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stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale · 4 years

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I Need to Talk About “Problematic Faves” within TWDG [2/?]

Backstories, the introduction of these characters and the importance of first impressions.

"Nice to meet’cha, I’ll be your disappointment for the evening.”

When I first started questioning why I like David as much as I do, I thought back to when we were first introduced to him in ep1.

He didn’t leave the best first impression since the first words out of his mouth are along the lines of “You’re a real piece of shit.” Plus he, y’know, punches the shit out of Javi for not being there when their dad died.

On one hand, fair enough to be distraught that your father just died and your brother was no where in sight... but, on the other hand, do you gotta get violent?

Maybe it’s just because I’m an only child so I don’t understand how the whole sibling thing works, but punching your brother and then tossing him a beer before saying “I love you” seems.... not good?

But, it’s also very telling in what David and Javier’s relationship is right from the start, and sets an idea for what’s to come throughout the rest of the season.

Say what you will about ANF: it’s a mess, it’s the worst season, whatever. But, when I tell you that it has one of the best openings to a game, I mean it.

Everything about it is damn near perfect. Not only does it start right at the beginning of the apocalypse, but it tells us so much about our main protagonist and his backstory, it establishes the strained relationship he has with his brother and the rest of his family, and it introduces us to the walkers in a different light.

I can’t watch the opening and NOT get chills every time little baby Mariana holds that cup in her hand and says, “Papi’s awake.”

When they go see that Javi and David’s father is up and about after dying, it’s just chaos from there and I love it.

Fight me all you want, but it’s an excellent start to the season.

Unfortunately, ANF couldn’t keep that momentum going, but that’s a whole other discussion for another day.

Back to David, something about the way he was initially presented stuck with me until we finally reunited with him at the end of ep2.

So I thought back to other character introductions, how their backstories came into place, and how it affected their endgame.

A character’s introduction is crucial when it comes to storytelling, whether its subtle or in your face. You don’t want to give too much away, but you want to give the viewer a taste of who this person is and what their importance is in this story in a more subtle but clever manner.

When introducing a character, you have the think about what their endgame is. How is this character going to change over the course of the story? How are the choices of this character going to affect our protagonist, the world around them, and the overall plot.

Knowing these things can help you to sprinkle in little details within their introduction that tie into their endgame.

When we first met Kenny back in s1, he was just this dude who wanted to get his wife and kid back to Florida, hop on a boat, and live the rest of the apocalypse with his family on the water.

He was nice and showed concern over how Lee was doing with Clementine. He has a character design that gives away parts of his past as a fisherman before he tells us anything about it, and his accent [+overall voice acting and dialogue] tell us a lot about his upbringing prior to the events of s1.

We only got that glimpse of what was to come of his character after the walkers attacked Hershel’s farm.

Shaun is stuck under the tractor with walkers pushing against the fence and Duck is grabbed. We as Lee are faced with the choice of who to help first: Shaun or Duck?

Regardless of our choice, Kenny obviously runs to save his son. He gets Duck out of harms way, but when Shaun begs for help, Kenny runs away, leaving him to be eaten by the walkers.

This portrays the possibility of Kenny being cowardly, selfish, or someone who freezes up in moments of danger and runs. It also sets up the guilt that lingers in his [and Duck’s] mind all the way through to ep3 and onward.

When you think about Kenny, without knowing what happens to him in ep3, and you have to take a guess about what tragedy could take place to further his development, as well as bring that guilt full circle, what would you say?

Easy. He loses his family. Of course he does. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it, but it makes sense that this would happen based on our first meeting with him at Hershel’s farm in conjunction with the themes of the game.

So what does this have to do with him being a “Problematic Fave?”

Uh, everything?

Ever heard of a “tragic backstory?” You don’t think such thing plays into why we loves characters like this?

Kenny the family man has a lovely wife and son. He does everything in his power to protect them, and it’s not enough. He was not enough to save his son, nor was he enough to save his wife.

He lost them both within seconds of each other, being a witness to Katjaa’s suicide and the agonizingly slow death of his son, and he had to keep going in order to survive, even though he had nothing left.

In the beginning, Kenny was a regular John Doe like the rest of us.

He had a job that kept him at sea a lot, he fell in love with a pretty vet and had a child with her. He thought this all would blow over and he could go back to Florida with his family and live peacefully.

Season 1 is Kenny’s tragic backstory.

We got to live this tragedy with him, so when s2 comes around and we’re given his second first introduction in the series, we already have all this knowledge of what has happened to him, what his relationship was to Lee and Clementine, and the assumption that he was already dead.

Season 2 was what cemented a lot of people’s love and hate for him.

I have a theory that those who hate Kenny tend forget that 1st episode back in s1, choosing to solely focus on the Kenny from the meat locker in ep2 and all the negative repercussions that stemmed for our choice there, while those who love Kenny tend to look further back and take everything into account when analyzing his character.

They sympathize with the man Kenny used to be, and are struck by this tragedy of who he became by the time s2 ended.

Kenny from ep1 of s1 is not the same person as the Kenny from s2 ep5, and his journey is not only compelling from a character development standpoint, but a huge factor in why he is the favorite character of so many. Few characters are built up and developed that way he is.

But can we say a lot of the same things about Kenny’s introduction in s2 that we can say about s1? Does it drop hints about what Kenny’s potential endgame could be?

Yes, but it’s not quite as effective as it could’ve been.

One of the first choices you make after meeting back with Kenny is whether or not you’ll sit with him at dinner.

It’s a non-assuming choice, one that shouldn’t warrant any big repercussions, right?

Except it’s the games way of presenting us with the choice of siding with Kenny under a more innocent pretense. It’s a taste of what’s to come.

Based on our previous knowledge of him, as well as his seemingly good nature [one that reminds us of the beginnings of s1], we watch the way he presents himself to Clementine and decide if we want to sit with this old, nostalgic connection, or the new connections.

Will you sit with Kenny, or will you sit with Luke and the cabin group?

Will you side Kenny, or not?

This is what led everyone to believe that the final showdown would be between Kenny and Luke, and they really dropped the ball on what they built up here when they decided to replace Luke with Jane.

Kenny’s part still holds fairly strong, but everything about it isn’t as well done as S1.

And because I know I’ll be asked: as for his introduction in S3..... I don’t consider Kenny or Jane characters as much as I’d say they’re obstacles the writers had to throw in to give the illusion that our choices actually affected Clementine significantly when they really didn’t.

He immediately dies in a car accident after being paralyzed and left to the walkers while Clementine runs away with a crying AJ. This does very little for the story of ANF other than to add fuel to Clementine’s own “tragic backstory.”

So I don’t count it here.

I want to talk about another great character introduction: Minerva.

Minerva is a special case compared to Kenny and other character introductions. We’re not plopped down in front of her like “Hi, I’m Clementine, nice to meet you, Minnie.”

We actually spend two whole episodes only hearing about her, building her character up slow and steady, until we finally meet face to face in ep3.

This complicates our first impressions of her, but only a bit.

The game pretty much tells us Minerva’s backstory:

From what we’re told, Minerva was a sweet, musical girl who didn’t even like killing walkers. She loved her brother and twin sister. She and Violet were in a romantic relationship, and Violet gives us plenty to chew on about how lovely her voice was and how she was such a good friend. Her and Sophie’s “deaths” left everyone at the school devastated to the point where they actually started using their graveyard again.

She almost seems too good to be true, don’t you think?

Then we find out she’s not dead.

It turns out, Marlon and Brody lied about the death of the twins to cover up the fact that Marlon traded them away to the delta in order to save themselves and the rest of Ericson. The truth only comes out after Brody confesses everything to Clementine before her death dealt by Marlon’s hand.

So not only are we told that Minerva was this wonderful person, but that she was traded away with her twin sister to a group of people who, based on our first impression of Abel, are a dangerous threat that’s back for more of them.

Your mind swarms with the worst possibilities of what those people could have done to them, and you even question whether or not they’re still alive.

Until we meet Lilly again and find out the truth: they turned them into soldiers, forcing them to fight in their war.

Keep in mind that this is all apart of Minerva’s “tragic backstory” and we haven’t even truly been introduced to her yet. This is everything that the first two episodes have built up.

We finally get our first glimpse of her in the trailer for ep3.

Everyone goes nuts.

Minerva was so hyped up. Everyone was talking about how good she looked and how they couldn’t wait to meet her and learn what happened from her perspective. Everyone theorized about her role in the next two episodes and how maybe we can enlist her help in getting our friends back and reuniting her with Tenn and-

Then we get actually meet her.

Turns out, she is none of the things the game told us she was.

Not anymore, at least.

She is not our friend or our ally and she is not going to help us get our friends back. She is fully brainwashed into the delta, and that’s the tragedy of Minerva’s first real introduction.

She is a betrayal of everything we’ve been told due to the crime Marlon made of trading her away. We will never get to meet this Minnie we heard so much about.

Instead, we get the husk that remains.

This husk is one of our antagonists for the rest of the game.

Knowing all of this, why do people still love her? Why are there fix-it fics and AUs where Minerva is “saved?”

Because we all wanted to meet the Minnie we heard so much about, but instead, we got Minerva, the brainwashed soldier from the Delta who, under Lilly’s fucked up rule, killed her own twin sister in order to prove her loyalty to the group.

We wanted Minerva to be on our side, to betray the delta for the school she once called home. But she didn’t.

Instead, she became our final antagonist of the whole series.

Minerva, like Kenny, is a tragedy and we like that.

I don’t mean that we like it as in “I’m so glad those horrible, traumatizing things happened to you!” but we like it in a way that it colors these characters gray.

Suddenly, their behaviors are not portrayed the way they are just because they’re the “antagonist,” but because they’re a complex, three dimensional character. The game didn’t hand them to us and say “They’re evil, that’s all you need to know.”

They took the time to flesh these two out in a clever way that got to us, either in a positive or negative light.

We are drawn to gray characters with interesting, albeit tragic, backstories that we can sympathize with.

But, when you consider that this IS the apocalypse, doesn’t everyone have one of these “tragic backstories” in this series? Just like how everyone is actually a “Problematic Fave?” Does this really play into why we like them when it’s not even something unique to their character?

That’s a good point, so in order for us to like a character like this, do they have to have an even more intense, tear-jerking past than the rest in order to stand out?

Well... no.

Nate’s the easy example for this one.

I honestly don’t know what this dude’s about, and I don’t know if I even care, but somehow Nate tends to end up on everyone’s “Favorite Characters from 400 Days” list.

Granted, he is a bit of a refreshing character to run into in this environment, what with him being so laid back, sarcastic, gross, and even sadistic in a way that’s mean to be comedic.

But what do we even know about him or where he came from?

Well, we know that he’s apart of the group that fan-favorite Eddie accidentally shot at, leading Nate to chase after him and Wyatt as a form of revenge. After that, he picked up Russell and headed back to a gas station where that old couple shot at them.

The old man reveals that Nate’s been there before and attacked, stating that he’s here to finish them off. Nate denies this, but asks if Russell and him should finish them off and take all their stuff.

From there, who the hell knows where this dude went.

But that’s all we got.

No “tragic backstory” from Nate, no implications of one, unless we missed the nonexistent detail that his previous group was his family or something. Even then, he doesn’t seem so concerned about the state of the world. He doesn’t have an issue picking up a random kid who could be dangerous. He was bored, after all.

Nate is a character whose backstory has nothing to do with why people love him. He’s an oddball out, in this case.

It’s a different story when talking about how he’s introduced, though. This is where he has most in common with Kenny, Minerva, and all the rest of these “Problematic Faves”: He has a great impression.

Well, assuming that you played Russell’s story before Wyatt’s, I suppose.

Nate’s likable, albeit insane, character isn’t dependent on who he was before or how he suffered. He’s a character who represents those in the world who thrive in times of disaster, choosing to take it as it comes, do whatever it takes to survive, and even get a sick thrill out of doing these problematic things. Odds are, life was boring before and now he truly gets to live. That’s all made clear in how he presents himself to Russell and the player.

And.... I guess it worked? He is the “Problematic Fave” of a handful of people int he community, after all.

Now that we’ve discussed three separate characters and their backstories, how they’re introduced, and how these two things affect their role within the story as well as our feelings towards them, I want to touch on one more thing before I go back to David.

What does all of this say about the people who throw this annoying phrase of “Your fave is problematic” at those of us who find these characters with great backstories compelling?

Do they not care or understand these backstories or what the introductions meant? Do they ignore them so that their perspective seems to be the correct answer? Are they so quick to judge based on the surface level that they don’t bother thinking twice about anything?

Do they feel that this character has wronged them, therefore they find they can’t bring themselves to tolerate them anymore?

Or are they just being a bag of dicks who don’t care about anything other than berating anyone who dares oppose them and their opinions?

Well, yes and no to all of these possibilities.

I’m sure there are people out there who don’t have a full grasp of what made Kenny the way he is in s2 because, well.... they’ve never lost a loved one. It’s easy to say “Get over it” to just about any troubling situation we’ve never found ourselves in. Even if we do feel for this character, sometimes it’s really only surface level because we don’t have a full comprehension of what they went through.

When I took acting back in high school, I had a teacher who could cry on the spot. We all assumed that he was just a good actor who could turn the tears on and off at any given moment, but then he explained how he did it.

He lost his father in a drunk driving accident the same day he gave his last performance on stage as a high school senior. Whenever he needed to cry for a scene, this 58-year-old man would think back to the last conversation he had with his father that morning, and then about the moment he learned his father had died.

Even in moments that didn’t require him to cry, but to develop a character and portray that convincingly, he pulled from that life experience. He also could sympathize with certain characters that we’d consider problematic while the rest of us were barely scratching the surface.

He told us we need to come to terms with any tragedy in our lives and use it not only to create characters of our own, but to understand the ones most wouldn’t give a second glance to, and help relate ourselves to the real people around us.

Since my high school days, I’ve experienced the loss of a longtime dog companion, and the alarming health decrease of two close family members. While I’ve never lost a child, a spouse, a parent, or a sibling, I find that a part of me can’t completely hate Kenny or even Minerva because I get it to an extent.

So it makes me wonder if those who look at these backstories and still brush them off do.

But, there’s another argument to be made here.

Maybe they do understand and that’s why they hate someone like Kenny.

They have lost a loved one before or experienced some sort of trauma. They know about the grief, guilt, and anger that it can lead to. But, they also know it’s not an excuse to be mean, cold, or abusive to loved one.

They know that such trauma can lead to lashing out, but the difference is between someone who knows what they’re doing is wrong, they need help, and they try to get it... and someone who using it to explain away why they’re broken and unfixable.

Some see Kenny as someone who can’t change, or won’t change. That’s how they’ve interpreted him based on their experiences as someone who’s lived through these things, or been around someone who has.

In their eyes, Kenny isn’t redeemable, “tragic backstory” or not.

What about those who felt wronged by a character?

I’ve come to the realization that this why I don’t like Minerva.

She wronged me in the way that I had to watch either Louis or Tenn die because she showed up on the bridge with the illusion that she would take her brother to a better place.

Louis, my favorite character across the entire series, and one that I’ve taken so much comfort in during the more recent darker moments of my life. Tenn, a character that I wanted to watch grow and become what characters like Ben or Sarah weren’t allowed to be come.

Because of Minerva, the only way for both Louis and Tenn to survive is if I let Louis get kidnapped, resulting in him becoming mute due to the delta cutting out his tongue, I have to break AJ’s heart by telling him that I don’t trust him, and I have to watch Violet be devoured alive by a horde of walkers.

I’m not willing to let Louis die, but I also don’t want him to lose his tongue, so in my route, I trust AJ to shoot Tenn and give Minerva what she wants.

And no matter what? Clementine gets bit because Minerva sliced her leg apart, leaving her slow and weaker when trying to get away. I firmly believe that if Minerva hadn’t done that, Clementine wouldn’t have been bitten for the sake of “parallel.”

It’s a situation that could’ve been avoided if Minerva hadn’t showed up, but her will to see and kill Tenn was strong enough for her

People who love Minerva might not see it that way, or if they do, they’re a lot more forgiving than I am.

Believe me when I tell you that I can see this being a reason for the hate towards any character like this.

Like Kenny. Lot’s of Kenny talk.

I know there are those out there who loved Kenny in s1, but by the time s2 ended, they couldn’t stand him because s2 wronged them in their portrayal of Kenny and what he had become. This wasn’t their Kenny.

To finish this segment off, allow me to answer that last question I posed: Are they just being a bag of dicks who don’t care about anything other than berating anyone who dares oppose them and their opinions?

Of course, then there are the children who like to fight. The answer for why these people hate such characters is because they think of themselves as... let’s say, Batman.

This community needs a hero to vanquish anyone who likes or enjoys these problematic characters and it’s a job only they can do! They’re the hero for sending that anon hate to your inbox!

This is an excuse to be a dick and we all know it.

So, what does all of this Kenny, Minerva, and Nate talk amount to?

It helped me in understanding a reason in why I like David so much.

I already knew that I enjoyed learning more about who he was prior to the outbreak, as well as having light shed on his and Javi’s relationship, but not in the way I initially thought.

You see, ANF is different in the way that it feeds backstory to the player- through flashbacks. At the beginning of each episode, we play as Javi in the past before the apocalypse happened.

From there, we get to see what David was like compared to what he is now, but they tell it to us through Javi’s point of view and we have to pick apart his character through that forced perspective.

From the flashbacks alone, as well as ep1′s beginning, I put together that:

David was a single father trying to raise two incredibly young children. We’re never told what happened to his first wife. I used to assume that they ended up divorced, but now I’m more on board with the idea that she’s actually dead and that’s why David has full custody of Gabe and Mariana.

Putting the pieces together now, it makes sense of why he married Kate when they’re clearly not compatible, and why he has these high expectations of her. David’s mother and father are still together, and with family being a big theme in ANF, it leads me to believe that David felt his children needed a mother figure in their lives in order for the family to be complete. He needed a wife.

While I think he did love Kate, and she obviously loved him enough to marry him in the first place, David didn’t love her the way he should have.

Kate tells us that their marriage was fucked up. We clearly see that given how she reacts when she sees David again, as well as when David himself confesses that things aren’t working out between them and that’s why he wants to go away.

They’re always arguing, he has those expectations of her as his wife and she’s fed up with it, and things are just.... not working. Of course they’re not.

He wanted a wife to make him feel more complete, as well as give his children that mother figure. He wasn’t out there trying to find the love of his life. For all we know, he already had that with his possibly dead first wife [note: shoot, add “possible dead wife” to the list of shit David’s got going in his backstory for future reference]. He thought that he could try and change Kate from who she is because he was desperate for this to work.

David and Kate should NOT have gotten married, but I can understand the stress David was under with having to raise two children as a single father while dealing with untreated trauma from being a soldier, his confidence in himself as a normal human-being deteriorating due to his “I’m a soldier and I can’t function here” mentality, working a shitty job while going back and forth on whether or not he should go sign up again, having a strained relationship with an irresponsible brother who lost his baseball career due to a gambling addiction yet still never being around when David needed him.

David marries Kate and things don’t fix themselves.

And then Javi does come around, and David doesn’t know how to act or what to say.

Then his father keeps from them that he has cancer and he’s not planning on getting treatments for it.

When his father loses his battle with cancer, everyone is there except Javier. David’s there holding his hand while his dying father asks for Javi.

I get why David’s upset that his father isn’t seeing him because he’s looking for Javi. Is it selfish to feel jealous or heartbroken when it’s your father that’s dying? Yeah, but it’s a realistic feeling. Most of us have felt some level of this but don’t want to admit it because we don’t want to see ourselves in a negative light. It’s easy to look at David and be like “What a selfish prick.”

But... why wasn’t Javi there? Everyone makes it clear that he should have been there, no excuse. Everyone was there for hours, for days but Javi was no where to be found. This plays beautifully into Javier’s character growth throughout the season, but what about David?

Compared to the “tragic backstories” of Kenny and Minerva, David’s seems... a little mundane, huh?

He has problems focused more in the real world rather than the apocalypse world.

Every bad thing we’ve ever learned about Kenny and Minerva happened after the walkers.

Plenty of people have served in the military and dealt with trauma rooted in their service.

Plenty have either been divorced or lost their spouse, were left as a single parent to raise the kids they love but are afraid they’ll fuck up if they do it alone. How about those who are apart of an unhappy marriage?

Nearly everyone has worked a job they hate and know the toll it can take on your mental health.

Left in the shadow of a more successful sibling, no matter how hard they try to be on that same level and earn that love, too.

A parent with cancer, or another life-threatening illness.

Feeling as though they can’t function because they’re not built to live in such a humanly “normal” world, eager to find where they belong and have a fulfilling purpose.

Everything David has going on prior to the apocalypse is real and relatable, and I like that this is the route they took with him. Rather than having him be like Kenny, who seemed to live happily with very little issue and only began to suffer when the apocalypse came, they took a route similar to Lee and Javier.

“Things weren’t great before.”

That being said, do any of these things justify David’s bad behavior towards Javi, Kate, Clementine, and everyone else? Does it justify the bad things he ends up doing during the events of ANF.

Hell no!

David can be a real prick and amazing backstory/introduction or not, I am not okay with that!

But look.

Listen.

ANF is such a mess. It’s a disaster.

It’s ‘s2 mess,’ but on crack.

I firmly believe that David is one of the better things to come out of it, except he got severely fucked over by just how terrible ANF’s writing could be.

They started off so good. David is established and he has some of the better character moments in the entire game, but it’s all buried underneath the bullshit.

They actually gave us David, who dealt with a lot of “normal” shit to try and find his place and be happy, made him have problems that we can see ourselves having and relate to, making us question ourselves, and then they gave him what he wanted.

David met up with Ava, he found Clint and Joan, and they created a community together where David got to be this leader with a purpose. He got what he wanted at the sacrifice of his children, wife, brother, and parents, something he didn’t even have a choice in.

They had all the right ideas...

I love the different take to David’s backstory. I love the way he was introduced in ANF. I love the way these things managed to weave themselves throughout ANF despite it being...... ugh.

People who hate David, like the one who listed all of those lovely attributes of his in the previous part, think he is nothing but a whiny, selfish, asshole because of the way he’s introduced and portrayed in flashbacks and... I disagree to a point.

He is an asshole a lot of the time, especially when you don’t side with him [heh, sound familiar] but that doesn’t mean he’s not a compelling, relatable character to study and infer about. And y’know what? I like that he’s not Mr. Nice Guy. Someone like him wouldn’t be. He is a person who can nice moments, and he has bad moments. It doesn’t excuse the shit he does, but it at least adds a depth to it that I appreciate.

I’m mature enough to recognize these his bad behaviors, acknowledge them, and infer more about his character without makes excuses and pretending that him having a tough time means it’s okay for him be that way.

I can see what they were going for as far as his endgame, but I’ll talk more about that later.

As for the conclusion of this long winded segment:

A character’s backstory, first impression, execution of developing these small seedling details into an overarching story plays an important role in the growing love of a character, problematic or not. Both love and hate can be stemmed from the maturity and knowledge of the viewer based on how relatable and sympathetic they find these ideas.

[Continued in 3/?]

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