- Sep 20, 2018
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I think the more acute risk is Mina learning enough about August to work out just what the Club is (or at least purports to be). Given her... curiosity, I find that a lot more likely to lead to problems than August being sufficiently smitten by her beauty to insist on recruiting an otherwise unsuitable woman (i.e. one who is nowhere near desperate enough to tolerate what patrons do to their toys).
I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with this at all. If you thought the MC would be calling the shots once he joined the Club, I don't think you were paying attention. Like TD said, the MC sold out his conscience the moment he learned Rose was sent to have sex with him purely as part of her interviewing process... and still took the job.
In fact, please note that upon learning what Chuck expected the MC to do with Rose, the MC (and player) gets no option to refuse the job, nor to call Chuck and rip him a new one for being a party to human trafficking. No, the MC takes the job, full stop. As he says to himself:
There's no player escape clause on this matter, which IMHO rather dwarfs the lack of alternative when Kathleen starts pulling our strings later on. Where there IS player input, however, is on how the MC responds to his strings being tugged. In Rosalind's case, we get the chance to accept her without any further hardship, or to indulge in the opportunity (and perhaps to regret it afterwards). In the case of Kathleen telling us to strip, we can play along with her game or deliberately sabotage it, but in the end we're still going to be working for her for the long haul.
In other words, we ARE given meaningful choices, but only within the scope of the game's overarching narrative. I find that neither surprising nor inappropriate in a video game, particularly a visual novel.
On specific point of the MC being a patronage hire, I again disagree. The Club is an exclusive, underground brothel: knowing someone already in management (or at least management adjacent) is the ONLY way to get hired. The MC's referral may be a little more senior than usual, but a) that only carries so far, and b) Kathleen ain't the one who recommended him and she's the one who decides exactly how far it carries in this case. And if there was any doubt before that moment that Kathleen wasn't a kindly lady, well, there certainly isn't afterwards. IMHO, that's another point of the scene.
I may be biased, but I do think you have the right way to view this particular issue. I know I find a number of things the MC automatically does distasteful (having to throat fuck Felicia in the first Exhibition, and going balls to the wall with Dalia prior to Exhibition 2 are examples that spring to mind). But I've always felt they made sufficient sense given the MC's canonical character and the limits of the medium to accept them as a part of the story without feeling railroaded - or at least, not more railroaded than the MC himself. That's what got me through issues like the MC having to dance to Kathleen's tune when I first played the game, and it still holds true nearly 4 years later.
Ultimately, I think anyone who really struggles with this sort of scene will probably struggle with the game as a whole. So as a relatively early indicator of where the game is going, the scene works as it should.
Plus, on the specific topic of the MC objecting to whipping it out at Kathleen's command, it feels like a preposterously hypocritical take. The MC already knows getting naked in front of a small audience is the least of what the girls are in story for, and they have even less recourse to withdraw than he does. If he'll turn a blind eye to much worse for the geese, he can suck it up when it's the gander's turn. Getting drugged was a much bigger issue, but that happened before he could respond, and he is at least able to express his displeasure at that turn of events.
(All that said - TANGENT ALERT! - it would have been nice to have an option to object *after the fact* when Kathleen injects him with the drug should he win the "prize" in Week 1. By that point he's at least developed a rudimentary working relationship with Kathleen, and there are plenty of reasons why an MC might draw the line at being routinely dosed with an experimental, mood altering drug. I think it would have been relatively feasible to add a scene where the MC can express some of the player's potential concerns/frustration and Kathleen could humor them sufficiently to explain why the MC won't make a larger issue of it. It's not a major concern (since the game does thoroughly foreshadow that the prize might be something he's better off without), and its always possible this sort of assurance might interfere with a future plot point. So I definitely don't think it needs to be retroactively changed. It's just an example of where I think the game walked closer to the line than necessary.)
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