Any time people (rightfully) criticise jade shadows for being an incredibly sexist pro-life story someone inevitably points to that stupid memory feather as some kind of defence but (ignoring the fact that this quest has so many other problems with its writing and story outside of the jade stuff, the sexism is just the most egregious offence) theres a few reasons why that doesn't work
1) you can't retroactively fix a story, no amount of retcons or added context is gonna change the fact that the story we got was bad, it doesn't help that the feather is so blatantly just a half-assed attempt by DE to try and address every major criticism people had withought actually acknowledging the problems with the story and instead just doubles down on there poor writing choices (and it doesn't even do a good job)
2) desire is not consent, jade saying she wants to have a kid doesn't mean she's ok with us forcing her to have one (it also doesn't help that theres at minimum 1000 years between the memorie feather and the quest), if you choked someone to death by forcing a burger down there throat you cant then go "well after i killed them i found there diary and 10 years ago they wrote that they would do anything for a hamburger right now" as if that makes it ok
3) and finally even if she was giving explicit consent and choosing this it doesn't matter, because jade isnt a person she's a fictional character and fictional characters dont make choices writers do, its the same as claiming an anime character wearing an incredibly sexual and revealing outfit is ok because she "chose" to wear it
And thats ultimately the biggest problem with pointing to the feather as a defence its a watsonian defence to a doylist criticism
When I say that the quest is incredibly sexist and doesn't respect jade as a character im not saying i think stalker is a misogynistic womaniser who hates his wife
When I say this quest has a lot of uncomfortable pro-life undertones im not claiming hunhow is secretly some pro-life right winger thats gonna go protests outside of a corpus abortion clinic when this is all over
And when I say this quest reduces jade to nothing more then a plot device for the men around her im not saying its wrong for jade to want to be a mother
What im criticising is the writing decisions made by DE and the story they chose to tell
Because the story they told is one where a woman who is given no autonomy or agency and exists solely to serve the men around her is physical forced to have a child fully knowing it will kill her, but its ok because a random man whos never spoken to her says she wants it and that makes what we did completely justified
And that is a disgusting and sexist story
