Guest Post: Pirate-ette?

I’ve invited my classmate, Julie Ashley, to guest-blog today. She posted this to our class forum, and I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to be able to publicize it to my vast readership (Hi, you two!).

Comment and tell Julie she needs to write more – I’m trying to pull her into the blogoverse!

So, I mentioned in class that I was trying to mod my player character in Pirates! so I could swashbuckle as a woman. Honestly, I was picturing a cross-dressing pirate wench who could fence in a cuirass just like any guy (with only the hint of somewhat flattened breasts). She’d have some other just-under-the-radar pirate chicks on her crew, and they’d keep the male pirate crew around for combined extra muscle, companionship, and stud stable. Maybe after a long day of dancing in drag with governors’ daughters, terrorizing and plundering trade ships, escorting new governors to Caribbean islands, and digging up buried treasure, my pirate would take off her armor and just be a girl with the other crossdressing chicks on her girl.

In a game with a single avatar option — a blue-eyed pirate guy with brown hair in a ponytail — I felt like I was crossdressing already. An important minigame consists of wooing and dancing with governors’ daughters, who in turn provide you with rescue quests, handy gifts, and treasure maps of lost Incan/Aztec/Mayan cities. Further, one category on your game “status” scorecard consists of points earned for courting, rescuing, and marrying a daughter. So unless the game added the option of plain, attractive, and beautiful governors’ sons rather than governors’ daughters (and then let each player order her or his own gender choice from a sort of in-game menu), I would be forced to crossdress anyhow if my avatar was female.

If the broken links can be believed, several female pirate mods USED to be available. Now just a single mod seems to be. The mod did make me a female pirate — clearly by grafting a “beautiful” governor’s daughter or barmaid’s head and buxom torso onto the male pirate’s lower body. At certain angles and points in the action, you just can’t miss my she-pirate’s package. Never fails to amuse. One other weird glitch: if your player character has acquired the special brace of pistols, these do not appear in the she-pirate’s hands. Instead, she swoops her hands out of the holsters to reveal….curled fingers, which, miraculously manage to shoot a bullet into her opponent’s right shoulder. Fingers like that could come in handy!

Further, the female pirate only shows up when I play the fencing mini-game. Since she’s got very low and burgeoning cleavage, this seems an inopportune time to whip off the boy-costume. (Never mind that her face suddenly changes into a totally different and female face during those fencing scenes too.) At all other times, I’m still the guy pirate and I sort of need a shave. I tell my game-self that the she-pirate is crazy brilliant to reveal her true assets at just the physically-vulnerable moment of battle: she’s not just risking a cutlass slash to that milky white animated skin; she’s actually using that cleavage to confound and distract her male opponents. (Would you really stab a girl, enemy captain? Haven’t seen anything like this since you left port, have you, poor sucker?)

I would love to be a rakishly sensitive crossdresser when I woo the governor’s daughters, but in those and all of my non-fencing moments, I’m still the same-old humdrum male pirate. Not nearly the mod of my swashbuckling dreams. Makes me wish I knew how to mod it myself. I can’t believe no one’s done it right yet! Undoubtably, this is how most modders start….

But I still want to play more than I want to muck around with mods and cheats. Just moved up to the third and middle difficulty level. Made me a fresh pirate named him/her Orlando in honor of V. Woolf’s gender-bender. I’m trying a new strategy this time, sacking lots more cities and pursuing quests earlier in my career. I’ll just have to plunder as a she-male for another three dozen hours or so.