Never got the feeling that taking her virginity was supposed to be the right thing to do. The MC himself acknowledges that Henry, Ellen, Katie and Sonja would all be mad at him, even Sasha looked him down with disgust. Gloria is some kind of forbidden fruit at best.
The romance would have been better if she had not been portrayed like a vulnerable child in a huge part of the game. The first visual the MC got from her is her child form, she basically replaced the little girl from Caraccas in his mind. Henry is portrayed as her surrogate father, Ellen & Katie act like her big sister figures, she's Sonja's morality pet. While Chandra & Abby are still way younger than the MC, they're both portrayed as snarky young women with an attitude and confident with their sexuality, so it doesn't really feel wrong. Gloria on the other hand is still traumatised with her aborted first sexual experience. The dream sequence where the MC as a full grown man is trapped in Gloria's first boyfriend'skin and watches her undressing herself despite the fact she's supposed to be 15 years old at this point, is actually creepy and uncomfortable. In many cases, the MC looks like a pervert every time he lusts after her. Even the dream threesome session with Ellen, while being hot, is pretty weird considering Gloria's having sex with her big sis figure and her fuck buddy.
It doesn't help either that she mentioned Ellen during the sex scene, confessing she feels less sexy than her. She sounded like a teenage girl lusting after her big sister's boyfriend.
Great points!
I think the issue is that Gloria is supposed to fulfill the porn trope of the innocent virgin, which doesn't fit well with the cyberpunk setting, where nobody is innocent. Having a grown woman act like a child in a world, where exploitation is normalized, gets creepy very fast. If anything she should have grown up pretty fast, because she spend her formative years homeless on the streets and all.
In contrast Chandra and Abby are also very young, but fit the setting well, because they show off the club and drug scene. Having rich kids rebelling against their corpo parents by partying with the lower class is also an interesting plot device.
I've mentioned before in this thread that I think the sex scenes in this game are a little disappointing, because they don't have anything to do with the setting. This doesn't mean that the game is bad, because the romance arcs are written well either way. That's especially the case for Katie and Ellen, but Victoria also works, because her sex scenes have plot relevance. In Gloria's case it's just so on the nose that she only exists, because we like them young. Her character is tropy in a way that can detract from the quality of the rest of the game.
Gloria could have been a newborn AI hiding in the matrix from the grasp of the corpos, who want to exploit her genius hacking skills. Ellen organizes a heist to get the MC to a specific port he can jack into to find and save Gloria. The heist is a success and Gloria and the MC get to know each other. He jacks into the matrix to visit her and subsequently jacks into the private port between her virtual legs, because she's a conscious AI and wants to explore human feelings and emotion.
But then, oh no, the corpos found her again! At the final showdown Victoria has to step up. The MC has always been good to her and she doesn't want to be on the side of the exploiters anymore. Her augmentations allow her to download Gloria onto her brain to remove Gloria's trace from the matrix and save her once and for all, so that she doesn't have to hide anymore.
The climax is an epic threesome with three minds sharing two bodies. In the epilog Gloria gets her own body with extra functions (wink wink).
Like this we could have an innocent young virgin, but with a cyberpunk spin on it.
