like, these poor little bug gals (pdf, p.32) left their evil hivebent lives behind to go make friends in the Core Worlds. their culture is all about cooperation and friendliness. A ton of their mechanical abilities revolve around conversation and social skills. And they have a Charisma flaw.
what bugs me about it isn’t the mechanical challenge of playing an envoy. Although they also don’t even have a Strength or Dex boost, so, like, they really can’t be competent envoys unless you take the +free/+free option. you can navigate that, more or less. that’s a me problem.
What bugs me about these bugs is that they really, by all rights, should have good social skills by now.
I may not be a Starfinder expert, but the old rationale for shirren having low Charisma seems to be mostly, “well, they’re weird bug people, they aren’t used to wider society”. right? but not only does that frame their communication style entirely through the lens of a non-shirren perspective (shirrens aren't really antisocial, society is just marginalizing them), doesn't it also suggest this kind of bleak, nihilistic determinism?
it’s been in-universe decades. a generation has passed. the shirren are thoroughly free of the Swarm's influence. they have had ample opportunity to learn how to communicate with other ancestries. other ancestries have had ample opportunity to learn how to communicate with shirrens, to understand their unique emotional expressions as being every bit as beautiful and nuanced as those of humans and space catgirls. these bugs are defined by having good social skills with one another, by wanting to have good social skills with the rest of the world.
and yet after all these years, the shirren are considered, mechanically, as shy and awkward as ever. they failed. they failed, and no one wants to be the bug-gals' friends.
the plight of the shirren is that no matter how hard they try to be outgoing and gregarious, no matter how deeply they understand those around them, they will never be the social butterflies they clearly long to become. at least, not through the strengths of their own cultures and upbringings. Unless they take the +free/+free array—in essence forsaking some part of their shirren-ness to be “exceptional”, "unusual" shirrens—they will always be quirky little weirdos, rejected by bardic muses and sorcerous bloodlines and the nebulous powers of the envoy. the shirren’s penalty to charisma feels like an unspoken tragedy.