When I was over at my partner's and zeir wife home last week, they were playing Portal 1. It was my partner's first time through the game, and it made me think about the game for the first time in maybe 10 years. Long story short, the next day I bought the game and its sequel and just completed them both yesterday evening. Needless to say the gameplay and atmosphere aged fantastically. But what about the writing? I was concerned that the jokes would have felt overplayed and a little embarrassing in the future of 2026. Maybe some of them felt a little fanservicy with the amount of "cruel unfeeling ai" in the first third of the game, and maybe that they were laying it on a little too thick with the wacky side effects jokes in the second third. But something far more important struck me, playing this as a non 13 year old terminally online nerdy boy.
Portal 2 (and 1 but mostly 2) is a criticism of the patriachy Spoilers ahead for the entirety of Portal 1 & 2's solo campaigns
Many people playing through the story felt like Caroline and her implication in GLaDOS' backstory felt shoehorned in. That it didn't contribute much or straight up diminished the impact of the character. To that I say : wrong! Wrong and misogynistic. So Caroline was Aperture CEO's assistant. Near the final years of his life, his lab was working on a device which could "transfer" a person's brain into an AI. Being a narcisist megalomaniac, he was terrified of the passage of time and distrustful of future generations. This invention was to allow him to keep running his business forever. However in the event that he would die before the "brain mapping" project could reach its completion, he made it clear that he wanted Caroline's brain to be put in charge instead. Wether she wanted it or not. Quote : Brain Mapping. Artificial Intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago. I will say this - and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place. Now she'll argue. She'll say she can't. She's modest like that. But you make her.
His entire empire is built on the usurpation of women's achievements. His sudden rise to omnipotence at the end of Chapter 5 is preceded by what even the most lukewarm of analysts agree to be an allegoric SA scene. Both Wheatley and Cave Johnson are megalomaniac men who were given immense power, only to drive their environment into ruin. Forcing women to pick up their slack, bursting into childlike fits of anger at the slightest disagreement from others.