couldyoupleasefluffmybutt:
alcone:
dandelionofthanatos:
talldarkbishoujo:
lucidivalidi:
lumlumlummm:
So, like
Wasn’t his big character development thing in ME2 all about him realizing that “Hey, I’ve got stuff to live for after all!” and in 3 he’s just like, “Yep, I’m dying. Don’t care.”
THIS.
welp…
The more I think about it the more it kinda breaks my heart lol.
How many people who’ve died way too young have said this, used every last bit of their willpower to close the eye of fear to MAKE it the truth, so the people who love them will be a little more at peace? (I’m really sorry, I know that thought is depressing as balls. But it’s something that kind of haunts my ass. How many people do I know who did that in the end?)
Man. XD; ME3 really annoys me for taking away what ME2 gave me and gave everyone else LIKE me—something that so few pieces of media give. The right to be scared, and to want to live, and to resent the possibility of death, and to be angry about your body doing stupid stupid things that you cant fix, that you can only control, or maybe not control at all. The right to exist as a person who happens to have a disability and who has the right to be pissed off that their body (or mind) is doing dumb shit that’s hard to control. ME3 AFAIK goes back to the old meme of “don’t be a burden, don’t show your fear, don’t let people know you’re in pain, don’t ever ever be angry, don’t be a PERSON just be an ~*inspiration*~ because the reality of what you live with is just not fair to ~*burden others with*~” and all that happy horseshit.
It’s not unbelievable in and of itself for Thane to eventually make peace with things. God knows I’ve seen people half my age or less have to do that because there’s nothing else to do except that, and maybe hope for a sudden turnaround.
I resent that the plot basically made the making-peace into “tying up loose ends”. Removing the ~*burden*~ of dealing with disability, of mourning, of treating Thane as a person and not a plot hook. Not a statistic. Not a learning experience. A person.
Real life is rarely tidy and free of loose ends. Real life hurts, and has more frayed edges and dangly threads than my ancient beach towel.
This doesn’t just apply to disability. It applies to anything that makes someone “less-than” in the eyes of the people who are lucky enough to be the default. They’re sure not less-than in reality, not by a fucking long shot! But culture as we know it is fucked right up, and there are people out there who honestly believe I have CF (disclaimer: I am doing well and intend to keep doing well, because I am still here and a lot of my friends are not, and they have my back from wherever they are so god help anyone who gets in my way lol XD) because mom and dad did something bad, and I am punishment.
tl;dr Screw you, Bioware, for retconning the existence of a PERSON LIKE ME in media, and making the guy into a plot point. Screw you for refusing to have a fucking spine and maybe portray Thane as doing treatments to manage his condition (futuristic puffers would look so damn cool). Screw you for running back to the safety of “PWD must not exist as people but only lessons, and must either die or be miraculously cured because culture’s crap dictates that living with a disability is inevitably a fate worse than death.” (Some disabilities do suck that hard, but not all do. My life is not a fate worse than death.)
ME2 wasn’t perfect, but when it comes to Thane and a bunch of other stuff it did well for what it did. Fuck ME3 for all the erasure and bullshit and stereotyping and pandering to the closed-minded that it dumped in. It may be really solid in other ways, and probably has good points, but all the shit it did do pisses me right off, haha.
Now, I will go get some more terrifyingly green Gatorade, and shake my fist at the sun and humidity. XD
Holy shit, that was hilarious.
um, why? and why do you tag this shit as “righteous tumblr indignation”?
That’s a perfectly valid criticism of the game and how it handled a character and that person has a right to feel that way about it, especially if they are disabled, jfc
people are allowed to look at these things, they’re allowed to analyze plot movement and character development, and dissect the messages the story is sending and criticize it. That’s how you interact with a story. THAT’S OKAY. and tbh, if you don’t do these things, you aren’t appreciating the story to its fullest, imo.
I never knew you were a fan of Mass Effect, Spazzaroony. In case you weren’t, though:
Thane was introduced in Mass Effect 2 as a disconnected, dispassionate assassin with an untreatable terminal illness. While he downplays it significantly, it’s clear that he has a lot of self-disgust for his role as an assassin. He claims that his body’s simply a tool in the hands of his employer, but he still considers himself, I quote, “wicked.” His taking part in the suicide mission is an effort on his part to do some good before dying, because, as he says, the only good thing he ever added to the universe was his son.
His character arc in that game was centered around rescuing that son from the same life that he lived, by stopping him from assassinating a high-profile political figure. After that, the two begin to reconnect, but they don’t fully reconcile until the third game. More on that later.
What bothered me about the initial brace of posts was the criticism that Thane was “mishandled” in the third game, and maybe there’s some truth to that. Certainly not in the way that’s claimed here, however. The initial post says that Thane’s arc in ME 2 was about him realizing that he has something to live for, and becoming frightened again at the idea of dying, and that does happen—if you’ve romanced him. If Shepard and Thane enter into a relationship, there’s an emotional scene where Thane tearfully admits that loving Shepard has given him something to live for again, and that he’s afraid to die because of it. Come ME 3, he’s once again at peace with dying, despite what he said to Shepard in the previous game.
The difference between the two is a little incongruous, to say the least.
But if you didn’t romance him, then that doesn’t happen. His arc isn’t about, as the above poster says, “tying up loose ends.” It’s about coming to terms with what he sees as his greatest failures: his failure to protect his family, and his failure as a parent. Saying that it’s about “tying up loose ends” grossly oversimplifies the matter.
About the romance, I agree that this is a poor way to handle it, because Thane was introduced in ME 2 specifically to provide FemShep with a sexy, romanceable alien, and the developers completely forgot that when putting ME 3 together. Thus, Thane’s character plays out almost exactly the same way, whether you romanced him or not. But the post I responded to was not about this. Rather, the person was offended simply by the idea that Thane would be at peace with dying in the first place, which is at odds with the character. As far back as his first appearance, Thane’s been ready to die. The only difference is that, in ME 3, he’s tamed his demons enough to live his final days peacefully. Maybe if Thane were younger, had more of a life ahead of him, it would make less sense for him to be so cool about his terminal illness, but this is an older man who’s lived a full life. He’s probably had a long time to cope with his illness, to the point where he says it almost casually in his introduction. This isn’t to suggest that old people are always totes cool with the idea of dying, but Thane’s had a while to prepare himself for this, and, honestly, with the exception of the scene I mentioned earlier, to do what the OP suggested would be really out of character for him.
Again, though, this is only for non-romanced Thane. I would rather have seen romanced!Thane making more of an effort to combat his illness. Dr. Chakwas said that he was a viable transplant candidate, but that he declined. Could have picked that up in ME 3; could have done far more for him than the nothing whatsoever that they gave him.
On a personal note, Thane’s character in ME 3 reminded me of my grandfather, who seemed to feel similarly in the months leading up to his death, which might be why I took so much time to write a mini-essay rebutting the claim that his portrayal in ME 3 was offensive. Considering Thane’s character, considering who he is, it’s very much in character for him to live his final days in relative peace and comfort, especially after living so long as an instrument of death.
Also, the post I responded to barely seemed to be about Thane, and more about the OP venting about his/her problems with societal views on disabled people. Which, you know, the same series that brought us Thane Krios also brought us Flight Lieutenant Jeff “Joker” Moreau, the very, very disabled pilot of the Normandy who is probably one of the most well-nuanced and developed tertiary characters of any game that I’ve ever played. And there is a fair bit of development which focuses on his disability, most famously, the sequence where the Collectors kidnap the crew, and he’s the only person in any position to do something about it.
So it seemed kind of random to level this kind of criticism at Thane, who was supposedly turned into some kind of stereotype for the disabled…which he was not. I mean, Kaiden suffers constant migraines because of his biotics; why not throw that kind of criticism his way? Miranda’s hopelessly sterile, Samara seems incapable of conceiving a child without a certain genetic mutation, Garrus is quite obviously depressed, but…really? Thane is the most offensive thing about Mass Effect 3? Well, okay then.
Guess we’ll just ignore James “WALKING LATINO STEREOTYPE” Vega, the character who randomly utters Spanish words and talks about “cerveza” so that the audience never gets a chance to forget that he’s Latino.
I’m not a fan of Mass Effect so I appreciate the recap; I was more commenting on how you handled the post.
I don’t think the commenter was saying that the portrayal of Thane was the MOST OFFENSIVE thing in the game, but reflecting on their experiences and comparing them with Thane’s and how they’re handled in the story, and how disability is portrayed in media in general.
Re: the other disabled characters in the game, I think the commenter was saying that the fact that he is so cool with dying due to his illness was what bothered them. Afaik, the other characters mentioned are not en route to death as a result of their disabilities. And they were connecting that with the idea that people have this attitude that being disabled is a fate worse than death. I can’t really debate with you about this because I haven’t played any of the Mass Effect games and I was commenting more on the post and it’s dynamics than the actual game content.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t understand why you mocked the commenter instead of engaging in this discussion with them, because I think if you had done that you could have learned a lot and the commenter would have been given a chance to reexamine their views on how Thane is handled.
