Female killer backstories are kinda...
They come off really wrong. It's hard to tell if who makes them thinks that it's the only way to write a compelling story for a female character or if they have some sort of fetish. Spirit, Artist, Plague and Hag's whole stories just revolve around them being helpless and tortured. Then they become a killer because uhhhhh....? I get that the entity feeds off of tragedy. But "woman is helpless and dies painfully" shouldn't be the go to story. And it doesn't paint a good image for the writers. Sure, it's uncomfortable which ig makes it fit into horror. But shock value for the sake of shock value doesn't really have much impact after the fact. It's a bad framework and reusing it over and over is just gross and lazy. I'd rather get more mary sue survivors than reading through this scenario constantly.
Why can't we just have some psycho ######### who kills people for her own twisted reasons? Julie kind of fits this but the Legions lore is really messy so we don't really know.
Also why do none of them wear shoes that's also very concerning.
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Huntress's story is tragic too at the start but she does start hunting people and kidnapping girls.
Also doesn't Nurse believe in ,,removing the weak from the gene pool" or something around those lines.
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in the Archives her lore is like that. But in the base game it's just a widow driven insane by working at an asylum, which I'd say falls under OP's reasoning
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I think this is only really a problem due to the repetitiveness, I don't think there's any other angle to it. Most of the killers are tragic to a degree, it's just that for some reason female killers have dramatically fewer unapologetically sadistic types.
It'd be nice to see that variety come in for future killers, since most of the killers as-is are pretty well written, I wouldn't want to rewrite any of them.
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What about Nurse, Legion, Twins, and Huntress? Heck, I don't even think Plague fits in with the others you mentioned.
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Huh. I never put the pieces together, but what female killers do we have that don't fit this mold? Nurse, I guess, but she lost everything she loved and was ground down mentally until she snapped. There's half of the Legion, but Frank is the face of that particular killer and also the ringleader, so I hesitate to count them. Twins - Charlotte is the main, so I can count her as a female character, and she's also a victim of 'had an absolutely horrible and helpless life' syndrome, though she at least had a little more agency in fighting back and then deciding to kill people because she just hated everyone at that point. Huntress is solid - she's a victim, but not moreso than a character like Billy or Wraith, and she took her fate into her own hands and emerged victorious - and Pig is a licensed character so I can't really count her.
I like them all individually, but it'd be a good thing to get a woman who's just actually a horrible person who does horrible things for her own sick reasons. Pig's the only one we have (and she was also a victim, but flipped around into becoming the worst kind of sadist, and had an active role in what she became), where there's plenty of men in the opposite role - Trapper, Doctor, Clown, Ghostface (the mask might be licensed but the lore isn't), and Trickster are all unambiguously monstrous. Do we actually have any really sympathetic male killers? I think Billy's the only one, and he at least lived to see his revenge - that's more than you can say for the Spirit, the Hag, or the Artist. Wraith too, but he led more of a life than just 'victim.'
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It doesn't come off to me as "REALLY WRONG" so much as just super uninspired lol
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Don't take this the wrong way but, it feels like you're projecting a bit
We have male killers with tragic or unpleasant stories that don't make them out to be completely psychotic - Wraith, Deathslinger, Hillbilly (To an extent), Oni (To an extent), Blight, Bubba (If you want to count him)
Plus you're doing a disservice to some of the great stories of those characters - namely Plague and Spirit. Spirit's a classic tale of the vengeful ghost and Plague is tragic but not because she's 'helpless' or 'tortured'.
Yeah she sacrifices herself for her people but she's doing it for what are, in her mind, the right reasons and that's what makes her service to the entity all the more tragic. I've always interpeted it as the Plague kills because she sees the Entity has her 'god' and pledged herself to it in order to save her people. Again, there's nothing really tortured or helpless about that.
Hell, she kills someone in her own tome lore before she was even taken
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Nurse jsut snaps.
spirit has supernatural stuff + entity manipulation.
hag's lore is trash.
plague is the most powerful person in the country.
I do agree though.
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Her backstory wasn't what I expected, considering the leaks were hyping her up as a cultist killer. Kinda disappointing but it's whatever.
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It’s really not that deep
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If people like the OP didn't project and make use of hyperbole then they wouldn't have anything to complain about.
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I think this is part of the reason it's a bad idea to write overly detailed backstories for characters in this game. I hate when movies and stories explain everything. I love the mystery of the unknown. I love when things are left up to interpretation. Horror especially is a genre where filling in the blanks with your own fears is super effective.
Some people may prefer to debate whether a character was a villain or a victim, and that was sometimes possible with the old short lore, but ever since Huntress the length of the text just grew and grew. I'm honestly surprised so many people read the lore. I find it tedious. But I think my opinion is often not the popular opinion, so... eh.
Anyway, more on topic, I know most sadistic killers are male, but there have been a few sadistic female killers. Where's our Elizabeth Bathory? It seems way past time. I don't really care that the writers fall back on tragedy and torture as an easy way to engage the readers, it's a pretty standard horror trope, but I would like to see a Bathory-esque killer. Give her some spider traits (black widow, not tarantula) and boom! Winner.
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"Women need a crucible, men are born as problems" is an old literary schema. I disagree with it, but it's ingrained in how a lot of media - especially horror - treats both antagonists and protagonists, and that's currently unlikely to change. Considering we already have egoists claiming you're projecting, you can see why.
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As someone who thinks OP is projecting a bit:
No, I think that because it feels like OP completely disregarded the fact that a lot of the male cast of killers are just as messed up/have just as tragic backstories in many cases.
Besides BHVR has tome lore talking about a psychotic woman killer who lures men in and then feeds them to pigs so they're clearly not averse to writing it. Maybe they just had others ideas.
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Nurse: Sent to the brink of insanity, mercy killed her patients and a couple coworkers.
Hag: Tortured and eaten alive, forced to use black magic to get revenge and kill her captors.
Huntress: Mentally stunted, forced to live on her own as a hunter to survive. Killed people for the same reason she killed animals, went insane after trying and failing to raise little girls.
Pig: Drug addict reformed by serial killer, became even more sadistic and murderous than her mentor.
Spirit: Watched her mother's corpse get turned to sashimi, then was assaulted and sliced by her dad. Became homicidal in her final moments.
Susie and Julie: Peer pressure.
Plague: Basically religious devotion and ignorance of how disease works.
Twins (Charlotte): Forced to live on her own hunting for scraps to survive, only killed when needed and eventually tricked via the Entity reanimating Victor.
Artist: Blamed for the deaths of her mother and baby brother, saved by the Entity and became revolutionary artist before tortured by the Black Vale and killing them + her friends.
Nea: Is the Entity.
Yun-Jin: Is a Karen.
Jokes aside, I think your explanation doesn't cover at least a third of the female Killers. Pig can't be helped cause license, but Susie and Julie acted almost of their own voliton, Plague's is a more dramatic version of Wraith's and Huntress doesn't know any better.
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From what it seems, all of the female killers so far have tragic backstories (Other than maybe Julie? Julie is probably the least tragic because even if she was manipulated she enjoyed what she did, plus she cares about Frank). I would love a female killer that ends up being a psychopath with no sympathy in there.
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Nurse supports genocide, Huntress see people as animals to hunt, Julie and Susie kill people for fun.
Some of the male killers also have tragic stories. Check Hillbilly and Wraith.
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Wraith wasn't psychotic, but Deathslinger most certainly was a psychopath along with Blight. Psychopathy as pop culture portrays it doesn't properly line up with the reality. Slinger was cruel and callous individual in life. Make no mistake that his method of catching bounties was designed to inflicted as much suffering as possible. Even as a child his intellect and creativity were focused into creating torture devices and he had no qualms about solving any slight against him with excessive violence.He also didn't mind lending his services to the prison warden. Blight, was willing to throw as many things away as possible for the sake of his work. He lacks the ability to feel fear and refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions.
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IIRC Nurse's Mori is painless because she doesn't want to sacrifice them, and tries to kill them as painlessly as possible to let them escape the torture for a bit longer.
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Fair points, well said
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Just uncreative is all
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I agree to an extent, I don't mind the character bios being long my problem is with the archives, they are giving too much information about anything in general, I preferred when the old lore focused only on the characters and what happened inside the entity.
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If you don't fit the label I described, it wasn't about you.
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