Ahem… he speaks in ALL CAPS. I think that says it all, really.
That he's loud has nothing to do with his intellect. My point was that Minsc too uses complex vocabulary so it's not fair to say that complex vocabulary is a way to judge intellect unless you apply it equally.
Sorry, I took a look at his banters and there’s no complex vocab there. Whatever there is, is probably whispered to him by Boo and he uses it without understanding its meaning, at least that’s how it looks to me.
Gack. Well that's what I get for boosting everyone's stats as soon as I get them in-game. I can see why they would ignore that rule though if they intended characters like Aerie and Jaheira to be crucial team members.
Boosting Jaheira’s Wisdom to where it should be by all rights would have made more sense to me – certainly more than dropping this rule. It makes Wis a dump stat even for a priest.
Waaaaaait... Is what you're saying that the rule that says unless a priest has a wisdom of a certain number they can't cast 6th and 7th level spells is nonsensible? It makes much more sense in terms of fairness and making certain Wisdom isn't a dump stat.
No, I said that the rule should have stayed, but then Jaheira’s Wis should have been at least 17 so it would not have affected her anyways.
You *do* know who wrote Aerie’s content for the game, yes?
I'm not going to hero worship someone if there's a chance they did a shoddy job making all aspects of a characters representation make sense. Someone must have screwed up with Aerie otherwise she wouldn't be so inconsistant. Her character sheet says LG, I see her, especially when in conflict with Jaheira, as LN with a delusion that she is good, like un-reformed Anomen. Her sheet says Int/Wis 16, she doesn't show that sort of mental capacity in game dialogue. So either someone screwed up taking down statistics or someone screwed up writing down dialogue. In my stories I try to mediate these inconsistancies, but my point is they shouldn't be there in the first place.
Okay, fair enough, I am fairly certain that Dave G. doesn’t really care if you are critical of his writing or not. Besides, to me there is no real inconsistency about Aerie in her game dialogues, it’s more in reconciling her dialogues with the character sheet and that may have well been designed by someone else and without any real attempt to match it to her dialogues. That’s one possibility.
Well, I have some trouble accepting Jaheira’s epilogues as being in-character, and I’m not the only one who feels that way. I think that the idea of the PC as being the only one who can make Jaheira move on in life after Khalid is downright ridiculous – to me it seems contradictory to how her character has been presented up to that point.The non-romanced epilogue for me works only if the PC leaves her for godhood – then it does make sense.
Which is what it may have been intended for. Emphasis on may. In that case they should have had for all four romances a third possible ending. It's as much a part of her character as portrayed through the in-game text as Aerie's temper-tantrums or Anomen's intolerance. If you're going to disregard Jaheira's ending as out-of-character you'd have to consider whether or not all other unusual, but otherwise in-character actions by other NPC's reall are out-of-character as well.
And are you implying that I am not considering that?
Well, umm, I don’t know, I think that in most stories she is already being portrayed that way. Certainly, if she would be portrayed as an impeccable fighter and a fountain of never-erring wisdom who never does anything wrong, aka, Mary Sue – then I would hate her guts. Me, I especially love the portrayals where she is more flawed, it makes her even more human – and certainly my version of her is very much flawed.
I've not read your story very much, I'm afraid. I don't have quite enough time to catch up at the moment, but what I'm saying is that the number of stories where the PC immediately turns to Jaheira for advice (or gets it regardless) and is significantly positively influenced by what she says is high. I'm no exception, particularly early on. Likewise there are a huge number of stories where Jaheira wins the majority of the verbal sparring match she gets in. Mary Sue? No, that's Charname's job (I'm also a but guilty here, but I work on it), but she's still most often portrayed as the victor and to even things out I'd like to see more stories where her actions don't tend to have a positive ring to them.
Well… of course, you can write your stories however you wish to, but it’s just that seeing Jaheira giving an obviously bad advice or not being able to grasp a fairly obvious thing will be something that always strikes me painfully uncharacteristic for her.
And here in Alpha’s tale, she wasn’t exactly able to help Lynn with her problem, was she? So she *doesn't* always say the right thing, after all.
First off, Alpha, I like your Jaheira, so don't take any of this to heart if you read it.
No, Jaheira doesn't help, but she's still -right-, and I can imagine that as things go along it will turn out that what she said will have a positive influence. That's great of Falynn and co. but what I'd really, really like to see is Jaheira be wrong or give bad advice, something that has a negative effect on the other characters.
The thing is, you have to be pretty dumb and very low on empathy to give that very wrong kind of advice in this situation. It’s just one of the perfect situations where you obviously expect Jaheira being able to relate and give a helpful advice – hell, you don’t come seeking her advice when you’re being beaten in scrabble or chess or whatever – she’s not so good at helping there. But Falynn’s problem *is* something that Jaheira can help with, so having her goof up here would leave me with a ‘wait, this doesn’t make sense’ kind of a reaction.
Yes, I’m afraid I don’t really see your point. She can be both a competent fighter and a wise person and insightful advisor, but she can also be flawed and make mistakes at the same time. You don’t really need to consciously dumb her down in order to make her more interesting, I think.
Not all the time, no. That would be just as utterly dull. My point, just to make it explicit, is that I've yet to see one of her mistakes have as much of an impact as one of her successes. Her mistakes are usually small, her flaws nothing terribly bad and in the end the majority of her portrayals are overwhelmingly positive. She is, in fact, one of the few characters that I see consistently depicted so positively. I may just not be reading the right stories, but that's my experience.
Well, the game does treat her very roughly throughout the whole BG2, so to me it’s no real wonder that some people feel sympathetic towards her and are more inclined to portray her positively. I wish you luck with your story and your alternative portrayal of her, though.