The game I’m playing, Spiritfarer, has a character who’s an archetype of an older woman, a grandmother. One of her traits is that she likes to bake home-cooked style meals for other team members, and she likes the orchard tree you can plant because it reminds her of memories of her grandchildren.
There’s a mission where you go out exploring with her, to this fairly regular little town. As an NPC (non-playable character), she moves slowly, so I’m running ahead, jumping up a ladder and backflipping all over the place, while she calmly climbs a staircase behind me, taking things slow like NPCs do. That moment made me think of some of the darker things I helped Granny explore back when we needed to talk about them, with me jumping all over the place with little apparent concern for my own safety, or physical or mental limits, whilst also seemingly hyper aware of them and intent on pushing their boundaries.
If she was just there to explore, then perhaps a more stable guide would have been more suitable… but I can’t help but feel that if I were in that position, if I was the person with less of both experience and vigor, as we entered into dark and uncertain territory, then I would actually want to be lead by someone who seemed to fearlessly charge into whatever adversity I may have been afraid of.
And I think it would be a lot more fun that way too. If I came face to face with the hound of Hades, I’m pretty sure that someone telling me “this is gonna be incredibly difficult and you might get hurt, but I’ll be watching from back here…” – that’s not helping. Instead, I want a companion who announces to Cerberus itself that they’re about to take a paddle to the big beast’s ball-sack. Bizarre, yes, but utterly disarming.