Monday, May 25, 2026

Paizo Iconics - Amiri

Amiri is the next iconic, and is included also in the Second Darkness adventure path. She's another one that I wish they hadn't made, but they seem to love her and have her all over the place. She's a grrlboss Conan, a barbarian from the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, who had to heroically overcome sexism because she was as good a warrior as any man! This pissed off the men in her tribe (and the women, for that matter) so they betrayed her and sold her out to some giants or something, but she escaped, found out that she'd been set up, "raged" (as per the barbarian class ability) and killed the people who'd sold her out. Whoops! Now she was forced into exile because it would be a death sentence to return home. Same as Sajan, as it turns out. Not the most creative, and actually really quite stupid in a mid 00s or 10s grrlboss narrative. 

To make things even worse, she's supposed to be prettier than most, arrogant of course, especially when interacting with Valeros, the punching bag of the gammas at Paizo, and she uses an oversized giant sword, which isn't actually appropriate according to the rules; they just fudge it in an attempt to make her even more appealing to low status gammas and to give he ran anime-style oversized sword kind of thing.

Although they also drew her with inappropriately skimpy armor, although not exactly sexy like 80s chain mail bikinis, just oddly feminine. And, of course, she has tattoos. And because she's a barbarian, she's gotta be like stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, even though she's half his mass and not really all that muscular. 

In other words, she's a walking epitome of crappy DEI thinking translated into an anime character. Her whole concept just screams woke 00s nonsense. I have little use for her. Luckily, she wasn't in the radio plays, but she does seem to be a favorite in cover art, and you see quite a bit of her on modules and other products. Although she didn't appear in Curse of the Crimson Throne, she was on the cover of one of the original modules.



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