Agreed. Frankly I'm baffled with Chad, he can barely keep Sage satisfied yet apparently has a phone sex pal on the side. Sometimes I get the feeling he's with Sage mostly for the status these days. Being the frat president dating the sorority president. Maybe it's a recent development when he started taking steroids and they were a lot more active before?
Then again the way he and his crew are portrayed... not really the sharpest tools in the shed. I am literally in stitches at their dumb, dumber and dumbest routine.
I think you hit the nail on the head with that one. It currently reads like a "marriage of convenience." And Chad's... problems in the bedroom do seem to stem from the drug use. But if that were the case, then yeah, you'd wonder how he's managing to keep a girl on the side. Unless that "side piece" is also just trying to cash in on the status symbol thing as well. Being known in certain circles as the girl the frat president is cheating on his actual girlfriend with could bring with it a good bit of influence.
As for the Alphas being portrayed as imbeciles, well... the majority of the background cast are pretty cookie-cutter. There's really nothing to any of the Alphas other than "big, dumb jocks," there's not much to the sorority other than "We're slutty. Woo." The nerds are nerdy, the rich kids are snobbish. I mean, they're all stereotypes, and arguably the reasoning behind not making them more than the stereotypes is so that the "main" characters stand out more. Jill stands out more because she's kind of part of the rich clique but doesn't act stereotypically "holier than thou." (just as the first example off the top of my head.)
This time round, I think he's mostly into just telling an engaging story. It'll still be HIS story though, so whatever the audience says, he probably won't change anything. And hense the warning: this is might cause some feelings, so try not to cry too hard.
I can't say it's a bad way to go about things. I like when an author has a vision and follows through with it.
That's just it. I don't expect him to change anything. That's what I'm getting at. It almost seems like that "warning" at the beginning is "I'm doing this the way I want to, some of you with delicate feelings may not like it. Oh well." It just comes across as him acknowledging that people didn't like his "vision" for his last game, therefore he's very passively-aggressively telling those people off by saying "You won't like this. And I don't care that you don't."
(Shrug)
Thing is, there's a lot to be said for "artistic integrity." I know there's a lot of disdain for people who "sell out." You had an idea for a thing, then people told you that your idea sucked, it wasn't going to work and you changed everything. And that's looked down upon. I understand that.
But at the same time, history is full of people who thought they, and only they, knew what they were talking about when it comes to writing a story or directing a movie or painting a portrait or what have you. And there is such a thing as ignoring useful criticism. Which, in my opinion, can be just as bad as "selling out."
I've gone on record as saying that I think Cake is good at certain aspects of storytelling. Like, genuinely good, I'm not bullshitting when I say it. But I've also gone on that very same record as saying there are some things he
doesn't do well. And I think his sort of odd fascination with "dramatic twists" is one of those things. And it certainly doesn't help that there's a growing trend of that sort of thing in today's entertainment media, with people just kind of blindly eating it up. I don't think he's quite drifted over the line into "being edgy" for the sake of being edgy - as in creating melodrama just to spice things up a little, but I can't help but just be wary of every narrative decision he makes because I'm constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
