Most Half-Life players felt at home with Portal 2's silent protagonist, Chell, but the game's writer Erik Wolpaw revealed that her silence has reasons beyond Valve familiarity with that design style or being influenced by Half-Life.
"We always assumed she could talk and simply just chooses not to, what with these robots all being dicks," he said. "She's not giving them the satisfaction of saying anything."
"There's also this thing, with comedy -- this is sort of reductive -- there are sort of two different patterns," Wolpaw added. "There's the straight man in a world gone mad. And the other one is: You're a crazy person in a sort of straight world. Portal is definitely the world gone mad with a straight man. And the straight man is you... Because you have to write in the margins in the game, time is kind of at a premium. The fact that there's already this established thing where you can have a silent protagonist, that saves us a lot of time."
Wolpaw noted that most players weren't bothered by Chell's silence and that he "guarantee[s] if she had to say her straight man lines, at the expense of half of the other dialogue, it would suck."
