Okay, I’m feeling we’re starting to go round in circles on some of these points, which should indicate it’s time to agree to disagree. It seems some of us think Lae’zel is perfectly coherent and well written, others think she’s badly written, and the rest are somewhere in the middle. I’d suggest we just take that as established and move on unless we have any genuinely new considerations to offer or haven’t already made our own view clear.
:Moderator hat off:
On the suggestion that there’s a kind of “story logic” that means Lae’zel can’t be evil and fulfilled, I’ll admit I find that difficult to accept. Sure there are conventions - and cliches - but I can’t see those myself as having any normative force that means the Larian writers can’t or shouldn’t try to be a bit more interesting. Personally, I think a well written RPG companion has the potential to develop in a number of different ways, depending on events in the game and player choices, and have all of them feel natural, logical and satisfying. If there’s only one coherent direction for a character, then I’d question whether the writers had made a good decision in including them as a companion, when it’s surely going to be more fulfilling for more players, as well as add to replay value, to build in a level of flexibility into their design.
It remains to be seen whether Lae’zel or the other companions have such flexibility, and how well different possible story paths for them come off, but so far it feels to me as though Larian are at least making a decent stab at setting up the companions in a way that has potential to develop in different interesting ways, which might include redemption arcs or falls to the dark side amongst them.
