But remember you’re comparing a finished story to an incomplete one. I agree with you the HoTs being drug dealers and pimps is outlandish. I’ve always had an issue with that plot point, but the whole Leah thing was hardly grounded in reality. No less outlandish than Quinn being a pimp. Actually break it down AL had a boatload of contrivances, but they were tied together by the story and characters. AL took a few dubious plot leaps and murky hand waving explanations, had them all blow up spectacularly in that twist and went forward off the back of how it's characters reacted to it. The actual plot leading up to the choice falls to the wayside and the story ends on how the characters handle it. BaDIK could easily follow suit.
We're currently sitting on half a story and all the heavy shit is yet to come. There's nothing stopping him from writing sincere, grounded reactions to whatever drama bomb is on its way. The tone is undeniably different this time but would it be any less heavy and grounded to see (and this isn't a plot prediction, it's an example of a traumatic event) Maya or Josy forced into prostitution? How they got there might be contrived but he could easily write a realistic reaction to such a revelation. As Stephen King put it.
“Pop culture writing is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Literature is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances.”
We've got our extraordinary situation, we've got our relatively ordinary people... we're just waiting to see how they react.
I would be somewhat surprised by your particular example (outside of a "bad" ending for the two), but I agree with your overall point.
Leah being a
serial killer in AL (as opposed to a more mundane obsessive crush) isn't particularly well foreshadowed, and it completely dominates the last quarter of the game. The idea that something really bad couldn't pop out of the woodwork 3-4 episodes from now is just not consistent with how DPC has worked as a writer.
Even if we assume DPC isn't going to kill any of the LIs this time (and simply killing one would still be much less extreme than what happened in AL), there are plenty of bad things that could happen. The simplest is that the LIs will eventually each face a major crisis simultaneously, and the MC will only be able to help one of them through it (maybe Maya and Josy as a combo if DPC truly is feeling sorry for AL).
The other girls will survive, but as scarred survivors who never quite get their lives back on track. Maya is forced to live the life her father expected of her. Bella becomes a reclusive old maid. Josy becomes a jaded dancer at the Pink Rose. Jill settles for marrying Tybalt and being effectively a trophy wife. Sage is caught up in Quinn's drug scandal and spends several years in prison. All of those would be far less tonally jarring than AL's finale was, yet would still seriously suck to play through.
That's what I worry about. I like all of the LIs. Hell, I like most of the characters in this game. I want to see them all get happy ending (or learn the error of their ways for the antagonists), and I remain hopeful that is what will happen. But I absolutely don't think we can take that for granted.
Maybe there's some other common girl they (or we) don't know yet. Crabs only live in people with pubic hair, which excludes 90% of the people we know.
