- Aug 30, 2017
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No, I'm sorry, but he absolutely does.Tony doesn't encourage Anne and his father to have sex in the shower.
If Anne accepts Martin's advances on the beach, there's a scene outside the bathroom. Martin is trying to spy on Anne, who's left the door open. The choices are to "let him look," "tell him to go in," or "stop him." That's a conversation between Martin and Tony; Anne's in the shower, after all.
Only the second choice causes Martin to enter the bathroom. If Tony makes that choice, it's followed by this conversation:
Tony: "Ok, Dad. Why don't you go in and see what happens?"
Martin: "What? You want me to go in?"
Tony: "Yeah, here's your chance. Go in and see what happens. Just tell her you have to pee really badly and see what she says."
(I slightly edited all of that because the game's familiarity with grammar, capitalization, and punctuation are tortured, at best.)
After which the omniscient narrator asks the player how Anne should react.
Choice one is that she angrily sends him away. That's Anne making the choice, for sure.
Choice two is that she lets him use the toilet. They flirt. That's still her making the choice.
Choice three is overt flirting, during which Anne admits that Tony's presence in the house is a concern, after which Martin explains that Tony was the one who sent him into the bathroom. Making it clear to everyone that Tony's the one who set up these conditions; not Martin, and not Anne.
And then the omniscient narrator says this: "Here you get to make the choice for Anne again. Be careful!" Though it's tempting to assume that "you" means the player, the player is the MC, and the MC is Tony. Because it's ostensibly not a female protagonist game (even though it so often is, and really should be), "you" can only refer to one character: the player/MC/Tony.
The three choices that follow are to let Martin leave (some more flirting, no sex, no forced followup sex), mutual masturbation (still no sex or followup sex), or inviting Martin into the shower. Anne can invite him in (and can, along the way, berate Tony for telling Martin to enter the bathroom in the first place), but Martin never would've been in the bathroom in the first place if Tony hadn't deliberately sent him in there. Knowing the sort of person his father was and the way he treated Tony's significant others in the past, Tony would have to be an even bigger idiot than the dialogue makes him out to be to fail to realize what was going to happen if he did.
The "I can't believe he did it/I can't believe this is happening" dialogue as Martin and Anne go at it makes absolutely no sense in the context of Martin and Emma — this would be Tony reliving a nightmare — unless sex was the outcome Tony secretly wanted all along. What else could "here's your chance" possibly mean? "Here's your chance" to introduce Anne to watersports? "Here's your chance" to discuss becoming a flight attendant/sex toy? "Here's your chance" to risk your entire relationship with your son?
No. If Tony sends Martin into the bathroom, he wants them to have sex. There's absolutely no other reason to do it, because he knows what Martin will do if given the chance. The "shocked dialogue" is because the dev's a terrible writer who wouldn't understand consistent characterization if it bit him on the nuts, not because Tony's actually shocked. And if he was actually shockable by Martin fucking yet another of his love interests, then he wouldn't have let Martin enter the bathroom in the first place. Or he would've intervened sooner (he was perving the entire time, after all). Tony's right there watching the whole drama unfold. He still has agency. He can still say no. Instead, he once again pushes her into a highly sexualized situation and leaves the ultimate decision to Anne, who he already knows will fuck the nearest available dick because that's the person he's been trying to turn her into this entire time.
Again: there's no logic in the world by which Tony tells Martin to enter that bathroom unless he's utterly enslaved to his fetish. Which, by making the choices that lead to Martin and Anne having sex, he demonstrates that he is. And which his dialogue while they're having sex, and in the immediate aftermath, also demonstrates; despite all the baggage, history, and disrespect, he still gets off on it. By the time he gets around to telling Anne about Emma, it's too late. Not that she has much sympathy, because she doesn't care anymore. Neither of them do. He's not telling her to stay away from Martin because he loves her, he's pathetically attempting to exert control he lost several dozen cocks ago. She'd no more do something based on her husband's say-so than wear a burka, especially as she already knows he's not exactly averse to finding his own fun elsewhere.
For the shower scene to be effective at solidifying Anne's intent to cheat with the worst possible person with whom she could cheat, Tony can't be involved at all. He should probably be forced to go to work, which is only an alternative in the revamp (albeit one that avoids the "LOL babe, good morning, but I'm banging your dad again" scene). Anne would leave the door open so Martin thinks that she wants him to join her (which I suspect was probably the intent, and a better writer would've made that clear). Martin has to either sneak into the bathroom without Tony's involvement, or stroll in if Tony's not home. Everything has to be driven by Anne, and everything has to be hidden from Tony. That's how you set up a cheating route. Not by Tony willingly, with eyes wide open, driving a stake through his marriage and then getting off on it. That's for the super-hardcore cuckolding fetish folks. And if that's what the dev originally intended for this game — it's hardly the only piece of evidence, and the rapid appearance of that sort of mood in TACOS suggests that it might be — then fair enough. But then dispense with the pretense of it being a playful open marriage romp and get to the marriage-destroying trauma. I mean: of course play around with the idea that it's the former for a while. But never let the player lose sight of the fact that it's always been the latter.
Or don't, and go the other way, but then everyone needs to be written very differently than they're being written. In all three versions of the game.
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