I dont think I can articulate exactly what it was about Leah that gave me pause - but a gut instinct told me she wasn't okay. I pushed those concerns down with denial - nah the writer is just lazy and she is just there to add to a harem - she's easy and wants to boff us because...well...its an adult novel who cares about verisimilitude. But encounter after encounter I felt something wasn't right. Then after MC made up with both babes and was ready to go, and had a nasty encounter with ex, and Liam's friendly advice warning that we are going to wind up in a mess just like our ex was like. I just had this sense of doom. I chalked it up to paranoia - pushed it away - but just had this strange feeling that something bad was going to happen. It was easy to assume Melissa's step-dad as he was the obvious scapegoat/patsy/red-herring. So the who was shocking - but then I remembered the way I felt when interacting with her and I realized that the writer wasn't lazy - the subtleties were there and I detected them, I just ignored them.
I must apologize though that while my references of shows where characters that we invested in were killed off for story development, it doesn't carry the same impact as say a story like this that is interactive and based on one's own choices - so i can see how this would be far more personal. That being said - things like that happen in life. My father died of a heart-attack 5 years ago. Yes he wasn't healthy - so that's a bit of a foreshadowing, but he was stable and healthy enough to be living a normal life. We went out to dinner as a family with my kids, dropped him off went home. Then got call 4 hours later from my mom. So not everything bad that happens is something foreseeable. I know you know this so I'm not trying to sound preachy. Those opposed to this concept argue that they dont want reality in their stories - that they come to stories like this to escape reality. That's a great point. I for one can handle some reality with my fiction. It makes it more...true I guess....that complete happy endings don't always happen. In the end it's a matter of taste. It's not wrong. It's not right. Kind like fake barbie doll tits vs small mosquito bite natural looking - Then there's some like me who love it all.
I think the story was great, I think the characters were great. I was shocked and grieved and was angry that someone i came to care for was taken away like that. But I also respect the creative direction and applaud it and accepted it. It wasn't wrong. It wasn't right. It was just art and the authors direction. If there's any criticism that I've read that I agree with was the idea that perhaps it was not fairly tagged or could have betrayed loyal patreons who paid him for several months by flipping the script so suddenly. I for one wasn't in that crowd so it would be unfair of me to opine from that perspective. I personally found it shocking but accepting having paid only one month (recently) for Patreon to have the privilege of playing it. And it was all worth my $5. (well now $10 cuz I really want the last chapter, too this month).
