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Parvati Holcomb: The Unaccountably Happy Face of the Unreliable

The Outer Worlds, the new space RPG courtesy of Obsidian, helpfully provides your player character with exactly the sort of ragtag gang of misfits which you are probably expecting in such a game. Today, we’re going to talk about the most important of them. 

Parvati Holcomb, likely the first companion you meet and definitely the first companion you can recruit, is a well-written female-character. Her talents for engineering and her incredibly positive and cheerful outlook quickly draw comparison with the character of Kaylee from Firefly (allegedly one of the main inspirations for the character), but there is one very clear difference between the two. 

Parvati Holcomb is an asexual character. 

While the term “asexual” is never actually used in the game, Parvati’s experiences and worries were so obviously born form the real-life experiences of asexual people that I was not the least bit surprised that she had been written by an asexual woman: 

I was, however, properly delighted that Parvati had always been intended to be an asexual character, even before an asexual woman took over as Parvati’s writer; Chris L’Etoile, the original writer, explicitly made the decision to create a warm and loving character, someone who could see the beauty and hope in a failing colony, who could express all the wonder they wanted their players to feel, and then he decided to make her asexual as well. 

The stereotypical ‘link’’ between asexuality and ‘coldness’ is even explicitly referenced by Parvati herself, when she explains her fears about starting a new relationship: “I’m not much interested in… physical stuff. Never have been. Leastways not like other folk seem to be. It’s not that I can’t. I just don’t care for it. It’s been a problem, in the past. The folk who wanted to be with me, back in the Vale? They didn’t - They said I was cold.”

The first response offered to players? “You’re about the warmest person I ever met. To hell with them.” 

Indeed, The Outer Worlds is a game which, over and over again, tells us that Parvati is not cold or unfeeling. This is a young woman who names a robot the moment she fixes it, who worries if the Captain calls the ship’s computer “it”, who checks in with crew members and, in a game with a reputation system (rather than a Mass Effect style morality system), acts as the world’s most adorable conscience. 

And, while Parvati does find her relationship with Junlei complicated, those complications have very little to do with her sexuality and far more to do with her being a young woman, away from home for the first time, and experiencing possibly the first great love of her life. There are miscommunications, a night of drowning sorrows, endless over-analysing of each other’s words and actions, and the need to go to four different worlds just to plan a date. As the player character can say: 

PC: “If you two marry, you’ll be saying, ‘Haha, just kidding. Unless you’re not.’” Parvati: “I resent you saying such, on account of it being uncomfortably likely.”

But once Parvati has worked up the courage to tell Junlei who she is, the relationship works well. Well enough for Parvati to find a new home with Junlei once the fight is over: 

Now, I always expect an Obsidian game to have some awareness of the wider spectrum of human sexuality - Fallout New Vegas included some same-sex relationships, and the player character could be played as straight, gay or bisexual, depending on which perks you picked. But I wasn’t expecting the only great romance subplot in an entire game to include an asexual woman actively pursuing another woman. Were this just one relationship among many, it would still be beautiful, but for it to take centre-stage and not have to share that space with anything else? It’s phenomenal. 

And, just when I think that The Outer Worlds couldn’t get any more lovely, it did this: 

Yep, that’s the option to identify your character explicitly as asexual. There’s even the option just afterwards to clarify your character as aromantic as well, which Parvati takes perfectly in her stride with a nice little nod to the player’s strong relationships with their friends. Either revelation is meant with the same response from Parvati: 

“So we’re… we’re kin-like. That makes me, well - unaccountably happy, Captain. It’s a lonely thing, being different like this.” 

Judging from that reaction, the Captain is likely the first fellow asexual who Parvati has met, and the relief in her voice was such a punch to the gut. Because Parvati’s right - the loneliness of feeling “other” sinks in fast and there’s nothing quite like the relief when you finally feel like maybe you’re not alone after all. 

And the idea that this game and this character might give that moment of relief to someone out there, well, that just makes me unaccountably happy as well.

Archaeology & Art@archaeologyart·

Golden cicada on a jade leaf, Ming dynasty (1368-1644). This sculpture was discovered in a tomb in 1954: it is the top of a hairpin, belonging to a woman of high rank. The imagery of a cicada on a leaf had a double meaning and was a high compliment paid to beautiful women. .

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…. according to this page on infj.org

value personal integrity and “being true to yourself”

are on a lifelong search for a unique identity and meaning; spirituality is important to us

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are...

Thank you for answering this so thoroughly! Your response was fascinating. Little Simra poring over charcoal glyphs scratched over the hearth is one of my favorite bits of imagery so far. But most of all I relished the chance to learn more about Simra’s mother. As with Soraya, her presence is felt more immediately through her impact on Simra and his father than through the rare glimpses we get of who she was otherwise - for me, the effect is reminiscent of the feeling you get craning your neck to see something through a barred window or the slats of a fence. What details you do manage to pick out are all the more vivid for the strain of searching. For instance, I remember returning again and again in my mind for days after I’d read it to the image of a soft leather jacket left behind with Verru (unfinished?) after her death, that she’d intended as a wedding gift for Soraya.

I have to confess, though, about an hour after I sent my question off I suddenly remembered that I already knew that Simra’s parents were literate - he writes them both at least once, doesn’t he? And the letters for his father are couched in a rather touchingly careful Dunmeris, even. So I felt like a huge dork all morning. (⌒_⌒;) Guess I should have slept on it instead of rolling out of bed in the middle of the night to ask, huh?

If I remember correctly, most Ashlanders are illiterate, forgoing a written tradition in favor of an oral one. Assuming that Simra's parents follow convention in this, then how did Simra come by his letters? And what does Simra's mother in particular, as a former wisewoman-in-training, think of his unorthodox affinity for the written word?

[This is a very good question. Mostly because it does something my favourite questions do. It asks something for which I don’t already have an answer. But it asks something that needed to be asked. It’s something useful to me. So already, thanks for that.Simra’s parents were travellers of Ashlander extraction. They didn’t spend all their time with the Zainab. So yes, while they were raised within and each participated within an oral tradition - particularly on the part of Ishar, his mother - they were literate to one degree or another.It was actually Ishar, rather than Simra’s father, who was the better linguist, reader, and writer. His father never learnt more than a few things outside of Dunmeris. Her background gave her more of a respect for knowledge, however the knowers store it and keep it known, orally or literarily.Bringing up her children in Skyrim, it was she that educated them in mixed Tamrielic and Dunmeris: reading, writing, arithmetic, bits and pieces of history, theology. She would not have her children go without the skills that they’d need to live as something other than Ashlanders.Admittedly, young Simra paid more attention than Soraya. This learning did not come from reading, however, but through listening. Even Simra’s literacy comes from watching his mother scratch letters and words in charcoal above their fireplace. And the oral nature of these lessons is perhaps part of the reason Simra has such a good verbal memory.In short, Simra’s no Zainab. He’s Dunmer, and part of Morrowind’s diaspora. He’s of Zainab blood, raised by parents who were raised Zainab. He himself admits that he’s a Dunmer of Skyrim, however — inheritor of some Ashlander traditions, but barred off from others, and proud of both.So he’s an unorthodox Dunmer in one sense. But he was raised by an unorthodox womer, after all — why d’you think she didn’t ever become a full-fledged wisewoman? For the most part it was Ishar who refused to acclimatise to this new place and new culture, his heart living with his wife and children, but belonging back in the Grazelands.]

Books!!!! I am all out of time order lately, haha. One of these, the one with white-and-gold endpapers, was mostly done before when l posted about After The Storm, but my cricut software had been giving me trouble. Well, I sorted that out, and also sorted out copies for the other coauthors as well!! I've been adjacent to these creators for... wow, many years at this point, and it's so rewarding to be able to put hard copies of their work into their hands :D

carletoncolton - GPOY 5: Wedding Guests

Scrapbook #15: Xan (Click for full-size image.)

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