PC: “If you two marry, you’ll be saying, ‘Haha, just kidding. 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. 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.Īnd, 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. Indeed, The Outer Worlds is a game which, over and over again, tells us that Parvati is not cold or unfeeling. The first response offered to players? “You’re about the warmest person I ever met.

The folk who wanted to be with me, back in the Vale? They didn’t - They said I was cold.” Leastways not like other folk seem to be. 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. 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. 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:

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, likely the first companion you meet and definitely the first companion you can recruit, is a well-written female-character. Today, we’re going to talk about the most important of them. 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.

Parvati the outer worlds