Miranda is incredibly unlikable. She's bitchy and bossy. The game desperately tries to remind you of how tragic she is. And the camera insists on focusing in on her ridiculously huge bubble butt at every opportunity.
At least they don't have any illusions about respecting her, I guess.
Her driving tragedy is that her ambiguously abusive father had her genetically engineered to be perfect, and she is constantly drowning under the pressure of living up to her genetics. That's an interesting conflict for a character to have, but there is an important concept you should learn in your first writing class: Show, don't tell.
Rather than acting it, Miranda instead chooses to tell you how hard it is to be perfect in every conversation. And since she's so unlikable, I just can't be bothered to care. I just wish her father had engineered her a better personality.
Miranda, like everyone else in the game, can't explain why she's working for Cerberus. If you choose the right dialog options, you can seriously have this exchange:
Miranda: "I work for the Illusive Man because his goals are noble."
Shepard: "What are the Illusive Man's goals?"
Miranda: "No one knows. He is very mysterious."
...Thanks, game writer. I feel I can fully appreciate Miranda's motivations now.
Every character has their special side mission, and Miranda's is just as weakly written as she is.
Miranda asks Shepard to help her rescue her sister. Naturally, it turns out that she's already prepared a shuttle, because she assumed he would help. There's another tally mark under 'bitchy and bossy.'
Compounding Miranda's great tragedy is the fact that, after she ran away from home, her father engineered a second child – essentially her twin sister. Miranda kidnapped the child as a baby and sent it to live with an anonymous family to prevent her sister from suffering her father's abuses.
It's a fine set up, but I felt a weird sense that the developers thought that this was some great moral quandary. I kept getting options to act horrified by her actions. Granted, Miranda never actually bothers to explain how her father was abusive and manipulative, so maybe he just didn't buy her the shiny spaceship she wanted when she turned sweet 16. But, giving her the benefit of the doubt, there is absolutely no justification for acting like she did the wrong thing by rescuing her sister.
As her mission progresses, she says we're supposed to meet her old friend who helped her escape in the first place. He's her best friend in the whole world, and she trusts him so much that it would crush her entirely if he betrayed her. But that would never happen, she assures Shepard, because he's her best friend ever and she trusts him soooo much.
ALL RIGHT, I GET IT!
Of course, what's his name betrays her, and it is tragic, because (did she mention?) he's her best friend, and she trusts him.
His motivation for betraying her? Her father is rich, so her sister will have a good life with him. Let's hop back up a bit. There was something important up there somewhere... Where is it? Oh. Right:
"...her old friend who helped her escape in the first place."
Her friend knows that her father was abusive, and he helped her escape from him. But because betrayal bumps up the drama and tragedy of Miranda's life, an extremely flimsy motivation is shoehorned into this scene.
After you shoot some people, her sister escapes safely, and Miranda tragically notes that she's happy her sister can live a normal life, even if she'll never know that Miranda exists.
Everything about Miranda's story and personality is so over-dramatized that it comes off as laughable. Couple this with the fact that Miranda is completely unlikable, and I just can't find myself caring in the slightest about her tragedies.
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