The High Road is Hard to Find

while the player character of kcd2 is much closer to a commander shepard than to a harry dubois, he is constrained enough in what he is in this time and place to convince me to think of "myself" differently, and to act in this world accordingly. and it's not a lot of games that can do that!

this game is a loving work of anthropological-historical fiction, seemingly unconcerned with things like "narrative structure" while still managing to balance on the character writing line between "expositing character traits to you" and "too subtle for its own good". it wastes your time but not too much; it's janky but in a sort of lovable way. the quality of life is right on the borderline. nothing about kcd2 is frictionless or completely polished, but it ends up being sort of charming.

thematically its project is an academic and almost obsessive one, a passion for history and for humanity writ large that comes through in the plot's insistence that you constantly meet with representatives of every broad social stratum and subgroup present in the time and place. if the game has any messages, they are "all people are just people" and "war is a bitch".

it is in fact the game's dedication to taking you around and teaching you and immersing you in the lives of regular people that makes it stand out so ridiculously when the game decides that there are things it doesn't want you digging into. despite the fact that societal misogyny in kcd2's version of 15th century bohemia is markedly less noticeable than it would have been historically, large portions of your dialogue interactions with female characters are restricted to making passes at them; you could argue that this is a form of characterization (though the game is deciding you're attracted to women for you in a way that it doesn't at all do for men, see more below), but it only applies to a subset of women in the game who seem intentionally positioned to be sexual prospects. your player character has no trouble refraining from making such comments towards even women that are around his age if they don't happen to be a specific sort of character: secondary or tertiary NPCs in major questlines, important enough to have names, but not more significant than a quick fling. as a side note, katherine, a critical member of your team, does most of her necessary (and sick as hell) work offscreen, her efforts silently underpinning all the blood and fire of the male leads' missions. she's shown in the key art with a crossbow, but you can fuck off if you think you'll ever get to see her do any of the cool shit she's apparently constantly doing! the choice to make godwin a deuteragonist instead of katherine is, frankly, baffling, and i still don't really understand why he had to be playable.

similarly the choice to allow you to play your character as being attracted to men, while the game simultaneously provides no access to any member of a "queer community" or similar contemporary, shows where the edges of acceptable historical representation lie for these writers and devs. the game acknowledges that men can be attracted to other men, but has pointedly little to say about it, bad, good, or neutral. it puts no words in your mouth; it allows you no questions, no elaboration, and no real contact. in some settings, normalized queerness is welcome - it's nice not to have it questioned. why would an elf care about if the sex is gay or not? but this is not one of those settings. this time and place are clearly and aggressively christian and heteropatriarchal, so the lack of the ability to question, to search for community, to make connections, to engage with the way queerness could have existed and DID exist, is strangely glaring - especially in contrast with the game's love for delving into all other things social, and in particular, the dynamics of marginalization and oppression at the time. (this isn't even touching on the decision to make one of the only two unavoidably/canonically queer men an irredeemably evil groomer, and the other his much younger lover, portrayed as being in many ways just as unhinged.) (there are, of course, no queer women.)

while the player character of kcd2 is much closer to a commander shepard than to a harry dubois, he is constrained enough in what he is in this time and place to convince me to think of "myself" differently, and to act in this world accordingly. and it's not a lot of games that can do that!

this game is a loving work of anthropological-historical fiction, seemingly unconcerned with things like "narrative structure" while still managing to balance on the character writing line between "expositing character traits to you" and "too subtle for its own good". it wastes your time but not too much; it's janky but in a sort of lovable way. the quality of life is right on the borderline. nothing about kcd2 is frictionless or completely polished, but it ends up being sort of charming.

thematically its project is an academic and almost obsessive one, a passion for history and for humanity writ large that comes through in the plot's insistence that you constantly meet with representatives of every broad social stratum and subgroup present in the time and place. if the game has any messages, they are "all people are just people" and "war is a bitch".

it is in fact the game's dedication to taking you around and teaching you and immersing you in the lives of regular people that makes it stand out so ridiculously when the game decides that there are things it doesn't want you digging into. despite the fact that societal misogyny in kcd2's version of 15th century bohemia is markedly less noticeable than it would have been historically, large portions of your dialogue interactions with female characters are restricted to making passes at them; you could argue that this is a form of characterization (though the game is deciding you're attracted to women for you in a way that it doesn't at all do for men, see more below), but it only applies to a subset of women in the game who seem intentionally positioned to be sexual prospects. your player character has no trouble refraining from making such comments towards even women that are around his age if they don't happen to be a specific sort of character: secondary or tertiary NPCs in major questlines, important enough to have names, but not more significant than a quick fling. as a side note, katherine, a critical member of your team, does most of her necessary (and sick as hell) work offscreen, her efforts silently underpinning all the blood and fire of the male leads' missions. she's shown in the key art with a crossbow, but you can fuck off if you think you'll ever get to see her do any of the cool shit she's apparently constantly doing! the choice to make godwin a deuteragonist instead of katherine is, frankly, baffling, and i still don't really understand why he had to be playable.

similarly the choice to allow you to play your character as being attracted to men, while the game simultaneously provides no access to any member of a "queer community" or similar contemporary, shows where the edges of acceptable historical representation lie for these writers and devs. the game acknowledges that men can be attracted to other men, but has pointedly little to say about it, bad, good, or neutral. it puts no words in your mouth; it allows you no questions, no elaboration, and no real contact. in some settings, normalized queerness is welcome - it's nice not to have it questioned. why would an elf care about if the sex is gay or not? but this is not one of those settings. this time and place are clearly and aggressively christian and heteropatriarchal, so the lack of the ability to question, to search for community, to make connections, to engage with the way queerness could have existed and DID exist, is strangely glaring - especially in contrast with the game's love for delving into all other things social, and in particular, the dynamics of marginalization and oppression at the time. (this isn't even touching on the decision to make one of the only two unavoidably/canonically queer men an irredeemably evil groomer, and the other his much younger lover, portrayed as being in many ways just as unhinged.) (there are, of course, no queer women.)