- Dec 29, 2018
- 447
- 2,675
Popularity isn't always a sign of quality. There's tons of popular movies, shows, games, and songs that are garbage.
And my dislike of Quinn is not by design, or at least not all of it. I hate Tybalt, Dawe, and other characters for the reasons that you are meant to hate them. But I hate Quinn for two reasons. First is for the intended reasons, which is that she treats you and your friends like shit. But the second is because she's unnaturally protected by the writer from any type of attempts at retaliation or obstruction.
I'm not. I'm totally fine with people being flawed. I am not here complaining about Tybalt being an ineffectual buffoon because the game treats him as an ineffectual buffoon. It's the inconsistency of the characters in the story that I hate.
I've recently been re-watching the TV series The Wire, and it's a very good show that is packed full of deeply flawed characters. Borderline alcoholics, womanizers, sycophantic ladder climbers, guys who bend the rules to take short cuts that backfire. All of them are all sorts of messed up. But the story works because their actions make sense and fit well into the overall story. Both sides give the other a run for their money, and that makes for compelling viewing.
Quinn's closest analogue would probably be Ziggy from season two. He gets special treatment for being the union president's son, and Quinn gets special treatment for being the sorority president's daughter (so to speak). He is a constant screw up who, on the rare occasion when he does something well, gets screwed over by someone else (a bit like Quinn getting jumped when she finds a way to pay down her debts). They are both deeply insecure characters who act out in order to feel like big shots, and that generally backfires on them. But the big difference for me is that people treat Ziggy in a believable manner, and but we don't get that with Quinn. And by that I mean that we as the player character are unreasonably (and inexplicably) restricted with how we can respond to her.
When you're making a game that allows the players to choose how the player character acts to different situations, you have to make reasonable allowances for the future implications of those scenes. We have no reason not to tell Maya the full truth about Quinn, and every reason to do so, yet are forced into that awkward scene where he says she's evil but won't explain why. We see how much Sage hates being lied to and deceived by Chad, so we know how much it's going to hurt when she eventually learns about Quinn, but we are forced to just let her blindly walk into that one. We know that Maya is desperate to get into the HOTs, and we know that Quinn is opposing her and tormenting her at every possibility, but we are severely limited in what we can do to help.
When we see that jerk from the store crying in the closet, we can walk away. When we see Quinn with a bloody nose, we have to rush to her aid (and only walk away once she demands it). The things that Tybalt does to Jill pale in comparison to the things that Quinn does to Maya, and yet we can do unreasonably horrible things to Tybalt and nothing at all to Quinn. Simply telling Maya and Sage about what little you know about Quinn is the absolute bare minimum you could do as a friend, but you can't do it because she's the writer's pet. There's no logical in game reason for your character to keep quiet on a path where you've rejected Quinn at every opportunity and also been nice to Maya and Sage at every opportunity. That makes Quinn horribly written. It's a consistent ongoing problem, and not some one off oddity where the writer accidentally painted himself into a corner.
The only thing DPC needs to do is throw an occasional bone to players who hate Quinn, but he can't seem to bring himself to do that. The most recent example is the scene where you are party planning with Sage and Quinn. What's the worst thing you can say there? You can say "no I don't want that" when Quinn asks if you want a threesome with her and Sage, and you can very lightly tease Quinn about her having competition for your affections (which seems to be flirting with her rather than any sort of mean-spirited teasing). It's super lame. You're never allowed to give her even the slightest taste of her own medicine. Instead, you have to then agree to wear a blindfold and agree to let them do things to you.
All that needed to happen in that scene was to give us the chance to refuse to play with Quinn and mention something she's done as a reason why. Then you could've had Sage make a short speech about how she wants the two of you to get along and play nice. But we don't get that, and it's so strange. I don't even know if Sage knows about the taser incident or not. We see her chastise Quinn about her treatment of Maya, where she says that there is a difference between hazing and bullying, but we don't see her mention any specifics. The taser would be a pretty good example to use there wouldn't it? Which leaves me wondering if this is another white-washing of Quinn to give her more mass appeal (like the absence of needles since the opening scene of Ep2).
Sage had previously asked me if I liked Quinn, and I had replied with a very hard no. So why is my latest no an even weaker no when I have more reasons to hate Quinn than I did before? If it's to keep Sage happy, then you have to set that up. Have her give us an ultimatum that she won't bang us if we're mean to her friends or something like that. She didn't like us telling Quinn to eat shit, so build on that a bit. Follow through with the foundation you've already set. Don't just have them all act buddy buddy for no reason. It's like when the MC suddenly demands that Sage treat him like a boyfriend and not a fuck buddy like they previously agreed. That was probably meant to be a result of how the situation reminded him of how he lost Zoey because he didn't tell her how he felt, but it's not set up properly because Zoey was hardly mentioned outside of the time we told Bella about her, which ended with us saying that we were never truly in love with Zoey.
