Hot damn, I popped up in there quite a bit towards the top. I'm flattered!
That was... one fucking Matterhorn of a read, even if I did admittedly skip over the story bits I already knew about.
With all the story beats condensed like this... I have to maintain, I don't think Callum
has a consistent pattern of behavior that can be adequately analyzed, except for a comfy blanket of 'selfish enough'. Though you did put paid to me saying he hadn't done anything 'truly reprehensible'; I must have pushed down the Energy Drink Incident. But I'll get to that.
Anyway, I've got a few reasons:
1: ESL. It sounds like a cop-out, but words have meaning, and different languages have distinctions English doesn't, just like English has distinctions other languages don't. You can run a sentence through Google Translate to maybe get the gist through the words, but that doesn't mean you'll get the intended nuance of the full sentence in its original dialect without knowledge or a native speaker.
2: Development pattern. None of the routes are complete yet, obviously. And unless I'm horribly mistaken there's not a pattern to which character is added to next, so the routes all lengthen at Milda's whim. This may lead to forgetting what things have already been established between Callum and another character, or which were established by a character that may apply to another route. This could even occur on a day-by-day basis, depending on what Milda's personal life is like at the moment.
3: Convenience. Callum will be what he needs to be in the moment to push things forward in a manner that is clear or understandable to Milda, which kind of dovetails with point 1. He'll be dumb one moment, cunning the next, mean, nice, introspective, completely oblivious... Everyone touches on those points sometime in their life; humans are complex creatures and far from perfect. But Callum has no baseline behavior list of traits except 'penis in hole' or 'grab titty', and what he'll do in the moment to achieve those noble goals.
For comparison, the MC from Grandma's House - I think the default name is Thomas - is a Gigachad and almost a literal pussy magnet, and depending on your choices will bury that bone - also nameable - in every possible orifice. Probably several times. He'll even go after married women, like Callum will, but only if they're unhappy - or in one notable case, with permission. But he has a baseline behavior of 'Good Guy Greg' that he operates on that leads him to that bounty in the first place. Callum doesn't. My neck popped several times from the whiplash of reading the details of the Mabel route. It was like being in a blender in a paint shaker.
Granted, those points can't handwave the most egregious actions Callum takes in the course of the game. See the aforementioned Energy Drink Incident. But again, with everything collated, those seem more like exceptions rather than a rule. They register as kind of shocking, unexpected, which says to me at least that they're outside of what little is expected of Callum, even as the main character of a porn game. Cal's a little prick, there's no question, but those actions seem far more like weaknesses of writing rather than character.
Hopefully the game gets a once-over when it's much closer to completion, maybe by an editor.
Mad respect for putting the time in, though, on the game and your subsequent colossus of an analysis. Goddamn.
