Problem is the overall lack of writing depth.
Gradius: “The game doesn’t go far enough in treating war like hell.”
Also Gradius: “The game goes too far in having the character engage in legitimate acts of war.”
Make up your mind.
1 Like
Never said that second thing. The Overmind did the same thing in SC1, only it made a shred of sense in that context. Kerrigan should know better and Jim is explicitly made to be a good moral character as per his writer.
Yes you did. Literally just now. You said she should be hated for what she did in HotS. You say you want StarCraft to be a dark world where moral boundaries are blurry and difficult to find, and then immediately turn around and call out Kerrigan for crossing what you consider to be a moral boundary. Figure out what it is you actually want.
1 Like
Great, those are not the same thing. Stop strawmanning me. ;p
Yes, Kerrigan should be hated for planetary scale mass slaughter. Amon and the Overmind aren’t loved for them either. The other things that the game calls attention to in comparison are petty and trivial.
Its not a strawman, youre literally complaining about the part of the game that touches on something you claim to want in it. Do you want StarCraft to be darker or not?
1 Like
If I may be so bold, I don’t think Gradius is mad that it happened, he’s mad that nobody in universe treats it like it’s a big deal.
2 Likes
I probably read what he said differently but to me it sounded like this:
What she did in Brood War is portrayed most heinous (in the meantime we get the idea it was all on Amon) and she always talks about how she’s going to pay for what she had done. In the meantime nobody gives a rat’s ash about all them Dominion worlds massacred. They are just stepping stones towards Mengsk and revenge.
And he is right, them two are treated differently in the game. And to be fair, it’s not really portrayed dark in the game either. It’s just a line like “This planet here produces weapons for the Dominion, take over it and you’re back in the Swarm”. Not exactly a thing portrayed bad or dark.
Then Gradius should pay better attention. Jim is the only character who treats Kerrigan as anything other than a necessary evil. And this includes Kerrigan herself.
1 Like
It might be more efficient for me and Kelthar to communicate via proxies since apparently my arguments are only indecipherable when they come directly from me.
Again, even that doesn’t make any sense because Jim is supposed to be one of the most moral characters as per the writer. Love wasn’t an excuse in SC1, he promised to kill her for her crimes.
1 Like
And he changed his mind 4 years later, because characters are not static and can change, grow, and are otherwise not bound to things they said years ago under different circumstances.
Just saying “it doesn’t make sense” doesn’t actually make it so. It makes perfect sense that Jim would try and take back something that he lost. Those losses and how they affected him are major parts of his character.
1 Like
To chip in on the overall discussion:
When Kerrigan was infested in the original game, she basically had any human moral filters and restraints turned off. She was bound to the Overmind and thus still kept “in check,” but by Zerg standards, not Terran. She has also become one of the most powerful creatures in the Sector.
When the Overmind was killed and she was set free, that last bit of check-keeping was gone. You know that feeling when someone irks you and you want to hit them, but don’t because it’s not right to do? She no longer had that little voice holding her back, no impulse control the way we do. For her though, being on the power level she was at, it’s not simply slapping someone, it’s wiping out worlds. This was her during the Brood War.
We know that Amon was influencing her during the events of “Wings of Liberty” for sure, this is canonical, but it was never stated exactly when he started doing so.
I believe this actually started towards the end of the Brood War as she started acting more out of character than we’d seen before. I can’t prove this, but I firmly believe it. Anyway, we also know Amon wasn’t controlling her, but he was suggesting things, things she thought was her own, and she did act upon many of those feelings and impulses.
Once she was deinfested and made (more or less) Terran again, she was a changed person. In addition to no longer having the inhibitors from her Ghost years (she has that undone in the original game after her infestation), she’s gone through an extremely unique experience that no one else in the galaxy has.
She’s messed up, has done a lot of very bad things, hates herself and most everyone else, and Jim serves as her only anchor. When she believes he’s killed, she completely cuts loose again. Not in the same way as during the Brood War, but with similar enough results.
She ultimately becomes more powerful than ever before, and is the single strongest character that Valerian, Artanis, etc. have encountered at this point. She also has a well earned reputation for single-minded pursuit of extreme goals that result, and end in, lots of death.
No one, in their right mind, would freak out at her, or insult her to her face because doing so would pretty much guarantee they’d a) get hurt at best, b) killed at worst. Valerian and Horner are absolutely treading carefully around her in “Heart of the Swarm” because of how unstable she is, because there’s nothing else they can do about it.
It’s not possible for them, or even the Dominion post-“Heart of the Swarm,” to bring Kerrigan to justice for her crimes; she’s too strong. The Protoss too. They ultimately were weary of her enough that they actually waited until she vanished in pursuit of Amon to launch their attempted reclamation of Aiur (this is stated in “Legacy of the Void”'s main Campaign’s splash screen).
During the Epilogue, she ends up ascending to Xel’Naga, but I don’t know if I’d call that redemption. The Xel’Naga weren’t exactly good folk to begin with, and now she’s the last of them after doing what she does best: killing.
Kerrigan is not a hero. In the original game and expansion, she’s an antagonist. Same with “Wings of Liberty.” For “Heart of the Swarm,” she’s the player character and protagonist. For “Legacy of the Void,” she’s an anti-hero.
With regards to Jim, Metzen said he was the one good guy left in the universe during Blizzcon 2007, as I recall. This was three years before release, and things obviously changed, as the Raynor we got in “Wings of Liberty” was not that. Metzen’s statement simply doesn’t apply to the character post-development.
Oh, brother I sure know that feeling. Got a question for y’all knowledgable folks. Would a bullet from a Gauss rifle kill Kerrigen if she was nicked right in the forehead?
Hard to say. The zerg will regenerate from anything short of outright death, and people have survived shots to the brain before. Straight up decapitation would almost certainly kill her though.
I think it’d have to be an explosive shot.
Mkay, thanks all. So Tychus coulda finushed the job even if they didn’t deinfest her.
Well, not realistically. There was still the question of her being one of the most powerful beings in the sector.
1 Like
Yeah. Its never explicitly said in the canon, but her playstyle in Heroes and Coop mode suggests that the writers imagine her having some sort of shield effect similar to the protoss, but biological in origin.
Kelthar, how about using the fact there is a fu^kton of Zerg that makes it impossible for 1 Marine to get to her instead of headcannon, albeit belieavable one.
Well I mean yeah, obviously, but I thought that “her bloody enormous army generally makes actually being able to shoot at her an impossibility” was both unnecessary to state and rather beside the point. The question was whether a bullet would kill her, not whether any given army could achieve a military victory against her.
Besides, she regularly charges out in the vanguard of her army, especially in HotS, and there is at least one scene where she single handedly reks a bunch of marines and Vikings shooting at just her. She’s either deflecting the bullets telepathically from hitting her or has some sort of barrier in place to protect herself.
2 Likes