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With the partial exception of Dragon Age Inquisition (and maybe Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC), Whedonesque dialogue is largely absent from these games. I guess to some extent Morrigan might have aspects of a Whedonesque character, but in many ways she doesn’t. Most important, the first two Dragon Age and Mass Effect games take their settings very seriously in a way absent from almost all modern Marvel movies. That’s not to say they’re without cringe dialogue, of course. But it’s cringe in the way high schoolers writing fiction is cringe, in its overuse of tropes or over-sincerity about the scale of the characters’ difficulties, not because it’s trying to be serious AND make fun of itself at the same time, which is the biggest hallmark of bad modern writing.
I really hate BG3’s companions, they’re all zany, wacky eccentrics with a Deep Secret. There are usually a couple of companions in a BioWare game like this, but there are also plenty of more ‘normal’ people.
They're not so bad.
The magical fascist sky murder ape. Not zany, no apparent deep secret, kind of sad really. Very ugly, but that's what illusion spells are for.
Shadowheart isn't zany or wacky.
Astarion is a sleazy lecher but not zany or wacky, doesn't seem to have a deep secret.
Karlach is a little zany but honestly seems like a mostly what she appears to be, a cheerful yet essentially decent blood knight.
If you play a fighter/mage you don't need anyone else, no? And with the cloaking spell Laezal isn't disgusting to look at and realistically would probably be easily persuaded it's not good for her life expectancy or mission to look like one of those impossible murder assholes from beyond the sky who swoop around the multiverse on their red dragons and behave like special forces: ask questions first, torture if not answered execute later.
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I don't really know what you mean by this. I tried looking up what Joss Whedon has worked on and there's not much of a clear pattern I can discern. From Toy Story to Firefly to The Avengers, he's worked on a wide range of things. I'm guessing by your earlier comment that the Avengers (or Marvel movies in general) would be the main thing here, but I'm still not quite sure what you mean by this.
I remember ME1 taking its setting very seriously since it was setting up this whole new universe. The other games from the ME and DA series still tried to stay within their settings... but so does BG3.
Again, I'm not sure where you think BG3 is doing this. Do you have some examples from act 1? Where is the game making fun of itself?
For me, these are parts of the characters are quite enjoyable since they add a degree of mystery at the beginning while connecting to the broader strokes of the story later on. After thinking about it, I would agree that the "I'm locked in a bad deal with an asshole god" trope is overused since it applies to half the cast, but there certainly companions without that. Lae'zel doesn't have this, nor do the alt companions like Minthara, Halsin, Jaheira, or Minsc.
It's his signature way of mixing comedy with drama. The plot is serious, but the characters keep cracking wise.
Is that all?
Well in that case, that gets pretty close to saying "don't have levity in serious works, period", which I'd strongly disagree with. Part of what made things like Breaking Bad and Disco Elysium great was that they dealt with really serious topics while also being fun and almost goofy at some points. The lighthearted moments were needed both for contrast and to not wear out the viewer. There's an art to doing this of course, as wisecracking during a serious moment can do a lot more harm than good, but the alternative of just being serious or negative all the time to the point of being hard-boiled and grimdark certainly isn't good either.
No, it's not that at all. It's closer to "please for the love of god, react to danger with literally anything other than a sarcastic quip".
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It's not that it's bad per se, people loved Buffy, I personally liked Reaper, which is very much whedonesque in character. It's just that you can't have everyone in a movie be a smartass all the time. Things can get so bad that the straight man of the cast makes a bitter joke or the resident clown finally shuts up. Maybe someone is two different people at work and with friends and the change in his tone shows how the relationship between the characters changed. People complain that the MCU movies are tonally flat: everyone is equally snarky almost all the time.
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