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Pathfinder: Curse of the Crimson Throne is massively sexist

BiopunkOtrera

BiopunkOtrera

Traitor to her Class
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This is sort of a review and contains massive, unmarked spoilers for Curse of the Crimson Throne from the very start.

Curse of the Crimson Throne is the second hard cover compilation of Path Finder adventurers paths. For those unfamiliar with this concept, this is basically a version of TSR old dungeon magazine, a series of adventurers that tired, busy GMs can just run with minimal prep work. Pathfinder goes one better by having, instead of a random series of adventurers, each path is a campaign that takes the characters all the way from level one to level twenty, over a massive, epic quest line with many twists, turns and adventurers.

In Curse of the Crimson Throne, you're in a fantasy city who's king dies and who's new queen, Ileosa seems to be bad news. You investigate what her deal is, and eventually realize she's evil, lead a rebellion and finally defeat her.

The art I saw for Curse of a Crimson Throne's art was one of the major things that attracted me to Pathfinder. It's no secret I really like female villains (and female characters in general) and the villain and her masked, female elite guard present a very strong picture (ignoring the flaws in the armour design) :



The Villain herself, Queen Ileosa also has a very strong look, with excellent art design, and a lot of thought obviously being put in. Like, look at this dress. It's literally got a cord to stop the hem getting dragging on the ground. It's so cool.


So, with this in mind, I was pretty excited by Curse of the Crimson Throne. . . Until I actually got it, and found out that it's really sexist.

Given probably 80% of all the villains and indeed all the major characters are female, it's quite a feat to mess things up this badly. However, Curse of the Crimson Throne manages this by making sure all but maybe one of the female villains isn't doing any of this because they want too.

Ileosa herself isn't someone who's actually hungry for power, she's possessed by an evil dragon artifact. Her guard aren't doing this out of loyalty to her, they're doing it because they under go weird torture and mind control initiations. Even minor villains, like the head of the Red Mantis Assassins (bug ninjas) has been geassed and tortured into her role of villainy. The Queen's chief henchman isn't doing this because of loyalty, she's doing it because she's in love with the Queen and Can't See the Truth.

In other words, none of them have any agency.

You might be asking, why is this a problem? They're evil. Isn't it better that they're portrayed as misled, or forced into it or otherwise treated with the sympathy that RPGs rarely grant their villains.

No, and for two reasons: first, because the trope of women, especially evil women, being mad or otherwise not in charge of themselves has a long and bitter history, but second and more importantly because villains are cool. The black-hearted villain is as much a fantasy as the hero, just of a different kind. Notice how few villains in fiction have traits that we associate with actual social ills in society. There aren't very many fictional villains who are actively racist or sexist. This is because a villain is just as much a catharsis as the hero. A hero makes the world right. A villain makes the world as they want it to be. Of all of us, the villain is the most truly free, and we wish we could be them. Strong and clever enough to get what we want, to take over the world and have it function as we wish it would. From Richard the Third to House of Cards, the idea of being the villain has its own allure.

By denying the women in this agency, you deny them that evil freedom which is the centre piece of any really cool villain. They are all basically just puppets, to the dragon artifact, to magic, to their own desires, and it gets worse from there.

Despite not having any agency, Ileosa still manages to fulfill all of the "bad queen" stereotypes in fiction. She's vain, and frames random women for murder because she's jealous of their good looks. She's a bad ruler, not in a cool way, but in an incompetent and dangerous way. Even if you wanted to accept the dragon possession thing, this makes her vastly less cool.

As much as I like villains. I've never been much of a fan of the old "Lex Luthor becomes president, fixes US economy" or "Doctor Doom actually runs a utopia" tropes. They're unrealistic, and far worse they play into a lot of very strange views about how if we only put some great man in charge he'll save us all, even if he's a ruthless ubermench. The Nazis used those tropes. However it's possible to go too far in the other direction. Rather than the Queen Ileosa doing anything actually oppressive, or making wars upon her neighbors, she's spending too much on luxury, and spreading a plague in a city she herself rules to get rid of the undesirables.

This of course plays into a long tradition of telling stories about how female rule is bad and unnatural, which stretches up into the 20th century. It's not enough for female rulers to be evil, or to want to do bad things to the hero, or heroine, they must also be incompetent, or do wickness to their own subjects. Curse of the Crimson Throne grabs just about every evil queen stereotype and runs with it to the moon.

I actually do recommend Curse of the Crimson throne because the art is nice and it's a great "how not to do it" guide to female villains. Maybe if everyone reads this stuff and learns from its mistakes, and we can allow women to have the catharsis of villainy too.
 
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Ive read Curse of the Crimson Throne, (not played it), and i kinda see your point. However, with illeosas mental state i had a different if overlapping problem. Namely even now i have no fucking clue who the real illeosa is. Because we see her under kavazons influence, and with some devil bound to her soul, but we never meet her (or even hear much) about how she was before.
So this left me with the impression that the main villain is nonexistant in some sense. We are helpfully told that she has no interest i redemption while she has the fangs (providing that she may be redeemable if theyre removed) but thats a)very unlikely to happen and b) as said above, i have no idea what illeosa is like.

Also the male villains dont necessarily do better, Togmor is possesed from the start.

For female villains with agency there is Andasin, though, and one of the rakshasas.

What left me wondering was the contract you can find. So Illeose was possesed/corrupted/whatever and like that singned over her soul to hell... and this is apparently legal in this cosmology? That has some ugly implications.

The other thing, an absolutely minor note, which i cant let go for some reason, is Zanzinaria. If you dont recognize it, its the name of the erynyes devil bound to Illeosas soul. The infernal contract calls her a "heretic" and makes this sound like a punishment with devilish irony (bound to her until the end of her life... oh and shes a month away from immortality, have fun).
Of course just because shes against something in hell may not make her anything resembling good.
Somehow speculation about that one name and line gets me more ideas for interesting characters than illeosa ever had.



Also, apart from anything specific, i love great female villains too.
 
I don't really know Pathfinder aside from what I've just started researching because I want to say whatever the hell I want. But whatever.

FBH said:
Despite not having any agency, Ileosa still manages to fulfill all of the "bad queen" stereotypes in fiction. She's vain, and frames random women for murder because she's jealous of their good looks. She's a bad ruler, not in a cool way, but in an incompetent and dangerous way. Even if you wanted to accept the dragon possession thing, this makes her vastly less cool.
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It seems to me like this thing was always going to be sexist. Because your idea of a cool, admirable, badass villain is simply not something that's applied to female characters often at all. In our culture female villains tend to be icons of our cultural contempt for women and the paranoid delusions men project upon them. Especially when it involves women in positions of power, and especially in pulp genre works like fantasy.

The fact that this character is a straight up villain makes it seem absurd to me that anyone could expect otherwise. Like, if you see an evil queen in fiction, you can immediately assume she'll be a temptress, be an incompetent fool who doesn't know what they're doing, be motivated solely by vanity and probably be right. Simply the act of making her a black and white villain is going to typecast her into that archetype in the minds of a lot people.

You could theoretically do a an evil queen character who doesn't do these things to break the Evil Slutty Bitch Queen Who Wouldn't Have Sex With Me In High School archetype. But this is an RPG scenario with black and white morality conflict where they want you to hate the villain, they're going to go for the low hanging fruit. Reading the wiki on this specific character it's clearly fucking baked into her entire core concept.

Personally, I think this kind of character would be much better served, and the archetype more effectively broken down if she was a more morally ambiguous character who might possibly have a point or a good reason to do what she's doing. Female characters tend to get a much better deal when it comes to being cool or admirable when they're anti-villains or anti-heroes.
 
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Reveen said:
It seems to me like this thing was always going to be sexist. Because your idea of a cool, admirable, badass villain is simply not something that's applied to female characters often at all. In our culture female villains tend to be icons of our cultural contempt for women and the paranoid delusions men project upon them. Especially when it involves women in positions of power, and especially in pulp genre works like fantasy.
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I don't think you can't make a manipulative evil queen a cool villain. You just have to make her effective at her manipulations, and her objectives not be like "Destroy other women who are more beautiful than me" or "fuck my own kingdom over for no reason."

Like, there's plenty of cool manipulative male villains. Shakespeare's Richard the Third is a manipulator and a seducer as much as any evil queen. You just need to make them good at it, doing it for their own reasons, and their objectives be badass. Like, if the PCs finally figure out the Queen's evil and confront her, and she congratulates them on being more intelligent that her dead husband, a man who claimed kingship but could not figure out the schemes of a simple landless noblewoman such as her, (saying this as red clad guards pour into the room to surround them) and tells them she will turn this poor city into a nation the the whole world will fear, that's cool, even if she's seduced her way to that point.
 
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FBH said:
don't think you can't make a manipulative evil queen a cool villain. You just have to make her effective at her manipulations, and her objectives not be like "Destroy other women who are more beautiful than me" or "fuck my own kingdom over for no reason."
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The issue here is that your not just dealing with you and the writing and the Tropes. You're also dealing with the audience, and the cultural memes inprinted on their monkey brains. You could make a manipulative seductress who's competent, level-headed, and badass, but a lot of readers or players are going to fail to see her in that light. People are going to go out of their way to see her as a slimy, bitchy cunt rather than an interesting and respectable villain. If you take a male character, like Richard III and you make them female, that simple act of changing their gender is going to warp people's reactions to the character.

People hate female villains for the most part, that's just how it is until we start breaking down our cultural norms further. And getting female villains on par with male villains without throwing out the sexist tropes associated with female villains in the first place is an uphill battle at best.
 
I haven't read Curse of the Crimson Throne, but it brings to mind, for contrast, Wrath of the Righteous, where superficially one might thing Deskari, the Demon Lord who's in charge of the incursion that's the Worldwound, but in truth the main villain of the path is more rightfully dubbed Areelu Vorlesh, the witch who opened the Worldwound and is vital to closing it. Deskari's the distant boss, Areelu is the mover and shaker who made things such a big threat now. And she's hardly the only big badass with agency of her own, Nocticula, the strongest of all PF demon lords, plays a major role in the path.
 
Wrath of the Righteous had its own problems, but weak female characters indeed werent it.

Although when im thinking about that, my thought is, we need more erinyes.

For explanation: Succubi are seducer lust demons, erinyes are kinda fallen-angel warrior woman devils, who specifically are not much of seducers etc.

Now, for succubi there were like a dozen or more who were named characters, had goals and motivations beyond just chaos and evil (even if all but one were still completely evil).
While erinyes pretty much every time they appear are a throwaway combat encounter, and ones that are even have names are hard to find.

Now, i havent read the recent adventure paths set in cheliax, maybe it gets better there, but i think the difference points out part of the problem. That apparently female villains have to be seducers almost all the time.
 
Xexilf said:
Now, for succubi there were like a dozen or more who were named characters, had goals and motivations beyond just chaos and evil (even if all but one were still completely evil).
While erinyes pretty much every time they appear are a throwaway combat encounter, and ones that are even have names are hard to find.

Now, i havent read the recent adventure paths set in cheliax, maybe it gets better there, but i think the difference points out part of the problem. That apparently female villains have to be seducers almost all the time.
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Given that this thread seems to be about female villains in games, I have to wonder how much of that is due to the stereotype that "Gamers are lonely socially awkward males who don't like or understand women". If they have that level of contempt for their audience, you'll get games where all the important females are sexy and seductive because the creators will simply assume that's all that will sell.
 
Xexilf said:
Wrath of the Righteous had its own problems, but weak female characters indeed werent it.
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Yea, rules tend to be the issue.

Now, i havent read the recent adventure paths set in cheliax, maybe it gets better there, but i think the difference points out part of the problem. That apparently female villains have to be seducers almost all the time.
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Oh, Nox comes to mind, and a seducer she isn't. She's the big bad's bodyguard in Hell's Rebels and thus the boss of one of the path's segments, with a devil pact that gives her super regen.

Also, for another one with women villains aplenty: Reign of Winter, the Witch Path.

Avernus said:
Given that this thread seems to be about female villains in games, I have to wonder how much of that is due to the stereotype that "Gamers are lonely socially awkward males who don't like or understand women". If they have that level of contempt for their audience, you'll get games where all the important females are sexy and seductive because the creators will simply assume that's all that will sell.
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There's a lot of women characters in important, non-sexy roles. It's just, I am agreed with Xexilf that especially at first (APs have been going on for over a decade), they tended not to be in villain roles. Like also in Hell's Rebels, there's an elder woman wererat as a potential ally, and the leader of the Strix tribe (black-skinned winged people who distrust humans) in the area is a women. Earlier on, 'Jade Regent' is about putting a woman on the throne of a country to prevent the Oni from cementing their rulership. That's just a sampling, there's quite a lot.

Hell's Vengeance has the Queen of Cheliax as a huge villainous figure, but she's not your opponent that time.
 
Q99 said:
Yea, rules tend to be the issue.
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Oh yes. Theres more, like endless battles against things to weak to be challenges, but maybe its time the Pathfinder guys admit that mythic rules as written are an enormous fuck-up.
The ideas may have been good, epic in the past wasnt balanced well either, but this...
As someone put it, its rocket tag. Mythic characters have simplified twice as much durability, but ten times as much damage, so everything is over in two hits.

Reign of winter i have read, and hmm. Yeah, theres a bunch. I guess i was slightly disappointed in Elvanna, because she seems to have little presence, and in terms of character memorability really stands deep in Rasputins and Baba Yagas shadow.
 
Avernus said:
Given that this thread seems to be about female villains in games, I have to wonder how much of that is due to the stereotype that "Gamers are lonely socially awkward males who don't like or understand women". If they have that level of contempt for their audience, you'll get games where all the important females are sexy and seductive because the creators will simply assume that's all that will sell.
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There's a larger point to be made how genre or "nerdy" properties tend to be geared towards both young people and geeks who often are inexperienced with women and often afraid or skeptical towards them because of a perceived lack of common ground which curdles into sexist. And intentionally or not writers use sexist archetypes to poke at this sexism to get an audience reaction.

If you make one of your villains a woman who seduces the hero and then betrays them, a lot of your readers are going to be so much more invested in the hero defeating her than if it was just some guy. It's like a big red button on the dashboard of the writerly jet fighter that says "HATEABLE VILLIAN. PUSH FOR AUDIENCE INVESTMENT".

This works so well that even if you intend a female character to be sympathetic, you can end up with a frothing hatedom for her just because you gave them some female-coding character flaws. Just ask Sansa Stark!
 
Reveen said:
There's a larger point to be made how genre or "nerdy" properties tend to be geared towards both young people and geeks who often are inexperienced with women and often afraid or skeptical towards them because of a perceived lack of common ground which curdles into sexist. And intentionally or not writers use sexist archetypes to poke at this sexism to get an audience reaction.

If you make one of your villains a woman who seduces the hero and then betrays them, a lot of your readers are going to be so much more invested in the hero defeating her than if it was just some guy. It's like a big red button on the dashboard of the writerly jet fighter that says "HATEABLE VILLIAN. PUSH FOR AUDIENCE INVESTMENT".

This works so well that even if you intend a female character to be sympathetic, you can end up with a frothing hatedom for her just because you gave them some female-coding character flaws. Just ask Sansa Stark!
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I really don't feel Pathfinder does that, btw, or at least not in any of the APs I know.

Wrath (which I use as an example because it's got a large number of memorable NPCs you're supposed to interact with longer-term), for all it has multiple named succubus and other demonic women characters, doesn't have any of them do the 'seduce and betray' thing, and the character most likely to betray you is male.

The women NPCs in Wrath and Hell's Rebels both strike me as pretty solid.
 
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Xexilf said:
Ive read Curse of the Crimson Throne, (not played it), and i kinda see your point. However, with illeosas mental state i had a different if overlapping problem. Namely even now i have no fucking clue who the real illeosa is. Because we see her under kavazons influence, and with some devil bound to her soul, but we never meet her (or even hear much) about how she was before.
So this left me with the impression that the main villain is nonexistant in some sense. We are helpfully told that she has no interest i redemption while she has the fangs (providing that she may be redeemable if theyre removed) but thats a)very unlikely to happen and b) as said above, i have no idea what illeosa is like.
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We honestly don't get much of her in general. Like, She basically appears, tells the PCS "thanks for getting this random jewel, go work for the actual good guys." I think it'd have been far better if you had the PCs actually go work for her, or some court faction, and only slowly learn that she's evil, rather than have her send them off to another faction she has no real reason to help or trust.

It would have been far more satisfying, in my opinion, to have the PCs slowly realize that their patron is evil and murdered her husband. Maybe even only have her take power part way through the game and have her appear to be a kind, gentle wife to the not particularly nice king, and then as things go on you realize that she's the one manipulating things from behind the scenes. This also gives her an actual reason to do bad stuff to the city, because doing so discredits her husband.

The whole possession angle is IMHO, pretty superfluous. Just have her be an evil high level bard with an powerful dragon artifact which makes her invincible.

Reveen said:
The issue here is that your not just dealing with you and the writing and the Tropes. You're also dealing with the audience, and the cultural memes inprinted on their monkey brains. You could make a manipulative seductress who's competent, level-headed, and badass, but a lot of readers or players are going to fail to see her in that light. People are going to go out of their way to see her as a slimy, bitchy cunt rather than an interesting and respectable villain. If you take a male character, like Richard III and you make them female, that simple act of changing their gender is going to warp people's reactions to the character.

People hate female villains for the most part, that's just how it is until we start breaking down our cultural norms further. And getting female villains on par with male villains without throwing out the sexist tropes associated with female villains in the first place is an uphill battle at best.
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I have a little bit more trust in my audience than that. If you write her differently, then she's going to come across differently. It's 2017, people can handle female power fantasies.
 
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So what you're saying is that we need Fantasy Margaret Thatcher. Well, it's a D&D spinoff so it'll be Fantasy Sexy Margaret Thatcher but there are some genre conventions we'll have to live with. Just model the business suit as armor with big pauldrons and you're good to go.
 
Mutton said:
Listen, if we can constantly get Reagan and Reagan standins I think we can get his intellectual lady love a few extra cameos.
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D&D Thatcher would totally be some sort of metallic construct commissioned by a local businessman as a daughter-surrogate because then you can make a shit ton of Iron Lady jokes straight off the bat.

"THE LADY IS NOT FOR TURNING"

"Yeah, we're with you all the way Maggie!"

"DARGIN WE HAVE BEEN OVER THIS I HAVE PROBLEMS WITH TURNING PLEASE HELP ME GET ROUND THIS CORNER"
 
Reveen said:
Like, if you see an evil queen in fiction, you can immediately assume she'll be a temptress, be an incompetent fool who doesn't know what they're doing, be motivated solely by vanity and probably be right.
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I dunno. Let's sanity check with Literally Disney Cartoon Villains.

The Queen of Hearts: Definitely motivated by vanity, but mostly just batshit crazy like everyone else in Wonderland.

Malificent: Motivated by a personal insult which counts as vanity, but neither a temptress nor incompetent. Also, turns into a huge dragon, so that's cool.

Ursula: Motivated by power and not vanity. Does some temptressin'. Definitely counts as a queen because she wins and becomes queen of everything before losing in the end, so not very incompetent at all.

The Evil Queen from Snow White: This pretty much fits. Motivated by vanity, tempting with the apple, basically a fuckup.

Yzma: Vain, but motivated by a desire for power, not vanity. Not that competent but not particularly incompetent either. No temptressing whatsoever.

Lady Tremaire from Cinderella: Motivated by family interests and generally being a huge bitch. Manipulative but not a temptress. (IIRC?) Not incompetent.


If you need all three qualities to qualify, we're at 1 for 6.
 
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Ralson said:
I dunno. Let's sanity check with Literally Disney Cartoon Villains.

The Queen of Hearts: Definitely motivated by vanity, but mostly just batshit crazy like everyone else in Wonderland.

Malificent: Motivated by a personal insult which counts as vanity, but neither a temptress nor incompetent. Also, turns into a huge dragon, so that's cool.

Ursula: Motivated by power and not vanity. Does some temptressin'. Definitely counts as a queen because she wins and becomes queen of everything before losing in the end, so not very incompetent at all.

The Evil Queen from Snow White: This pretty much fits. Motivated by vanity, tempting with the apple, basically a fuckup.

Yzma: Vain, but motivated by a desire for power, not vanity. Not that competent but not particularly incompetent either. No temptressing whatsoever.

Lady Tremaire from Cinderella: Motivated by family interests and generally being a huge bitch. Manipulative but not a temptress. (IIRC?) Not incompetent.


If you need all three qualities to qualify, we're at 1 for 6. (OTOH, many of these are really stretching the definition of 'queen', whereas the 1 is actually named 'Evil Queen' on Wikipedia)
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My firm conviction is that villain coolness is about effectiveness primarily, and secondarily about PC interaction.

Curse of the Crimson Throne is bad with this because the PCs barely interact with the villain. They hear about her, they encounter her plans and minions, but they don't interact with her much.

Here's how I'd do it.

The PCs have a first adventurer where they distinguish themselves in some public way, as public as a group of first levels can. They're hailed by the city, and invited by some court faction, and the new Queen Illeosa rewards them for their efforts, and for finding one of her jewels. She tells them that she believes there's a plot against her husband, and asks them to work with the royal guard to investigate. Play her up as nice, have the king come across as having anger management issues. Introduce some red herrings, like the King's no good brother and conniving sister and uncle. Then have the PCs work around the city against various plots. When they succeed, Illeosa's faction claims the credit, when they fail, the King gets the blame. Maybe introduce some future clues that the Queen is more than she seems.

Then, when they hit about 5th level, bam! King is murdered. There's rioting, which the PCs get caught up in, which appears to have been instigated by the Red Herrings. The PCs eventually confront them, find out they couldn't have done it and gain evidence that Illeosa murdered the king.

At this point, they either go with the royal guard to confront her, or decide she's already too powerful and seek to disappear into the city. If they disappear, have some royal guard or new patron survivors contact them, and say that the arrest team that was sent after Illeosa was slaughtered, and report how she appeared to be immune to what should have been fatal weapon strikes.

If, as is more likely, the PCs go to confront her themselves with a bunch of royal guard, then you have it play out as above. The Queen happily confesses yes, it was her, but tells them they're far too late. Her guards pour in around them, and throw down the body of the man they sent to mobilize the main royal guard force. Other guards materialize around her from invisibility. The Queen offers them a chance to surrender and join her, but says she suspects they're too honourable to ever take her up on it. If the PCs surrender or lose, they have a dungeon escape scenario. If they fight their way clear, they're outlaws and must hide in the city. In the fight, they get to witness Illeosa's immunity to weapons, and her evil powers.

From there, things can play out more or less as they do in the main adventurer, just with a little less chance to redeem random enemy NPCs around Illeosa.
 
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FBH said:
I have a little bit more trust in my audience than that. If you write her differently, then she's going to come across differently. It's 2017, people can handle female power fantasies.
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Crimson Throne was published in '08 for reference. Which is still a timeframe they should've done better, of course, but plenty of time for Paizo to become more aware of how to properly handle things (which IMO they have).
 
Q99 said:
Crimson Throne was published in '08 for reference. Which is still a timeframe they should've done better, of course, but plenty of time for Paizo to become more aware of how to properly handle things (which IMO they have).
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This is talking about the remake/re-release, which changed a bunch of things, and is from 2016.
 
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