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Castle Dust
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Warning: wall o' words. Trying to get my thoughts out in full.
>but actually turned out better than I hoped
Dunno. Well, I mean, yes, I can appreciate what went right, but right now it's kind of hard not to see it as a bad end, especially as Rise and the others forget Guy even existed. And I expected our suicide play to kill Jean, not burn Guy off and reveal him again. (Forgot to comment on it when it was first revealed, but nice touch using another french name).
The sad part is for a moment I though we'd dodged the railroad by using the grenade on the chair (I was counting on you not having remembered we had it in inventory). But... then you gave us the choice to save our hide at the cost of letting friends die, and we never take that choice. So we were trapped again.
(Oh, minor continuity error- we'd looted a flashbang and a regular grenade at the first D7 raid. We used the flashbang to help Jager- so we should have thrown an explosive, not a flashbang, at the chair. Not sure that would have helped, though. Jean was recoverable without the chair, and stunning the tear and breezy slowed them down more than a death would have).
Some of the branch points are kind of obvious, in retrospect. If we had run west, Guy probably would have lived longer, and the mess with discovering what he really was would have taken place near Linda and Elizabeth, potentially giving us more options (at the cost of placing other characters at risk of crazy tear stuff). If we'd run to the LR we probably would have run into whatever de Castillo is doing to fight tears down there. Our choices (and removing Guy from the decision) also cost us the chance of getting Jager or Lira to head west- and she would have been very useful if recruited into Linda's powerbase. As is, de Castillo is going to have the chance to try and scoop her up, and we have to worry about our secret Doctor stuff or robots getting hacked. (Or we may have lost them all together- I can't tell if Jean plans to rob them of the data, or neutralize them as breakers completely. Perhaps retroactively, with the time-tearing talk).
The real hanging question is what would have happened if we'd gone to the chair or drawn on tear powers in the last moment instead of over-breaking. Was a better outcome possible, or would tapping into Jean at all just have cost us Guy anyways, and loss of control of the character? What was Isabella really after, and how much of a dick were we turning the one person she seemed to trust and care about into killing her? (Just because she snapped doesn't mean she was a terrible person. She might have snapped simply due to the profundity of what it meant that we made 'Jean' reject her). ((Or maybe not so much, considering Jean was pleasantly surprised to have killed her)).
Overall, Guy makes a really odd breaker. He didn't really have a past. His break didn't cost him anything, or traumatize him. There was no sacrifice or recovery- breaking gave him everything. His identity, his family, and his friends. For the exceedingly short time he was allowed to have them. (He was conscious all of what, 3 days?). And then he had to choose to give it all up, and destroy himself, in a desperate (and only somewhat successful) attempt to preserve any of it.
From a reader perceptive, it's kind of weird too. We made all this investment and prep work for what we thought would be the slow construction of a build that almost wasn't relevant. (Guy never had a real fight- everything was trivialized by normality tricks against scrubs, superior numbers, or extraordinary circumstances. His stats were almost irrelevant). Similarly, we invested in a character who had to face his end just as he was starting to develop. And in relationships we never got to see the results of, and that now won't even be remembered (the Guy-Sidhe dynamic was fun, he and Rise were getting close, we barely scratched the surface with Lira, or with Jager (I meant to talk with him about his reaction after we woke up. And we never found out who he was looking for, either)).
I mean, the story certainly works. It's good. But the what ifs, and false expectations and things cut short by circumstances we didn't understand or see coming just leave a bitter sadness. (I did not expect "plan let's cut past the amnesiac protag running away bullshit and face the truth" to lead to death. Or for what looked like our first real fair fight to suddenly go so horribly wrong).
(And there's certainly a nice congruency with the way things lined up in the end. We made an avatar real, the actor played his role to the end, ending the play with literal and meta use of a chekhov's gun (more play references),simultaneously using it, and establishing it to used later).
>dangling thoughts
...where'd breezy go? I though Guy sent him with the others, still trapped by Sidhe, but he wasn't mentioned in the epilogue.
Missed opportunity- I have expected the Awakened Guy to make a reference, recognizing that the manner in which he was sacrificing himself, using his thread up, was the same way that Raphael / Daniel did.
I wonder how a Michelle / Sidhe encounter will go. Will Beloved By Avatars effect her in any way? (It's supposed to only work on her avatars, but Sidhe is an odd edge case, being independent now). Would Michelle see a free avatar as a fair game- material to be used to unlock the third of her children?
Guy's odd death (unraveling, over-breaking, and becoming someone else) also means I can't see if one of my theories is right. I half expect that when breakers die, they end up back in front of the man in the chair. Guy's special case means there was no after action report, no debrief, no end of life review. ...I wonder if that will catch his attention. One of his children went missing. Sent out into the world, but never coming back.
And, goddamn but we can't keep male characters alive in this quest (their only safety is to hide behind minor allied character status). And that's another person dying for Linda, too. We've got compounded men in refrigerators and black widow syndrome. (Linda's got good reason to be afraid of spiders).
>>77514
Yes, this still bugs me. I know we were being railroaded at that point, and almost nothing would have helped us, but dang it, how are we supposed to try and find a way out if we don't know one of the things we have to exploit.
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