The single biggest issue that I have with Jaye is the fact that she is the writer's pet. Any time a game has multiple romance options, and then pushes one of them much harder than all of the others, I'm almost certainly going to resent them for it. The harder the game pushes her on me, the more annoyed I get. And the more annoyed I am with her, the more noticeable her faults become.
When I played The Witcher 3, I didn't like Yennifer or Triss. But I didn't hate them, because we were allowed to choose to not be in love with them (after a while at least). I was 110% done with Yennifer after she threw Geralt into a lake via a portal (which he notoriously hates), but I still didn't hate her after that, because the game was allowing me to push back against Yennifer (which was the trigger for her to lose her temper and teleport Geralt away). As for Triss, I mostly just resented her because I had chosen Shani over Triss, and the second game didn't give a damn about that. I also thought that it was wrong for Triss to take advantage of Geralt's memory loss, but I still didn't hate her in the third game because we were allowed to distance ourselves from her in a very reasonable manner. We don't get that here in this game.
Here, we are either bitterly angry with Jaye or fawning over her with constant reassurances that she shouldn't blame herself for anything. There's very little middle ground here, and the game heavily pushes you towards Jaye. I'd be happy with them being cordial or professional, but I have zero romantic or sexual interest in her at this point.
I understand that kids are stupid and do stupid things for stupid reasons, so I don't have a problem with forgiving her for the stuff she did as a kid. Or at least I wouldn't if not for the fact that, even after five years apart, Jaye is still pulling the same old childish bullshit she always has. The small things she does are made extra annoying because we aren't allowed to challenge her on them at any point in time. One example is the locked phone fiasco.
I wanted the choice to have the main character ask Jaye why didn't she call him if she wanted to talk instead of keeping her phone under her pillow and getting increasingly angry at him for not calling her. Just to see if she understands that she has a bad habit of creating drama out of nothing. But we can't do stuff like that, which makes it seem like testing Jaye is off limits, and that irks me because she's very clearly testing him when she asks if he ever had sex with Tara. Since the game has double standards when dealing with the two, it makes their potential relationship look unfair and unhealthy.
Another example is when Jaye makes a joke about the main character reading her diary as a child. The main character takes it in stride and laughs at it, but we aren't allowed to do the same thing to Jaye. We had the perfect set up when they were talking about how Jaye was hurt that he wasn't there for her graduation. When she jokingly says "I'd have been super pissed if you were at a free concert in Mongolia", the main character should've responded with "Or missing your big day to sneak off on a date with someone?". But nope. Can't do that. That would be mean because it's poking fun of Jaye and that's not allowed. Only she can poke fun of him, not the other way around.
Likewise, we are supposed to run everything past Jaye to get her approval (like agreeing to meet with Mallory) but she doesn't have to clear things with us (like inviting Christian on board). These are all very small things on their own, but they keep adding up as the game goes on. And then we get the biggest event of the recent update, her secretly reading his journal.
Jaye knows exactly how big of an invasion of privacy this is, not only because he just told her not to do it, but because it happened to her as a child. But she does it anyways, which shows that she doesn't respect the main character enough to care about his privacy or his wants. She's supposed to be reconciling with her estranged brother, not repeating the same mistakes they made ten years ago. And she knows this. She even told her brother that "We won't get anywhere if all we do is pick at old wounds", yet she just can't control herself. She's still acting like a child, even though she's an adult who is supposed to be getting ready to take over a multi billion dollar company in the middle of a huge lawsuit.
So at this point I'm 110% done with Jaye. That was her portal to a lake moment, and I'm in need of a genie to grant me freedom from this maladjusted witch.
. Thing is though that fallen indeed does have a point when he lists it as a total. I said it myself as well before even if many of their actions are understandable from their pov and experience. Jaye does have the habit of being to attacking, placing blame and not taking responsibility or take into account how MC might have reacted to/felt about her decisions/tests and her role she played in his actions and blindly does the same years later.
