Paizo Iconics - Kyra

The next Paizo iconic is Kyra, the iconic cleric. Sadly, of course, she's a terrible character. She's a pseudo-Middle Easterner, in Middle Eastern garb that's overly fancy for an adventurer, and she worships a dawn goddess that's associated specifically with the Middle Eastern region, making her iconicness... well, pretty suspect. She's a regional character who has no real business participating in most of the adventures, because there's little reason to expect her to ever be in the region that those adventures take place in.

Her original bio was pretty sparse; something about being the only survivor of a raid of bandits on her village, and becoming a cleric because of that (??) but of course, Paizo couldn't leave well enough alone, and they also decided to make her a lesbian, and eventually even had her married to Merisiel. 

Excepting the gay nonsense, Kyra isn't necessarily a bad character concept, although she's not fleshed out enough to be a good one either, other than the obnoxious brown action grrl vibes that she gives off, but she certainly isn't iconic. If this is what's iconic to the Pathfinder game and setting, then Pathfinder isn't a worthy successor to D&D after all, and isn't itself iconic within the fantasy genre.

She's another character that got redrawn for 2e, but many of those were not necessarily improvements, and Kyra is one in particular that looks even more ridiculous after the redesign than she did before. 

Of course, I have never liked the cleric "archetype" for, among other reasons, that it's not actually archetypal, but if there needs to be one, the 3e iconic cleric, Jozan is actually iconic. He's a white, male cleric of Pelor, the sun god, not a fake Persian or Arabic (or whatever) lesbian girlboss cleric of the girlboss sun goddess. Not that he was super interesting either, but at least he wasn't the polar opposite of iconic from pretty much every angle.

Kyra 1e

Kyra 2e

I don't really love the "pantheon" of Golarion, although I suppose it's mostly pretty D&Dish in all the ways that you'd expect. Then again, I don't really love the pantheon of any of the iconic D&D settings; Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, or Eberron, etc. 

Like I said, I don't really like clerics, but if I had to make an iconic one, it'd be more like Jozan, a cleric of Sol Invictus, who's based—like the original D&D cleric—loosely on William the Conquerer's half-brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who according to some probably apocryphal accounts, was forbidden to shed blood, which he took as meaning he couldn't use an edge weapon, so he used a cudgel, mace or some such bludgeoning weapon instead. 

Kyra may have been part of the original four iconics group, highlighted as pregens in Rise of the Runelords and other early Gamemastery modules, but I think it's interesting that there is no cleric in the radio play iconics group; Seoni the sorceress is replaced by Ezren the wizard (coming up next in this series) and Kyra is replaced by Harsk the dwarf ranger. Kyra does play a "guest star" role in the Curse of the Crimson Throne radio play, which is the third of three that they did, where her "relationship" with Merisiel comes out of nowhere and feels very forced. Everything about Kyra feels forced. Like woke retards everywhere, she's created by checking boxes, not by actually being iconic. Which is unfortunate for a character that's supposed to be ... y'know, one of the iconic characters. But the radio play writers made a good choice in sidelining her; she simply isn't interesting, and I don't know what they could have done to make her interesting either. Her guest starring role wasn't; it was quite tacked on, and she had no personality or relationship dynamic until without any warning she's making out with Merisiel at the end. 

Just a tragic waste, Paizo. As you so often do.