Cerise Magazine

Can you believe we’re already celebrating the first anniversary of Cerise? One year ago this month we launched Cerise with the goal of “Getting Noticed in Gaming.” A year into our project, how are we doing? Let’s take a look back at some of the exciting things we’ve accomplished this past year, as well as look forward to what we’ve got in store for the future!

Last summer, in the early days of Cerise, we kicked things off well with some exciting interviews and the introduction of some of the features that have become mainstays of each issue of Cerise, such as the Gamer Stories, Retro Reviews and our regular columns.

October was a momentous month for Senior Editors Robyn Fleming and Andrea Rubenstein. Robyn represented Cerise in “Women in Gaming,” an event hosted by the Xfire Debate Club. Meanwhile, Andrea received notice that she was accepted into HAL, a noted game design school in Osaka, Japan. Make sure to stop by their respective game blogs, launched under the IRIS banner in the past year: Robyn Can’t Jump and The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student, which are joined by Staff Writer Latoya Peterson’s Gaming in the Media blog.

One of the most exciting developments for Cerise over the past year has been to see how our articles are received by others, and what kind of impact they’ve had. So far, articles that we’ve published have been linked on Wikipedia, reprinted on other blogs, sites and magazines, translated in multiple languages and used in college curriculums. We’ve been asked to participate in podcasts, contacted by filmmakers and approached by gaming companies for reviews—all of this in just one year! Phew!

With each passing month comes a rise in Cerise readership, with increased traffic here and on the forums. The number of unique hits we receive at Cerise grows exponentially as time passes—they’ve more than doubled in recent months. More and more gaming companies are starting to take note of the work we are doing here. Just this past month Robyn traveled to Los Angeles as a member of the press invited by Wizards of the Coast to attend a preview of the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Coming up on the horizon for Cerise, editors Robyn Fleming and Olivia Luna will be participating on several panels at this year’s WisCon, including “Gender in Virtual Worlds” on Sunday the 25th at 11:30am. We’ll also be co-hosting a “Capes and Consoles” party with Girl-Wonder, so if you’re attending WisCon this year, make sure to come by and join us Saturday night the 24th in Room 263. In addition to food, drinks, games and music, we’ll be holding a prize drawing and selling Cerise swag. We encourage party-goers to come dressed up as their favorite game or comic book character—we don’t want to be the only ones cosplaying!

Thanks for a fantastic year everyone, and let’s continue to look forward to the bright future of Cerise!

I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I was six or seven years old, and have been a feminist for about that long. It’s easy to imagine, then, how thrilled I was to see steps towards greater inclusion of women – as both characters and players – in the 3rd edition source books for D&D, and with what excitement I have watched the continuing development of the D&D franchise in recent years. D&D’s earliest incarnations were rife with casual sexism, but since the franchise was taken over by Wizards of the Coast there has been a visible trend towards inclusion and gender equality. Feminine pronouns have been utilized in sourcebooks, female characters have been used as archetypes, and while some regressive, chain-mail-bikini-esque artifacts have remained in the art and writing of some newer D&D products, Dungeons & Dragons as a whole is getting better and better from a feminist perspective.
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Autumn, 2005

I smear my cheeks with brown face-paint and drape a frayed cotton tunic over my shoulders, tying it at the waist with a strip of muddy fabric. The Monster Mistress, Jenn, taps me on the shoulder and hands me a slip of paper.

“Break a leg…” She smiles evilly. “Or eat one.”
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As many of you know, the newest edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the best-known tabletop roleplaying game in the world today, hits the shelves in two months. The internet is swimming with claims and predictions about the new edition, from the developers to doomsayers to diehard fans. If you want concrete previews of the new rules and content, you can find a webliography at the end of this article.

I had the privilege of attending the Dungeons & Dragons Experience convention in Arlington, Virginia, from February 28th to March 2nd. This was the first opportunity for the general public to play 4th edition, although it wasn’t a 100% finalized version. Again, there are plenty of reports and blogs out there (including my own) discussing the mechanical details of the new ruleset. Rather than rehashing those types of descriptions, what I’ll be focusing on here is a qualitative take on the new edition: how does it feel to play, compared to earlier incarnations of the game, and how is it liable to impact your fun at the table?

Getting Started

Although we were provided with pre-generated character sheets, I can tell you that creating characters is somewhat easier in 4th edition than it was in 3rd. The arduous aspects of creating a 3rd-edition character — allocating skill points, poring through dozens of feats and spells that have wildly different effects, and using multiple charts to base all the math on — are greatly reduced. Most progressions are unified, eliminating the need for all those charts; the plethora of skills have been condensed, and skills are either trained or untrained without counting all those points; feats have mainly minor effects and very few of them can be chosen at 1st level. Best of all, most choices can be retrained, within limits, as your character progresses in level, so if you make a bad decision, you won’t be stuck with it forever.

General gameplay was also easier to get into. Many of the things new players often find confusing, such as moving on the diagonal, calculating areas of effect, and the dozens of subtle options for moving and attacking, are either simplified or eliminated. Even I, as an experienced player, found my turns going much faster. There were a couple of things that were unintuitive — for instance, certain abilities require you to choose the “closest opponent,” and while one opponent might by obviously closer by physical distance on the map, it might be considered equidistant or even further away by the new distance rules. However, these rules were quickly mastered by everyone I played with, including some who had never played D&D of any edition before.

There was one aspect of the new system that challenged everyone, beginners especially: strategic movement. Mobility in the game is both greatly increased and more important to determining the outcome of a fight. For instance, one of the types of opponent we fought was the kobold dragonshield, which had the special ability to take a step away from you whenever you ended your movement next to it. This led to a lot of confusion from the players, especially the melee attackers, because every time they moved up to hit it, it would just step away. In order to actually land an attack on it, you had to plan your movement very carefully, so that there was no way for it to retreat, or find an alternate solution, such as having one character grab onto it while others attacked. These elements certainly made combat more interesting, but they could easily become a frustrating experience for beginners to strategic games, or even experienced players not used to thinking outside the old-school D&D box.

Getting Into the Swing of Things

Once the players had the basics down, the dynamics of long-term play started to show themselves. Although I never got to play with a group for longer than one five-hour adventure, I could definitely start to see the emergence of a real sense of roles forming. “Roles” is one of the buzzwords for 4th edition. Each class has a designated primary job to fulfill in combat: Defenders (such as fighters and paladins) hold down the front lines and keep the other characters from getting pounded on, Strikers (rogues, rangers, and warlocks) deal substantial amounts of damage to key opponents, Leaders (clerics and warlords) are responsible for healing and otherwise supporting the team, and Controllers (just the wizard, so far) manipulate the battlefield and wipe out masses of weak foes. There’s some freedom to go against type, but not much, the logic being that the developers didn’t want to give the players enough rope to hang themselves. When a character is outshined by another at what they’re supposed to do best, or is unable to fill a critical role in the team, it’s less fun for everyone. The role categorization helps ensure that every character has a job to do, and to be a contributing part of the team in a meaningful way every round.

I’ve heard anecdotes again and again to the effect that nothing is deadlier in an RPG than a team of women who know how to cooperate. This will clearly be truer than ever in 4th edition. I’ll give you an example, something that didn’t exactly happen in our game, but came close. The party is traveling along a mountain pass, when they are attacked by a group of shadar-kai, a sort of twisted, evil, goth fey. The ranger and warlock go first, severely injuring the lead monster. The fighter goes next, closing the distance and reducing the monster to less than half his hit points. Then the enemies go, concentrating their fire on the fighter and damaging her severely. The first shadar-kai now activates an ability he can use only when bloodied, and goes into a whirling dervish of death, knocking the fighter unconscious and moving on to attack the rest of the party. The paladin takes a swipe, misses, then draws an attack from the monster as she moves up to the fighter and uses lay on hands to restore her to consciousness. She also positions herself in such a way that any opponents coming from the front will have to go through her first before reaching the vulnerable fighter, which means that if the first shadar-kai retreats, he’ll reach the fighter first. Why would he retreat? Because it’s the cleric’s turn, and she casts cause fear. The injured monster attempts to flee past the fighter, who hits him and stops him in his tracks. The cleric finishes her turn by moving up a little and healing the fighter some more. Finally, when the fighter’s turn comes around again, she grins, takes a step to the side, and uses her tide of iron to attack the dangerous foe and push him off the side of the cliff.

This kind of play is commonplace in 4th edition. A party that works together can beat challenges far above their level. On the flip side, a Leeroy Jenkins-style player who dashes off without regard to the rest of the party will increase the difficulty significantly. While there’s certainly room for a single player to do some awesome things, a team who can communicate and are familiar with each others’ strengths, weaknesses, and options can be impressive nearly every round.

Getting Simple with the Math

No matter how much one likes math, too much of it creates mistakes and slows the game down. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve updated a character sheet and found a +1 that I’ve been failing to apply for the last five sessions. My wife is playing a swordsage in our current 3rd edition game, and her rounds take forever because of all the math. An example of a “normal” attack for her might be using shadow blade technique augmented with burning blade while in assassin’s stance. This involves rolling 2d20, adding her normal modifier, the bonus from the bard’s song, and her flanking bonus to each roll, then deciding which die to use; if she hits with the lower roll, she adds 1d6 (her sword’s basic damage) + 3 (her Strength and magic weapon) + 3 (the bard song) +2d6 (assassin’s stance) + 5 (her Dexterity modifier, which she can add while in a Shadow Hand stance) + 5 (her Wisdom modifier, which she can add when making a Shadow Hand attack) + 1d6 (the shadow blade’s bonus damage) + 1d6+7 (the burning blade’s bonus damage). None of those things apply all the time, so it all has to be added up every time. This is an extreme example for a level 7 character, but high-level characters can get even worse.

I can’t speak very much about 4th edition’s amount of math firsthand, but the promise is that this kind of thing gets much, much better. No more two-weapon-fighting rogues who force you to add up 7d6 four times a round. No more dozens of modifiers all applying at the same time. No more having to calculate on the fly what armor class an opponent has against a brilliant energy weapon while flat-footed. The same is true for getting creative: the game no longer grinds to a halt when a player decides to grapple the troll. It’s a simple roll—your Strength against the troll’s Reflex defense—and the result is that the troll can’t move from its current location until it breaks free with an Athletics check against your Fortitude defense—or claws your face off. That’s it. (In contrast, the grapple rules in the 3rd edition Player’s Handbook occupy nearly a page and a half.) And if you get really creative (like swinging from a chandelier to kick an opponent off a balcony onto another opponent on the ground), it’s very easy to adjudicate that sort of thing, too, using only ability checks, skill checks, and static defenses.

Getting out of the Dungeon

Everything I’ve talked about so far has centered on combat. That’s only natural—D&D started off as a derivative of wargames, and combat is the most detailed aspect of the rules. That doesn’t mean that non-combat rules have been neglected, though. We’ve been promised a working set of “social encounter” rules better than the ones in 3rd edition (where a well-designed bard could turn a foe into a friend more or less automatically), but those weren’t demonstrated at the show. What was demonstrated, briefly, was the “skill encounter” system, which allows players to find creative solutions to a problem using the strengths that your character has. In our adventure, we had been involved in a street brawl and had to escape before being noticed by the guards. As the cleric, I used my Heal skill to pretend to be administering to the fallen, then used my Intuition to look for a moment when no one was watching and slip off into the crowd. Other options included sneaking off into the shadows (Stealth), climbing a roof (Athletics), hitching a ride on the side of a passing merchant cart (Acrobatics), influencing the crowd to act as a distraction (Streetwise), recalling where the entrance to the town’s sewer/dungeon system was and slipping into it (History), and so on. A little bit of creativity and anyone can find something to do in just about any situation. You can also choose how fancy you want to be — choose something simple and mess it up and you could get into big trouble, but choose something complicated and you could get an extra benefit out of it. Communication between players and DM is critical here — if the player tries something that they think is a moderately difficult Athletics check, and the DM decides it’s a difficult Acrobatics check, there could be some hurt feelings if it doesn’t get resolved before making the roll. Skill and Social encounters are worth just as much experience as a combat encounter, so a group who’s not as big on combat can avoid it much more easily, if they wish, than in previous editions.

Getting Promoted

The task of the DM is both easier and harder. The math side of it is a breeze: coming up with balanced and interesting groups of monsters to face, calculating experience rewards, putting together treasure troves, generating advanced or templated monsters or NPCs—all of these things take a fraction of the time that they did in 3rd edition. This kind of menial labor has been greatly reduced.

The hard part is the part where you really have to think. You can’t just plop down a room with some monsters in it — a narrow passageway, an ill-conceived trap, or a potent environmental hazard can all make things far more difficult for the PCs than the numbers would indicate. A well-designed map needs to be large enough to maneuver, with any hazards in places where they’re relevant but not crippling to either side, and that requires a lot of foresight (and a lot of space on your battle mat). A monster with an interesting ability that the PCs just don’t get can take down a whole party — and a monster with an interesting ability that you don’t get can either take down the party (if your interpretation makes it more powerful than it’s supposed to be) or make it an insignificant speedbump (if you don’t use it advantageously). A skill challenge or PC improvisation makes you think on your feet, and you have to be able to do so in a fair manner. If you come up with a “fun” trick for the hill giant that uses its through-the-roof Athletics check, the PCs may get crushed without a fair chance. DMs may find themselves “fudging” things for a few sessions to make up for their mistakes, until they get used to the demands of the new system.

Getting Digital

For some reason, the rumor has persisted that 4th edition will somehow require the use of a computer. It’s just not true. You need books, dice, paper and pencil, and something to use for a map and minis or tokens. That being said, there are some new digital tools that will be available for 4th edition, some free and some requiring the Dungeons & Dragons Insider subscription service (initially priced at $14.95/month, $38.85 for 3 months, or $119.40 for a year, per person). The subscription buys you access to the new electronic forms of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, a rules database (which contains info for all 4e supplements, whether you own the book or not), a character creator which includes both mechanical (a character sheet) and visual aspects (a customizable “virtual mini”), and the D&D Game Table, which allows you to use maps, minis, die rolls, etc. more or less just as you would at a physical table.

These are all take-it-or-leave-it kinds of materials, but the Game Table is worth special mention. Subscribers can connect with each other over the internet, “meet up” from their home computers, play (text and voice chat, though not video chat, are integrated), and save their session to continue later. For the casual player, that’s pretty convenient. If your group has half an hour to get a bit of gaming in, you can all load up the program from where you left off and suspend it when you have to. No setting up or forgetting where you left off — you don’t even have to haul out your rulebooks or character sheet, as it’s all stored (and indexed!) online. Each mini will stay right where you left it, even in the middle of combat, with the previous rounds’ actions recorded. If one player has an unstable connection, the session persists; there’s no “host” and no complications about logging out and logging back in again. If the DM allows it, play can continue without them even being connected. In theory, the Game Table can be used for games other than D&D, but you’d have to supply your own rules.

Of course, the “casual player” may not be willing to shell out $10/month/person, in which case you’re stuck playing the old-fashioned way. But passing on Insider won’t prevent you from playing the way you’ve been playing all along.

Getting Back to the Point

A lot of concern has been expressed on the internet about whether 4th edition still feels like D&D. Some are afraid it will feel more like an MMO, others that it’s dumbed down to the point of being more like a board game than an RPG. My feeling is that it feels like D&D. It’s undergone a lot of changes since 1st edition, when I started playing, but the basic feel of it is the same as ever. You’re still attacking monsters, casting spells, killing them and taking their stuff. You’re still adventuring in a pseudo-medieval society with elves, dwarves, and halflings. You’re still rolling d20’s to hit and d-something-elses for damage. There are some things missing that you might be used to — magic missiles that always hit, fireballs that involve dumping your whole collection of d6’s on the table, multiclassing that nets you the iconic abilities of multiple classes at once, and most of all classes and races (the druid, bard, and monk, among others, are being reserved for future releases, and gnomes and half-orcs can, at release, be found only in the Monster Manual, although they’re playable if your DM permits). But in the grand scheme of things, these changes are relatively minor.

So in my opinion, there’s no real paradigmatic change, either forward or backward. Combat is more streamlined and potentially more exciting; there are fewer boring moments while you wait for other players to make their decisions (in or out of combat) and you have nothing interesting to do; there’s less risk of feeling like a burden on the party, or feeling like you never get to have fun because you’re too busy taking care of other peoples’ problems. It’s all little things. These little things do seem to add up to a more fun experience (again, based mainly on my meager 11 ½ hours of trying it out), but it’s a quantitative change, not a qualitative one. If you never cared for D&D before, chances are 4th edition won’t change anything (unless your main complaint was that it was too slow, in which case you may want to try it out), and if you were a fan before, you’ll probably like 4th edition as much as or a little more than you liked previous ones.

Webliography

• The Design and Development series at the official D&D website, giving previews of 4e rules and content
• Presentations and other videos covering Dungeons & Dragons Experience 2008
• ENWorld’s compilation on info released by reliable sources about 4th edition
• Gleemax, the blog and message board service of Wizards of the Coast, which contains a great deal of content (and rumor, and opinion), including my own blog (search for MindWandererB)

Consider. You have decided to run a theatre-style LARP with a plenitude of romantic themes. You have recruited players and filtered them through a questionnaire so that you know who is interested in playing out a love story. You have written your characters, dressed the venue, made your final announcements and said, “Go.” Nothing to do now but watch.

This article discusses the actual play of the romance story lines in Sanctuary, a LARP I co-ran with Naomi Guyer and Sean Broadley. We had a range of romantic storylines planned. Some were quite sad, others were designed to be as chaotic as a Shakespearean comedy, and in fact some of our inspirations were drawn from there.¹

Marriages of Convenience

This is something of a staple. Marriages of convenience seem to happen often in LARPs, or at least the ones that I play in. In terms of playability, they’re quite easy because the players know that whatever contracts are agreed to in the game, the out-of-character stuff disappears at the door and there’s no emotional load to deal with inside the game. In a way, I think that the marriages of convenience that happened in the game were a way of keeping score for the players, whether the character gained money or soldiers or influence.

Unrequited, Unconfessed Love

We had three characters who were written with some form of secret crush on another character, varying in strength from “You’re very loyal” to “You’re a bit psychotic about this.” Sadly, in all three planned instances, the objects of desire were entirely oblivious. In one case there was a marriage proposal and a suicide after the character was turned down – very much to the surprise of the person who was proposed to. Another character asked his object of desire for romantic advice as a prelude to dropping hints and was blithely advised to “find himself a woman.” I guess that roleplayed love is as subtle and hard to notice as the real thing. Advice to LARP-writers: drop a hint to the object of desire that there might be a little bit more going on than is obvious.

Love at First Sight

Okay, not love love, but roleplayed love, in which the player is handed a note when they first meet the other person telling them that they suddenly feel a strange desire. These had pluses and minuses. One player was reportedly quite appalled when he read his note and complained afterwards that he would have met the character previously and shouldn’t have been so thunderstruck. Another character took his “epiphany” as a challenge and spent the rest of the game working hard to achieve marriage with the woman he’d “fallen in love” with. In other cases, I don’t think that some of the planned pairings ever met up, or if they did, the new goal was subsumed underneath other material. From a LARP-writing point of view, these kinds of GM-mandated Easter eggs seem to me to be a bit random – you might get a cool storyline, or it might never emerge out of the chaotic stew of the LARP. I also think that the most successful character to roleplay being struck suddenly by Cupid’s arrow was one who had already been primed with a character sheet suggesting that marriage might be a good idea, hence putting the player in a receptive mood.

Same Gender Romance

These worked out rather well, if I do say so myself. The most spectacular of these storylines was full of confusions and ifs and maybes, in which the central figures were stumbling into each other, leaping to conclusions, quizzing people for (often misleading) information, recruiting friends for help and making meaningful looks at each other across the room. Often, the meaningful looks were also bouncing off an old flame of one of the principals for added melodrama. Most of this was subtle enough that I as a GM wandering about the room hadn’t realised it was going on until near the end of the LARP when the two lovers got married, and most of it I heard about afterwards. The thing that made this storyline so successful was the degree to which the players leapt into their parts. One person commented afterwards that while he spent a little time managing his political goals, he was trying to get that done as quickly as possible so that he could spend more time worrying about his love life.

In case it matters to anyone, the participants were a mix of straight and gay. I didn’t hear of any problems with people roleplaying outside their regular orientation. It was a question we had specifically asked people before casting them, and it made us a lot more comfortable with assigning characters.

Touch Me/Touch Me Not

There was very little physical contact in this larp – I think the limit for people was holding hands. One guy that got “married” said that he would have kissed his partner if someone else had set a precedent, but that was as close as anyone got. I’ve heard of a mechanic invented in Scandinavia called Ars Amandi that deals with a low contact way of simulating sex by touching people’s arms and hands, but it wasn’t relevant to our game which, after all, was focused on the falling-for-someone stage rather than the doing-something-about-it stage.

Crossing the Boundaries

How far is too far? That’s always the question, right? People’s out-of-character relationships had a strong effect on how they roleplayed their in-character stuff. We had a player group of 62 people and some of them knew each other already and some didn’t. From the comments people made afterwards, I think that a previous acquaintance meant much more trust between the players and they were more comfortable pushing the envelopes of their parts. On the other hand, one pair was already dating each other in real life, and I don’t think I’ll knowingly cast that way again, because they said afterwards that there was a fair amount of confusion between what was real and what was in-character – quite important when you’re in the middle of a row.

I’ve previously played in a six player LARP called Couples, by Tony Shirley, which had a very extensive preliminary phase to help people get into character and comfortable with each other, so I know that there are ways to shortcut the kind of trust you get by knowing someone well. I cannot stress enough how valuable that trust can be in a roleplaying environment.

You Can’t Write Me Love

Overall, I was very pleased with how the romance storylines went in Sanctuary. One thing I did notice was that you can’t compel people into roleplaying a romantic relationship, no matter what you write on their character sheets. You can plant plot hooks, you can dangle bait, you can drop hints, but if the people involved aren’t interested, nothing is going to happen.

When they do happen, when people leap into the uncertainty, melodrama and glory of a love affair, you get something magic.

¹There’s an afterLARP report here for people who would like more background to the event.

It’s five in the afternoon, and I’ve just changed my outfit for the third time. I’m not preparing for a date; it’s the first meeting of my new, all-women gaming group, and I want to make a good first impression. Since two of my four players this evening have never played a tabletop game in their lives, and the other two have had only a little experience, I’ve decided that I’d better tone down my natural nerdiness as much as possible. Unfortunately, every clean shirt I can find says “geek” somewhere on the front.
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Once upon a time (not very long ago), I helped to run a theatre-style Live-Action Role Play game. This isn’t a particularly special thing to do; people run LARPs all the time. However, we tried something I’d never done before: a registration questionnaire asking all the players what kind of characters they’d like to play. This helped us to fine-tune casting - it meant that with some of the storylines, particularly those involving romance, depression and same-gender relationships, we could be far more relaxed about which players were doing what. And, of course, it gives me the opportunity to answer the vexing questions:

• What do LARPers really want?
• How different are men and women gamers, really?

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So, you’re finally ready to start your new campaign. Months spent creating a detailed world with a rich historical background and dozens of believable cultures. Hours devoted to creating important NPCs, towns and kingdoms. In your own mind, you imagine a world of fantastic adventure and breathtaking landscapes. But will your players? Will they share your excitement and vision when they play in your new campaign world? With a simple Powerpoint presentation and some handy information packets, you can establish your world and the game’s mood before the dice even hit the table. (more…)

Female video game characters began as either the prize, the motive or the vixen, and then settled into supportive roles. Currently, video game ladies struggle to break free of the “hot and deadly” shell of a male audience. Princess Ashelia B’Nargin Dalmasca deviates from the stereotypical female role with her powerful personality and abilities in Final Fantasy XII and empowers females, gamers and characters alike.

Princesses in video games rarely appear without a typical entourage: gallant princes, castles and flowing dresses. Pursuing these princesses are devious, not-as-pretty women and arrogant, ill-intentioned men. FFXII’s Ashe does not carry such baggage; a refreshing and much needed change. (more…)

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Coin Heaven. Drew Mackie now writes about pop culture on his blog, Back of the Cereal Box.

Had I asked this question ten years ago, the answer to the above question would be a resounding “no.” To be blunt, that Peach — who had then only recently shed the first name “Toadstool” in the States — was a big pink sissy whose primary function in life was to get kidnapped and scream “help.” Peach didn’t even have the honor of being the first leading lady in Mario’s life. That character, of course, was Pauline, who did about as much and at least got to wear a more modern-looking outfit. With her floor-length royal gown and odd, flipped-out Farah Fawcett hair, Peach was a dead weight character — a reminder of what a woman’s place was 50 years ago. She was an uber-stereotype of what women should be, injected into the Mario series to balance out the overwhelmingly male cast with a double dose of sugar-coated girliness. (more…)