A similar approach was used in the first Alien movie.
Ripley’s gender was never once predetermined or stated in the script, they tried out both male and female actors and ended up settling on a woman.
I know one of my friends rather dislikes WoW’s female characters despite normally being an advocate for female representation in games.
Their words along the lines of “Every single female character is either: A) An extremely minor character. B) Completely crazy and/or evil. C) Flawed to the point of needing a big strong man to tell them what to do or D) Are clung to the side of said man.”
And to be honest, I can kinda see where he’s coming from.
Sylvanas is evil, Jaina had her crazy period and only just mellowed out but still has tons of issues, Tyrande… Laughs, Azshara is evil, Chromie is comic relief, Aggra literally was invented solely to be a baby maker for Thrall and nothing else…
That’s not to say there are only bad female characters but the few that I have no complaints with are very minor and are barely mentioned, if at all for many expansions at a time.
Magatha is a great villain, very realistic, very sound motives, actually got some good plans in there. But then she vanished after Cata and shows up in Legion and does… nothing? Nadda. Zilch. What was the point of her even showing up? I wanted to see her prod Baine until he snapped or something but nah she just sat in the Shaman hall.
Moira was pretty great whenever she showed up. Again, not exactly a pure good character but in recent events she’s had the interests of the Dwarves as a whole in mind and even the Alliance. That’s good progress from when she pseudo-kidnapped Anduin and tried to seize power. But since Legion… again, nadda. And she had nadda from Cata to Legion.
And so on. If I spent more time I could probably think of more. But it’s quite irritating that all the good ones get shunted aside in front of the cover girls who have more enough narrative and characterization issues that I could literally sit and write an essay on each of them and hand it in as part of a writing course. Maybe the “good” ones are just spared from the pens of the lead writers who do… unspeakable things because they’re more focused on cool set pieces rather than continuity or common sense.
But on the other hand the same can be said for male characters tbh, I’ll happily pick Varian, Baine and others apart.
My #1 fear is that they’ll be tapping their heads trying to think of a random tauren shaman boss for a dungeon, then remember Magatha exists and drop her in it. I’ll be very upset if they ever just killed her off, she’s straight up the most realistic, grounded and probably best villain the setting has right now.
then?
.