You're not coming off snappy at all! I'm just trying to think of the best way of putting it without, like, really dorking out.

Overall, like I said, Skyrim does a pretty good job of keeping things balanced and even. Women and men are largely interchangeable, and women are as likely to lop your head off with a greataxe as a man is, which is nice — I remember Dynasty Warriors keeping all the bigger weapons male-only, and it's nice that there's no such limit in Skyrim. All-in-all, women characters are handled quite well.

However, the moments I referred to, as well as a handful of others, feel... off-key. It's not that they're egregiously offensive so much as it's that they seem to make assumptions that I'm not comfortable with. The phrase "suspension of disbelief" comes to mind. Just as a fantasy world has to operate well enough by its own rules that I can get lost in all its fantasy-ness, there are scenarios involving women in Skyrim that simply feel too off, too jarring, for me to get along with okay.

It's not about "hurting" women per se, because obviously every Dovahkiin is some degree of equal-opportunist sociopathic looter. And it's not about sexualizing women or anything like that, either. I'm pretty okay, for example, with Delvin Mallory's constant perving on Vex (or is it Tonilla?) — it makes Mallory come off like a cretin, but that's fine, I accept that as characterization.

On the other hand, the quest with Haelga operates off the assumption that what Haelga's doing is wrong or shameful. Like, okay, I'm fine with the notion that one woman might think it's okay to slut-shame another woman who gets around, but I find it really weird that Haelga, an acolyte of Dibella, would find that blackmail effective. So she has awesome sex! Why wouldn't she want that news to get around? Similarly, I understand if Bolli feels ashamed of his cheating on his wife, absolutely. But when Hofgrir describes Haelga as "out-of-control", it feels like a weird-ass thing for the guy to say. Guy's single. Guy got laid. Why the hell would he feel the need to shit on a woman for sleeping with him, let alone in a context that literally makes her sleeping around a part of worshipping her socially-accepted goddess?

The whole thing feels off, not least of which is Svana's description of it:

She's disgusting. I think she takes her worship of Dibella a bit too seriously. Do you know she's slept with three different men in the last month alone? What kind of a woman would do such a thing?

I could see that as an ironic remark, intended to characterize Svana as conservative and ignorant, but literally everything about that questline seems to buy into the notion that Haelga is legitimately "in the wrong" for what she's doing, and that your efforts to blackmail her into being less "wretched" are all for the better. There's a line where Haelga says she's worried about being run out of town, but again, elsewhere in the game she openly talks about preferring Dibella to Mara, so it's clearly not like Dibella is somehow a problematic deity to worship.

Similarly, the thing with Sapphire's just that... I mean, I know a lot of women who've been raped. A lot. It's a sadly common thing to have happen to you if you're a woman, I hear. And Sapphire's account of being "violated for a fortnight" is so sloppily written that it feels pretty obviously like the writers were just churning through their list of NPCs to write dialogue for. Big game, lotsa people to talk about, yeah, I get it. But having listened to many different accounts of many different types of rape, it's not something I can take as a casual, flippant, plot-device kind of thing. So what's jarring about the moment isn't "she got raped but there's no plot associated with it" — that's asking for more than is reasonable to ask for, perhaps. But the writing is so shitty that it throws me out of Skyrim entirely. It makes it impossible to see Sapphire as a person, instead of a figurehead for a writer who frankly doesn't know what the fuck he's writing about.

It's never a matter of grotesque, overt misogyny — not with Skyrim, anyway, I don't think. But there are little ways in which things, for me at least, fail to "add up", where I just kind of pause and go, like, "Huh. This isn't right." And then I keep playing the game, and if I remember I'll skip over those dialogue trees or plots entirely, and just kind of imagine to myself that they aren't there in my particular game, and that's the end of that.

There're other parts of Skyrim, by the way, that I feel are similarly tone-deaf but have nothing to do with women whatsoever. This isn't just a gender thing; it's a "bad writing" thing overall. But the occasional moment of gender squickiness is certainly there. For the most part, Skyrim's pretty damn good, relative to a bunch of other titles at least. It's a shit-ton better than Skyrim mods, that's for certain. But it's not perfect, and I'm comfortable calling it out for these little weird moments while still generally liking the game and appreciating the efforts it went through to keep things fun for men and women alike.

EDIT: ...and there's the "dorking out" I was trying so hard to avoid. Whoops, my bad!