No, I did not. But that doesn't change anything.
You can leave her, yes, and what does it show? That all your band of mercs is incapable of beating one woman. That your party literally escapes with nothing but their lives for all the hard work out of fear and respect for her.
I would count that only if it is possible to kill her and get out of all this mess alive and well. Otherwise, what's the point?
The Female Domination tag doesn't mean that woman is incapable of loosing, or is Mary Sue, or is immortal. It means only that female is dominating and almost all the conversations with Carmen play out exactly as she wishes.
I'm not a huge fan of author's intentions mattering too much, so my interpretation doesn't matter more than anyone else's really, but I'd say this is less about Carmen dominating and more about an ongoing negotiation. Really the whole game is about negotiation and compromise. You begin with Carmen locked up, but your employer hasn't arrived. As the game goes on, Carmen can convince you that your employer never intended to collect, and regardless of whether she is right, he never does appear. So while you have her locked up, you can't get anything for her. So now that the parameters of the mission have changed, the question is how can you still benefit?
Killing Carmen doesn't really achieve anything. From our perspective, safely behind a screen, it might feel rewarding, but it's not pragmatic if you're one of the Mercs. Roman wants a Knighthood, he wants recognition and status, and there's some honour in that. Killing Valentine won't get him that. Even if she's Greater Hirane's enemy, she's noble, and they'll never knight somebody for killing a noble. In that time period it was custom to ransom captured nobles. If you were going to kill them, you'd do it publicly as an execution. Neither side wants assassins murdering their nobility. It's mutually assured destruction. So he could kill her and not take the credit, but that's a risk for no reward. Walking away is safer, since Carmen has much more important things to do than send her troops after some mercenaries. There's also joining Carmen, which is also risky but at least offers a reward. The riskiest option is to try and take Carmen north, and this is the one she is most opposed to, and reacts most violently too. That Carmen
can fight to get free doesn't mean she wants to. She's very Sun Tzu in her approach, and would prefer to subdue her enemy without fighting, because fighting is the least effective way to get what she wants. Being stuck in a Watchhouse for three days isn't fun, but sustaining an injury which takes weeks or months to heal from? That's worse.
So in a certain sense Carmen does dominate the different routes, but the goal isn't necessarily to make Carmen lose it's to make Roman win, and you get to define your own win state. If you value Roman's friendship with Glasha, that can be the win state. If you think Roman's budding romance with Crow can satisfy him, then that can be the win state. If you think Roman needs to earn a position of power, then joining Carmen can be the win state. If you want Carmen to lose, you can do that, it just costs your life.
In any of these scenarios, Carmen doesn't really
win. It's revealed in some of the endings that your employer's plan was to attack her fleet, and it worked perfectly. The Sanguine Rose war effort takes a huge hit, and so does Carmen's reputation. Carmen almost always gets out alive, but much like the player, she's losing something in the process. Her decision to negotiate her way out, rather than fight, ends up costing her dearly, but if she fought from the get go then she might have lost her life. It's easy to feel like Carmen is always winning, but she arguably loses much more than Roman does.
We didn't want an ending which lets anyone have it all, since we felt it would diminish the whole point of what a choice is. It's a negotiation, you decide what you want to take away and what you leave behind. If there was an option to have everything, that would defeat the whole point. Your choices matter, or they matter as much as we could make them matter for an indie studio with a minimal budget.
All that said, it's perfectly valid and cool for people to feel that there should be a route where you can win more, or outsmart Carmen and beat her completely. It's just that, to us, that would spoil what we were going for. It would be a different game entirely.
Does this game have mom son incest
Nope, none of the characters are related.
