{"id":7280,"date":"2010-03-15T10:32:52","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T15:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=7280"},"modified":"2010-03-15T10:59:03","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T15:59:03","slug":"mass-effect-2-jack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=7280","title":{"rendered":"Mass Effect 2: Jack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jack was a big part of the Mass Effect 2 marketing campaign. This marketing campaign: <\/p>\n<p><small>(Warning, bad language and banality.)<\/small><\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/etareWBj9hE\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=etareWBj9hE'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>My first impression of the character was more or less: <em>Oh look, it&#8217;s space-Morrigan.  Only more annoying and with a more preposterous top. (How does that thing stay in place? Are we to believe that a mass effect field is being used to secure her you&#8217;re-wearing-that-wrong set of suspenders?) Just what the franchise needed.  A venom-spewing nihilistic nutjob to give the series the dose of &#8220;more badass and stupid&#8221; that fans [of other games] have been clamoring for.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But it turns out that my first impression was wrong. <\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Well, her top <em>is<\/em> ridiculous and she <em>is<\/em> pretty nihilistic, but she&#8217;s not nearly as two-dimensional as she seemed in the trailers. She&#8217;s not there as an author-insertion character \/ fantasy object.  She&#8217;s not all fury and kickass.  She&#8217;s actually a tragically broken person and I found her story to be gut-wrenching.<\/p>\n<p><table width='600'  cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/me2_jack2.jpg' class='insetimage' width='600' alt='I don&#8217;t claim to be an expert on bras or anything, but I&#8217;m pretty sure this design is completely infeasible regardless of your tech level.' title='I don&#8217;t claim to be an expert on bras or anything, but I&#8217;m pretty sure this design is completely infeasible regardless of your tech level.'\/><\/td><\/tr><tr><td class='insetcaption'>I don&#8217;t claim to be an expert on bras or anything, but I&#8217;m pretty sure this design is completely infeasible regardless of your tech level.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Jack was a victim of (who else) Cerberus. She was raised in one of their distant, clandestine, well-supplied, well-staffed, and completely unprofitable labs which the paranoid spies at Cerberus somehow funded without knowing what they were doing.  Or something. Like everything to do with Cerberus, it doesn&#8217;t really survive scrutiny and you&#8217;re just supposed to roleplay Shepard as a dunce who doesn&#8217;t ask about or even notice little details like this.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway. Cerberus. In keeping with the Cerberus we met in the first game, they had a plan to develop the ultimate biotic warrior. They did this by performing batteries of experiments on groups of biotic-sensitive <em>children<\/em>.  They did all kinds of horrifying, monstrous things to the kids and killed quite a few in the process. When they found one that boosted biotic power without killing the patient, they would use that same technique on Subject Zero. (Jack.)<\/p>\n<p>Her story pays off when you bring her back to the now-ruined Cerberus facility so that she can blow the place up.  As you tour the ruin, she pieces together what really happened to her.  The &#8220;tough girl&#8221; persona gets wobbly and her voice cracks in places.  The writing is great, but a lot of credit needs to go to actress <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm1057696\/\">Courtenay Taylor<\/a> for a brilliant performance. <\/p>\n<p><table width='600'  cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/me2_jack3.jpg' class='insetimage' width='600' alt='BioWare did a brilliant job with facial animations.  Not only did they pull off &#8220;crying face&#8221; that doesn&#8217;t plunge the character into the uncanny valley, they also pulled off &#8220;<em>nearly<\/em> crying face&#8221;, which is actually way harder.' title='BioWare did a brilliant job with facial animations.  Not only did they pull off &#8220;crying face&#8221; that doesn&#8217;t plunge the character into the uncanny valley, they also pulled off &#8220;<em>nearly<\/em> crying face&#8221;, which is actually way harder.'\/><\/td><\/tr><tr><td class='insetcaption'>BioWare did a brilliant job with facial animations.  Not only did they pull off &#8220;crying face&#8221; that doesn&#8217;t plunge the character into the uncanny valley, they also pulled off &#8220;<em>nearly<\/em> crying face&#8221;, which is actually way harder.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Jack is one of the obvious seams between the two games BioWare was trying to make.  On one hand they were making &#8220;Captain Shooty Hands out the Galactic Ass Kickings&#8221;, and on the other hand they were making &#8220;Catpain Shooty&#8217;s Dramatic Space Opera Adventure&#8221;. The latter is what they enjoy doing and what fans love them for, but the former is apparently what pays the bills.  Jack looks like a bit of pandering (and to a certain extent, she is) but she&#8217;s an interesting and deep character who stands on her own.  (It&#8217;s worth doing her mission just to unlock her extra outfit, which is a <em>tanktop<\/em>. Thank you. Geeze.)  <\/p>\n<p>And I also like that you can&#8217;t &#8220;fix&#8221; her.  Blowing up her former school \/ prison \/ test chamber doesn&#8217;t immediately make everything all right. She&#8217;s still irrevocably warped and probably nowhere near ready for a trusting relationship with another human being. But we do see a glimmer of hope that through the torture, violence, drug abuse, and neglect, she retained a little flicker of her empathy. She perhaps could be healed over the course of years, given the right group of friends. A lot of it would depend on what she decided to do with herself after the end of the game. (Assuming she survives.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jack was a big part of the Mass Effect 2 marketing campaign. This marketing campaign: (Warning, bad language and banality.) Link (YouTube) My first impression of the character was more or less: Oh look, it&#8217;s space-Morrigan. Only more annoying and with a more preposterous top. (How does that thing stay in place? Are we to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}