Oh. That's embarrassing. I must have misremembered. My mistake.Polarity27 said:Um. No, game progression absolutely does not require you to do this mission, nor is it a Thieves Guild quest or required to progress with the Thieves Guild. I'm sitting on a Nightingale who never did it and another working toward Nightingale who never did it. The Thieves Guild requires you to play the role of enforcer in a protection racket-- you have to go hassle business owners to pay their debts to the mob, basically. Haelga is one of the ones you need to collect from to progress as a thief. You can either beat her up, as with all three of the business owners, or you have an optional method of threatening her statue of Dibella (IIRC, you threaten her statue, break the Pawned Prawn guy's ugly sculpture, and threaten the Argonian innkeeper's family for the optional quests. Or, you can skip the optional persuasion methods and just hit them. Actually, depending on the order you did it in, the third merchant will usually hear about what you did with the other two and just hand you the cash. Haelga was my third, so she caved the minute I walked through the door.)maninahat said:That's where the problem lies: Skyrim encourages players to take part in a behaviour that has become associated with the oppressors of womankind, by turning slut-shaming into a mission objective. As I mentioned in a previous post, game progression requires you to do this mission, and outside of not doing the Thief quests, there is no choice. You are expected to do this deed and get rewarded for it. In so doing, the player has to endorse slut-shaming as much as they endorse any of the other thief guild activities. Presumably, the devs thought you'd have as much fun doing this as killing or stealing.
The slut-shaming quest is completely outside the Thieves Guild mission, it's simply a single quest from her (very grudgy) niece. You absolutely do *not* need to do it to progress in the game or with the Thieves. You can decline it and nothing happens to your game. I agree that it's a nasty quest, my first character did it and it's on my mental list of "quests that made me feel so oogy I'm never doing them again", but you're way overblowing it here. I really don't know what the devs intended, since on one hand they made Haelga kind of a joke character (look under her bed!) but on the other hand they made the niece who gives you the quest *really really clearly* lazy, unpleasant, ungrateful, and completely deluded about the sleazeball guy she has a fixation on.
Well, it may not bar your progress with the Thieves guild, but it is still a quest which your character can not express an opinion on, one way or another. As with many optional quests, the only choice begins and ends with "should do I do the quest at all, or not bother?"