'What I wanted to bring to is that she finds her own fight in terms of her voice and things that she wants to fight for and stand up for.' Balinska said she was invested in bringing Frey's journey of self discovery to life, and it works really well in the game. ' Forspoken's tagline is 'Find your fight',' she said.

I asked Balinska, beyond people's projections and assumptions about the character, what her vision was for Frey. Parrish: To examine Forspoken's Blackness, we have to start with Frey.But unintentional or not, there are elements to its plot, reinforced by Balinska's phenomenal acting, that made me go 'holy shit, this is Black as hell.' It doesn't seem like it, and I don't think Square Enix is trying to market it like that. Wonder what the difference is there? In fact, a lot of Forspoken's plot - despite the fact that apparently no Black people wrote it - touched on very specific Black issues that deeply resonated with me and resolved them, at least somewhat, in a very satisfying way. The Last of Us' Ellie is just as vulgar and acerbic, but she has no shortage of people willing to die for her. In real life or fake, a Black woman's behavior is given this level of scrutiny that just doesn't exist for other people and characters. It's a song and dance very familiar to me. Parrish: I think it's deeply funny in an ironic way that some players are responding to Frey's unabashed assertiveness by calling her an unlikeable bitch.'I think audiences might not be so used to seeing that.' 'This is such an extraordinary game that has come out with this amazing protagonist who's so bold, so unapologetic, so reluctant in the best way possible,' she said. also understands that folks' reaction to Frey - sometimes calling her mean and shitty - stems from the fact that Frey isn't like other video game protagonists.

And they did! Keep up the good work, Gamespot. I was frustrated I had to click on that Gamespot article to double check what they quoted, because I knew that they would have left out all the good no-spoiler quotes from Balinska or Parrish's perspective in favor of clickbait instead.

Ash Parrish's perspective on why Frey as a character deeply resonated with her is an excellent read. If you're not worried about Forspoken spoilers - which I don't think will be a great concern to most with the dismissal of the game's writing due to some out of context scenes - it's very much worth reading the original Verge article that Gamespot took quotes from.

Forspoken imdb