Paizo Iconics - Seelah

Seelah is another DEI iconic; an African sheboon dressed and behaving like a European knight in shining armor. I get it; Paizo can't help it, and to some degree, hey, it's their audience or whatever, but I've never in the least found her an appealing character. She has a pretty trite backstory (again, before detailed bios were written for any of these guys) where as a girl she saw some heroic paladin sacrifice herself to save people or something, so she was inspired to do the same.

The problem with these DEI characters is that they simply don't fit. Why is an African woman wandering around fantasy Europe as the iconic Paladin, acting like one of King Arthur's knights of the Round Table? It just doesn't make any sense that she'd be wandering around in pseudo Mediterranean European Korvasa and the rest of the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, where she appears. She's from a completely different part of the world, her dress and accoutrement is out of character for her race and origin, and she may look like some black women I know, I suppose, but she doesn't act like any kind of woman at all. She's not charismatic, she's not attractive, she's not likeable, she's not interesting. Even worse, she'd make no sense whatsoever in the adventure path that she's cast in as a default pregen character. Honestly, I'm not quite sure how any paladin can be in that role, especially in the first adventure. I'm sure I could figure something out, but I'd never select her as a character that I'd play. If I had to choose from those four, Harsk is the one I'd go for. 

By the way, a wizard, a paladin, a ranger and a bard? Not exactly the most iconic adventuring party either, is it? Although I suppose you had the four characters from the previous adventure path to choose from if you really wanted to; a sorceress, a cleric, a rogue and a fighter. Three out of four of those seem to fit the geography that they're set in too. Between the two adventure paths, you could get one functional adventuring group. Sigh.

In general, I'm not much a fan of the 2e artwork updates, but I think Seelah's picture might actually be one of the few that's a definite improvement.