And you're right, the sister's complex relationship and thoughts were great, too. I like, too, that the quest wasn't about that aspect of things specifically. It was "find my sister," not "find my autistic sister who is autistic and this quest is about autism." It was just like the bajillion "find my [whoever]" quests we've done in our lives, just with complex people. Maybe I should take back what I said about the quest being formulaic. Maybe the fact that it was a follow, fight, follow fight quest was intentional, like, "This is totally normal, totally banal, the fact these people are slightly different doesn't matter."

True about Kotallo, but in those cases the injuries were directly related to what makes the game world unrealistic. We've seen that before. True, people lose arms and go blind in accidents in real life, but the injuries we see here were because they were warriors intentionally fighting ROBOT DINOSAURS. I think that makes it less "real-world" specific, even if their injuries are injuries people actually have.

Dude, my discs just hit it. They got thrown towards it, they hit it, they damaged it, they acidified it, but that's it. It was like a really slow bow, nothing more, nothing less. I certainly think there was a way to use it to make that fight easier, though. One time I was just like "Man, fuck this, I'm going back to what I know" and whipped out my bow (that does acid damage and I can fire three arrows at once and it's awesome) and tried to use that, just like always, and they were all "Use the gauntlet! Use the gauntlet!" in the way that games do when you should, you know, use the gauntlet. They were likely right because I died using the bow and eventually killed it with the gauntlet. After flinging twelve thousand discs and using up all the machine muscle I had.

Feminina:

Well, technically Kotallo lost his arm fighting a rebel army, which is the kind of thing that could certainly happen in the real world. Indeed, losing body parts in war is a known hazard of the job for soldiers. (Or people who get kidnapped by Paladin Fulke. Maybe he's actually Tyr!) We don't know the details, so it's unclear if he lost it to a machine or a human. Doesn't really matter, I don't think.

Butch:

Hmm. True. He is a soldier.

I'm tired of being busy. I think summer camp is just doing a month's worth of work ahead of time.

If I have to write down emergency contact numbers one more fucking time.....

How come some of these places need you to write the emergency contacts multiple times? Dudes, can't you look at the page I filled out two pages ago?

And don't get me started on the fucking doctor's website. Went in there to download their physicals and vax records so I could upload same to various places, and the thing was very insistent that I only had one child.

Not very helpful, website.

Feminina:

SO frustrating that the site won't remember what you said two minutes ago about emergency contacts for the first kid and let you transfer it. Our site does actually let you save emergency contacts and then plug them in at various points, which seems great, but in practice I feel like I always end up having to put some of the information in fresh anyway. I just tried to sign up for the school summer program last week, so the pain is fresh.

Oh, and then it asks for the kids' height and weight, and I frankly just guessed, because hell if I know off the top of my head how tall and heavy they are. They're always growing, and I don't stick them on the scale on a regular basis or anything, man.

"I don't know, like...3 feet? 4 feet? 80 pounds?"

Not like the program is going to measure them anyway.

Butch:

Height and weight? The hell is that? That's not much to go on if they lose your kid.

"Yeah, we're looking for a kid that's 4' 2, about 80 pounds."

That narrows it down to, like, EVERY KID.

Stupid.

And then, on the medical form, they make you check "no" on each damn thing, and they always put in one thing that's "yes" to make sure you do it.

Diabetes? No. Heart condition? No. Alien possession? No. Human being? Yes. Broken bones? No.

You click no no no no no no in an attempt to get it fucking done, and then you hit submit and it's all "Please explain what species your child is........you lazy bastard."

Feminina:

"Look, my child is a halfling, all right? Adopted from the nearby Shire. Leave me alone with this nonsense."

Butch:

Dude I should totally write that.

In high school, we had a pretty good idea that our chemistry teacher, who was about nine hundred years old, wasn't really reading our lab reports. We had this game where we saw how many times we could put the word "alligator" randomly in our reports, like "When chemical A was added to alligator chemical B, we saw a alligator reaction." We got up to, like, thirty two alligators.

I think we should start putting shit like "My kid is a halfling" in these dumb things we have to fill out just to prove NO ONE READS THEM.

For science!

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