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Repster posted:So... instead of having sex with people for money... she'd be better if she had sex with people she DISLIKES for money? Well, I'm getting at more like "character that creepy anime fans like, that actually hates and calls out creepy anime fans for liking her", much like how Spec Ops: The Line serves as a callout for gamers that revel in murdering scores of dudes just because the objective markers tell them to. I mean, it's still bad in Dorothy's case, but it at least mitigates it, like, at that point you can imagine that the writer meant well, and just went about proving his point poorly, rather than just being a creepy weirdo. EDIT: Just a disclaimer in case anyone is confused on this point somehow, I'm not on the side of anyone that likes Dorothy, obviously, this is just a bit of speculative design in how to do things better. EclecticTastes fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 19:26
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On top of all the horrible poo poo about Dorothy, the VN and its creators actively try to hoist her importance and likeability on the player. It's like George Lucas with Jar Jar Binks, except with a lolibot instead of an obnoxious childish alien.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:47
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Y-Hat posted:On top of all the horrible poo poo about Dorothy, the VN and its creators actively try to hoist her importance and likeability on the player. It's like George Lucas with Jar Jar Binks, except with a lolibot instead of an obnoxious childish alien. When Dorothy is not on screen, everyone should be asking "where's Dorothy?"
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Aug 26, 2016 21:06
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Covok posted:When Dorothy is not on screen, everyone should be asking "where's Dorothy?"
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Aug 26, 2016 21:28
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.png) Day Nine
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Aug 30, 2016 03:57
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So hey, a gay guy did show up! And our resident gay guy hated him. Good job game.
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Aug 30, 2016 05:07
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Wait a minute hold the loving phone. You guys again stepped over one of the worst parts of that entire episode. Dorothy said that because she doesn't show tons of skin when working (euggggh it does not feel good to type that), some of her clients feel comfortable enough to take her to dinner or a movie before they, eh, "conduct business". But think about that for just a second. Think about what that implies. "It's okay because she's actually an adult's mind in a child's body" is both accepted logic AND common enough for people to be used to seeing it in this lovely game's universe.  That's the only way her line makes any drat sense. Everything about Dorothy is awful, and new levels of awful are constantly being introduced while she's on screen. Rad Shiba, however, is pretty okay.
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Aug 30, 2016 06:35
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EclecticTastes posted:Wait a minute hold the loving phone. You guys again stepped over one of the worst parts of that entire episode. Dorothy said that because she doesn't show tons of skin when working (euggggh it does not feel good to type that), some of her clients feel comfortable enough to take her to dinner or a movie before they, eh, "conduct business". But think about that for just a second. Think about what that implies. I noticed that, and decided not to steer the discussion that way. Stay tuned for the next chapter, where this tactic does not work nearly as well.
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Aug 30, 2016 06:38
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No ET, didn't you hear? We've all been assured that everyone treats Dorothy as a pariah so her character is definitely ok. Nabokov.
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Aug 30, 2016 06:55
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See I agree that Dorothy is a terrible character, but I don't agree that adult's mind in a child's body is a technically speaking terrible thing. Sure it's creepy as hell but in my opinion the moral/ethical terrible thing about sexual/romantic relationships with children is that they don't have the emotional or mental maturity to carry out such a relationship. Dorothy has that maturity, so she's creepy but it's probably okay. I'd honestly find it worse if she was the other way around, as it is she's disturbing but potentially harmless, bar the terrible handling and writing, the reverse would be worse because it's far more visibly acceptable whilst also being a rather abusive relationship. Basically in a better written game she might have been an interesting character, as it is she stands out as worse because she's ultimately a more objectionable character than just about everyone not named Ingram, who is awful in other ways.
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Aug 30, 2016 07:08
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Oh hey, the third plotline's been introduced now. Jill's old squeeze being dead and how everyone handles it is where the game really kicks off in terms of characterization for everyone.EclecticTastes posted:That's the only way her line makes any drat sense. Everything about Dorothy is awful, and new levels of awful are constantly being introduced while she's on screen. This isn't the dumpster fire you think it is, mainly because it's a different society with different societal norms and rules. Pretty sure most people would cotton on that she's a robot at a glance and while they would think her appearance weird they wouldn't think anything sketchy or bad was going on. Services (waiters, movie ticketers etc.) might check her records to verify she's mature but that's pretty much the same as carding people at a bar. As such, yeah Glitch City is weird. Heck, every society on the face of the Earth today is weird/has weird things about that someone doesn't like. Every single one. You just have to live with it (and take them into consideration when booking your travel destinations.)
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Aug 30, 2016 08:25
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EponymousMrYar posted:Pretty sure most people would cotton on that she's a robot at a glance and while they would think her appearance weird they wouldn't think anything sketchy or bad was going on. The thing is that in this thread many people defended her character by saying that she is an outcast and what she is doing is clearly not the norm. Except now it explicitly says that it is.
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Aug 30, 2016 08:29
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See, that update was the perfect example of Valhalla's self-awareness conflicting with its constant need to pander to the disgusting fantasies of its audience. Right at the beginning was a news update about stupid anime games and "waifu" simulators. It's the sort of thing that makes you think, "Hey, maybe it can laugh at itself after all." But then Lolibot comes in and adds more detail about her character, including "pranking" a mall Santa. At this point in the VN, Dorothy is the bar regular we know the most about by a considerable margin, and that's not a coincidence. I wanted to jump out a window during that entire segment. It was so bad that it completely undermined the moment that a rather good plot point created. I hope the creators get sentenced to the collectivized farms that the Venezuelan president wants to establish. Forced famine would be a good punishment for them. Lord_Magmar posted:See I agree that Dorothy is a terrible character, but I don't agree that adult's mind in a child's body is a technically speaking terrible thing. get that OUT of my face fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 08:36
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Lord_Magmar posted:See I agree that Dorothy is a terrible character, but I don't agree that adult's mind in a child's body is a technically speaking terrible thing. What the gently caress are you doing
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Aug 30, 2016 09:06
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Lord_Magmar posted:in my opinion the moral/ethical terrible thing about sexual/romantic relationships with children is that they don't have the emotional or mental maturity to carry out such a relationship. Save it for the trial, buddy. Seriously, are you one of the writers of this game?
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Aug 30, 2016 09:18
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EponymousMrYar posted:This isn't the dumpster fire you think it is, mainly because it's a different society with different societal norms and rules. And here comes the relativism.  Dorothy and everything about her is irredeemable. Like, multiple posters, myself included, have speculated on ways to improve the way she was written to salvage something from the character, and nobody's managed anything better than "slightly less completely loving awful". I have no idea why you're so intent on trying to convince people that the pretend-child prostitute robot is Actually Okay. Because she is a dumpster fire. She is an amalgam of everything wrong with anime. You could point to pretty much any other character thus far introduced, and come up with something that can serve as a defense, even Ingram at least gets points for originality in his awfulness. Dorothy has nothing redeeming or interesting about her. Can you point out even one thing Dorothy has said that was actually well written? I mean, this whole thread, people have been pointing out examples of awful writing, and your attempted defenses have just been a bunch of vague claims that at some undetermined point, this bullshit turns into something tolerable. I mean for gently caress's sake, even cutting out the creepy stuff, the main character's ex died of a made-up sci-fi disease that existed entirely so that she literally died of a broken heart rather than something real or relatable. I'd call it hackneyed, but I feel like an actual hack would come up with something better than that. If you genuinely think any of this game is well-written, please, don't hesitate to point it out.
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Aug 30, 2016 09:20
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EponymousMrYar posted:This isn't the dumpster fire you think it is, mainly because it's a different society with different societal norms and rules. Pretty sure most people would cotton on that she's a robot at a glance and while they would think her appearance weird they wouldn't think anything sketchy or bad was going on. Services (waiters, movie ticketers etc.) might check her records to verify she's mature but that's pretty much the same as carding people at a bar. Also the whole santa prank is stupid and at best this just paints how try-hard Dorthy and the writers are, at worst it contradicts yet AGAIN with your defense that "people just know she's a robot and regard her differently". Because why on earth would they let a supposed easily-identifiable adult (because if they can't ID her as an adult straight away that would send warning signals when she's out getting DINNER with her clients*) pull this foolishness multiple times anyway. I mean ignoring the baffling setting detail that somehow this setting still has MALL SANTAS. Or even addressing the dissonance that this culture with culturally acceptable pedobots is all about a totally normal sex worker asking for dildos like a good capitalist consumer. The hitting on the Santa should be met with the same deadpan ire as anyone who tries to hit on any other service worker though which is "leave" or dealing with it instead of trying to be puritanical about it. I mean this IS supposed to be a different culture right? You can't hop over the line for the sake of a punchline. Also isn't her robot pavlov purpose to interact positively with humans? Isn't pranking negative or yield a non-positive reward? I mean that's how her agency is supposedly justified in the game. "She likes sex work" because it SUPPOSEDLY rewards her human socialization programming and such a feedback loop could be interesting to explore if she and the rest of the cast shut up about their perversions for a few and actually addressed it. Honestly that's the whole constant that wears on me, if the overwhelming majority of (anime-pretty, female) characters blathering on about sex in a way some voyeur can find charming, they all come off even more boring. None of it is vaguely 'adult' or mature and it's much less interesting since none of it is even UNIQUE to the setting. Or it's played for a joke- humor is fine of course, but it serves no purpose for it's lauded drama. I know I'm negative about this game, so let's end on a positive, I got a half-laugh about the dramatic reveal of Jill's exGF offscreen demise because you can't have a bar without some FRIDGE. *To my recollection no other character has really dressed as oddly as her save for the uniforms of the knights. EDIT: All of the overthought above is me being generous with your premise that Dorthy JUST HAS TO be who she is. blankd fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 09:20
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kjetting posted:Save it for the trial, buddy. Hey different people can have different opinions, I still think Dorothy is a better character if they had swapped her and cat-girls issues. I just think that I would be more upset about a character who was a child's mind in an adult body then an adult's mind in a child body. The concept is not bad, the fact that she's a sex worker and written terribly is. My point was not, Dorothy is fine, my point was, Dorothy is terribly written but the adult's mind in a child's body is not the problem, it's what they're using the character for that is. The other stuff was more why I think that the other way around is worse. Like if the hypothetical alternate Dorothy was just some business lady who looked like a child but came to the bar to drink and flirt she's better than the current Dorothy, if her issue was that people don't treat her like an adult because her body will remain physically childish she's a potentially interesting character. Loli-robot prostitute is a terrible character, but literal child-bodied adult potentially isn't. As it is she's half written to allow fetishisation and half written to admonish those who do so and comes across as just the former because they haven't written the latter correctly at all, she might just be written for the former, I don't actually know. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 09:52
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EclecticTastes posted:Dorothy and everything about her is irredeemable. Like, multiple posters, myself included, have speculated on ways to improve the way she was written to salvage something from the character, and nobody's managed anything better than "slightly less completely loving awful". I have no idea why you're so intent on trying to convince people that the pretend-child prostitute robot is Actually Okay. Because she is a dumpster fire. Dorothy is not OK. I agree that the best you can do is making her less bad because in order to make her decent you have to fix the rest of the game's writing. But it's possible. It's still on par with Other M (since you mentioned it first Sazero) in terms of the effort needed though  blankd posted:I mean ignoring the baffling setting detail that somehow this setting still has MALL SANTAS.  While the kernel of the Mall Santa anecdote is totally possible (kids have and can say the most messed up things) Dorothy as per her usual messes it up. The lack of reflection in the game keeps it from being anything but a shallow, introductory look into the concepts it's trying to introduce. And wow I fully admit that I had forgotten how badly it mashed together it's concepts sometimes.
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Aug 30, 2016 11:02
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Jill's ex died on the way back to her home planet it's actually impressive how Dorothy manages to keep getting worse Hwurmp fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 12:25
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EponymousMrYar posted:Dorothy is not OK. I agree that the best you can do is making her less bad because in order to make her decent you have to fix the rest of the game's writing. But it's possible. It's still on par with Other M (since you mentioned it first Sazero) in terms of the effort needed though  I mentioned Other M to tell you not to talk about it. Other M took a popular character and made her bad. Samus isn't bad because there weren't enough effort in her character writing. Samus is bad because feminism. Valhalla is a collection of bad characters that's somehow popular. So much like everything else Valhalla has been compared to in this thread. Not at all comparable.
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Aug 30, 2016 13:39
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Please don't bring the "but did you know the age of consent in Japan is 12?!" style argument re: cultural norms into this... like every goddamn anime thread where poo poo like this happens. "No really, guys, that's just the way things are over there." The game keeps going "see, not everyone is okay with this, it's cool, it's cool" while winking and nudging at the audience. Dorothy is the studio's goddamn Twitter avatar. They know exactly what they're doing, and what the fans of Dorothy are doing. They could have just made her a pragmatic sex worker in a grown rear end body, and it woulda been fine and some of the praise would've been deserved, but instead they did this, because they know their audience. Or just themselves. side note: 
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Aug 30, 2016 19:42
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Throwing this out here: Japan's national age of consent may be 13, but every prefecture sets it to 18 through their own laws. As a result, the age of consent is effectively 18 (20 in some areas). Mention this the next time an otaku tries to defend being a pedophile.
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Aug 30, 2016 20:13
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EponymousMrYar posted:Considering one of this setting's details is a holiday called Mega Christmas (that is literally the complete corporate capitalization of Christmas) I would think it stranger if there weren't Mall Santas
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Aug 30, 2016 21:49
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On Mega Christmas night, the Maul Santas go out into the city to hunt down offenders who haven't purchased enough to keep the economy strong, and mercilessly eviscerate them with their adamantium Santa Claws. They see you when you're sleeping. They know when you're awake. They know if you've been bad or good...so be good, for goodness' sake. Hwurmp fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 21:51
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Watching this LP silently from afar is frustrating because VA-11 HALL-A is a culmination of every element that I enjoy + PC-98 graphical aesthetic which isn't used enough in video games but now that I know the actual content of the game - which looks fairly innocent and innocuous in the trailers - I'm doing a Ghostbusters backwards jog away.
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Aug 30, 2016 22:14
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Covok posted:Throwing this out here: Japan's national age of consent may be 13, but every prefecture sets it to 18 through their own laws. As a result, the age of consent is effectively 18 (20 in some areas). Mention this the next time an otaku tries to defend being a pedophile. Otakus: the Alabama of fanbases.
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Aug 30, 2016 23:36
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That's an insult to Alabama
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Aug 30, 2016 23:38
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Miz Kriss posted:That's an insult to Alabama Can one insult that which hath no dignity nor class?
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Aug 31, 2016 00:11
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War Eagle mother fucker
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Aug 31, 2016 00:16
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By the way, gently caress this game for using another Seinfeld reference ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!"), when this game is what would happen if you took the core appeal of Seinfeld (the cast is terrible people) and then removed everything that made that premise actually appealing and replaced it with anime. Reminding people of far superior work: still a bad idea.
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Sep 2, 2016 19:24
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The problem with defending some of the game aspects as a whole is that one would have to play and experience the whole plot to even go "Hey, here's how Dorothy is not that bad" and even by then you'd have to think literature or heck, other games that are handling said similar plots. So you either have to spoil the game to defend partly said character, which is bad for a VN, or you have to use what one has seen so far which so far looks really, really bad Dorothy wise.
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Sep 2, 2016 21:53
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For some reason the more goons that hate a game, the more likely I'll end up enjoying it.
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Sep 3, 2016 12:25
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Lacedaemonius posted:For some reason the more goons that hate a game, the more likely I'll end up enjoying it. Oh that's simple. Your enjoyment is fuelled by spite. Essentially "You think this sucks? I'll show you, I'm going to do this and I'm going to like it!". I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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Sep 3, 2016 13:18
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Lacedaemonius posted:For some reason the more goons that hate a game, the more likely I'll end up enjoying it.
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Sep 3, 2016 16:54
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Lacedaemonius posted:For some reason the more goons that hate a game, the more likely I'll end up enjoying it. How do you feel about this game then, seeing as a lot of goons seem to love it?
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Sep 3, 2016 21:18
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I kinda feel like if i didn't understand english well I could really get into this game. I think most of the thread agrees that the music and art are great. I can kind of see how some people could zone out to the mood and just enjoy the ride. But. when we just start talking about the market of child sized sexy santa costumes! WHAT THE gently caress! Is this poo poo for real? I honestly Dorothy is just a symptom of a much deeper issue. fake edit: also are we sure we aren't a psychiatrist? because a LOT of people seem to be extremely comfortable with revealing there sexual hang ups to a random bartender
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Sep 4, 2016 00:18
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Well in the US, before people started accepting psychologists, we had a bit of a tradition of bartenders as therapists. I think it just has to do with them being the person directly in front of you as you get drunk. This game takes it to weird new places though.
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Sep 4, 2016 01:23
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Haven't watched the LP but skimming this thread was entertaining like a trainwreck 
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Sep 4, 2016 02:57
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.png) Day Ten
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Sep 4, 2016 09:25
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