It is the characters around Sophia that drive the story forward, not Sophia herself. Also, please remember, AWAM is about Sophia and her role as wife and mother. It only makes sense that Dylan and Ellie get more space here. Also, I think it's good to bring Dylan forward even a bit more. After all he has to seduce both his mother and his sister. That takes time.
Sorry, but the stories around Dylan make the whole game worth playing from my point of view. Even Sam only gains weight in the story through his role as a competitor to Dylan. Without Dylan, AWAM just wouldn't work. He has the best overarching stories next to Sophia. I'm even curious to see the story between Dylan and Ellie accelerates.
That's becaues L&P is a male trying to write from the perspective of a female, and not understanding fully what that means. So L&P keeps inserting Dylan into the story more and more as he can relate far better to Dylan than Sophia and her struggles. I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but it's why L&P needs a small group of people to sound board off of so that he can gain different perspectives. Dylan just feels like an insert character and the "hero" of the story, Sophia is just the lens through which we watch the story.
So many of the different story threads tie directly to Dylan, because Dylan is the more relatable character to L&P. Bennet's blackmail. Aiden's blackmail. The Sam/Amber/Dylan MILF-off thing. Christine/Marie/Emma all being love interests to Dylan; even though Emma was telegraphed as a lesbian route interest for Sophia, Marie and, specifically, Claire as swinger type route, and Christine seemed way more tied to Ellie's story than to Dylan. Dylan is active in multiple sports and is learning martial arts to defend himself, we've spent multiple scenes following those plot lines. Two scenes have been dedicated to Dylan getting a haircut.
It's confounding since there are other family members whos lives should also be affecting Sophia and
her story. What has happened in Ellie's life that has affected the story? Kissed a girl at the pool, and asked her mother some pretty benal, at least so far, things about sex. And we've spent one scene at the dance studio, one in the dressing room, and one short scene with Ellie smoking a cigarette with Christine, that Dylan takes a part in unless sent away to the boarding school. What about Patricia? Encouraged Sophia to go out to a club and to a galla event at a museum, and introduced Sophia to Claire. Patricia has done little else in the story besides introduce Sophia to someone else. You know what most of these scenes have in common? They all came very early in the story. The longer the story has gone on, the more focus has shifted in Dylans favor, when he was already getting as much time as the rest of the family.
I absolutely cheered when Liam got in trouble at the casino, because finally someone else was having an effect on the family and it was a fire that wasn't directly tied to Dylan that Sophia had to put out. It was supposed to make Liam out like a bad guy, and I turned around and created a goodwife savefile solely because of this event.
My problem with Dylan isn't that it's Dylan, it's that he isn't Sophia. I enjoyed the early parts of this story, specifically because Sophia seemed like a well written character. Most of the early filthy options weren't even filthy, but iwere pretty innocous things like giving a phone number to a galla coordinator or enduring a hug that would make most people uncomfortable. Same goes with most of the lesbian temptations; rubbing sunscreen on a daughter's back, complimenting the looks of another woman, have a bathtowel lowered during a massage. It planted all these seeds for what could become of Sophia, and now for the last twoish year it feels like to story has drifted further away from all these early plot points so that Dylan can take up more focus.