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Old 03-08-17, 16:00   #61
Patrick star
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Originally Posted by pirate1802 View Post
Oh dear. Let me explain - If you look at my post you'll see I said none of these things. I was merely commenting on the notion that overthinking any fictional character eventually unravels them, so we shouldn't think too hard. If you see other posts, you'll see this argument applied not just to Anna, but in other cases as well. Overthinking Lara's motivations, overthinking the game's story, overthinking these fictional characters etc. For what it is worth, I was never in any doubt what disease Anna suffered from since I've seen it up close in real life. So I didn't need to overthink in this case, but I could overthink Lara's intelligence and the wisdom of blowing up rocks while being trapped in an underground cave and people would tell me I'm overthinking a stupid videogame character. That's what I was ranting against. This discussion-stopper known as overthinking. For example you might tell me why you think it's not stupid for her to blow up underground caves and I'd hear you and we'd be having a discussion. But then someone would come along and say "well your overthinking the motivations of a stupid videogame character lololol ex dee :winkface: maybe you should stop overthinking or something jeez" and that would work as a discussion terminator. This I don't like.
Fair enough . You could've at least specified that in your post instead of blaming me for assuming that you fully agree with the post you did indeed agree with which is the reason why I ended up quoting your post with his .
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Old 03-08-17, 16:36   #62
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Just for the record, Uncle Atlas doesn't think he's the heir of Croft Manor, he was made executor of the estate. He refused Lara access to her claim as beneficiary due his thinking she's not of sound mind and asked her to seek help. Lara's money was tied up in trust funds, which she failed or refused to touch originally at becoming 21. But now, in BT she's decided it's time, I guess along with gaining access to Croft manor to find her father's will or evidence of her mother's death. He's fighting her for ownership of the manor as he believes she doesn't have legal rights to it.
First, an executor is named in the will.

Second, if someone dies without a will in Britain, their possessions automatically pass to their direct descendants.

Also, since we have to play the all-the-important-bits-happen-outside-the-game game, I believe it is established in the first comic that Lara herself tied up the money so she couldn't touch it. That means that legally the estate has passed to her.

So again, CD has not done a minimum of due diligence here. Again, they're telling one story and contradicting it poorly later on. This is what infuriates me. Someone should be paying attention. Someone should be clever enough to write something that bears some resemblance to how the world actually works or how people actually behave.
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Old 03-08-17, 16:36   #63
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CD did not failed the story of Ana and Konstantin by not telling us exactly what disease Ana suffers from. They failed their story by putting an important piece of their story in an optional document. That is a bigger failure than not telling us the name of Ana disease.
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Old 03-08-17, 20:18   #64
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Wooxman: Well, all I know is that I haven't read the extra material and I didn't enjoy the story. For all I know I might not enjoy the story even if I had read the extra material; or maybe I would, it's hard to say. (I did actually like the game well enough, even though I'd say it's nothing special)
Maybe I've a different view at RotTR's story since I already knew Trinity from the novel and comics prior to playing it.

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I know the rest of your post is addressing Dennis's Mom, not me, but since I agree with her points in general, I'll take a stab at answering that part as well.

First of all, beware of TVTropes as a source. Their quality has decreased a lot over the past few years. It's full of instances where some user decides "I gotta divide this trope into five almost identical sub-tropes based on very specific distinctions that I just invented under the shower!", and then also full of the kind of fans who add their favourite anime or whatever under all of these tropes, whether it fits or not, using the magic words "subverted", "averted", "kind of" and so on to justify their graffiti.

What this means in particular: I would not be surprised if the TVTropes page for well-intentioned extremist lists Ana as one (or the character page for Rise). But I would not say that she is, because her intentions are not really good at all. I mean, her motivation is "I want to live, and I don't care how many people have to die because of that". It's entirely selfish. Not dying is an understandable goal, but not in and of itself a noble one. As well intentioned extremists go, her methods are too extreme and her intentions not well enough to really qualify.

Obviously this is a matter of degrees and opinions, which is why I think it's important to consider the wider context of TVTropes and so on to begin with. Tropes are not catch-all buckets where you have to sort everything in; they're short-hands to make it easier to describe and understand fiction. "She fits that trope" is a starting point for a discussion, not a conclusive proof of anything. Does she fit that trope here? Maybe. Let's say yes, just for the fun of it. Does that mean she's not irredeemably evil, or morally grey? I think not, for the reasons I gave above.

That leads to the whole morally grey thing. I have not quizzed DM on her understanding of morally grey situations, but my guess would be that the problem is not that she doesn't understand it, it's that she disagrees that this is a morally grey situation. What you present seems like a simple maths proof: Ana can be considered a well-intentioned extremist, well-intentioned extremists are a feature of stories that have moral greys, therefore this is moral grey. QED. But that's not how literary analysis (or trope discussion, which is really the same thing) works.

Just because you have a villain with an understandable motivation does not mean that the morality is anything other than black-and-white, and I think this game is a great example of that. (If you want more, though not with the specific example of sickness, look for example at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...FreudianExcuse And note that I said "for example" and "not about sickness", because knowing online forums, there's a good chance someone will immediately reply with "those aren't about sickness at all!"). The fundamental aspect of grey morality is that it's difficult to know which choice is the right one, because all choices have up- and downsides. That does not apply to this game at all. There is never any doubt that Trinity and Ana must be stopped. Lara never wonders whether she should maybe join them or just let them continue their murdering in peace. If you call that morally grey, then you're just watering down the concept to meaninglessness just so you can add a story you like to the box. Which is, of course, the true TVTropes way to do things, but in my opinion, not very useful.

Edit to add: Since it's 2017 and all, I figure I should get with the times and finally use a TV show GIF expressing my feelings succinctly: http://68.media.tumblr.com/440a7cee5...rjrl4k_250.gif (no, I'm not gonna start embedding these damn things, that's annoying)
Yes, I know that TV Tropes isn't the best source, but unfortunately I haven't found any other pages about grey morality.

And there's a bit of a misunderstanding: I didn't quote the examples as proof for Ana being morally grey, but because of Konstantin. Dennis's Mom wrote that Konstanting wants to help his sister which makes him good. Before that she wrote that someone who thinks that killing people is okay to get to their goal is evil. But that's what makes Konstantin morally grey: He has a good cause: Helping his sick sister. But he tries to get to this goal by murdering the remnants, which certainly is a questionable way of getting to this goal and thus he can be considered morally grey. Not necessarily with the exact definitions of the linked TV Tropes articles, but the typical "grey morality" is exactly this: Someone who has a noble goal but does questionable or even evil things to reach it.

When I searched for pages about grey morality, I hoped to find a more specific page, but alas, I only found the "white vs grey", "black vs grey" and "grey vs grey" pages of TV Tropes.
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Old 03-08-17, 20:50   #65
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But that's what makes Konstantin morally grey: He has a good cause: Helping his sick sister. But he tries to get to this goal by murdering the remnants, which certainly is a questionable way of getting to this goal and thus he can be considered morally grey.
No, it's not questionable, it's evil. Robbing a bank to get money for his sister's treatment is questionable. Mobilizing a small army and murdering innocents is evil. The fact that said sister is perfectly happy to go along with this makes her evil.

That's at least a "14" on the Most Evil scale. It only goes to 20.

Morally grey is Magneto. He and the other mutants are persecuted for no reason other than humans fear them. He considers his actions self defense and there is some truth to that, but his shotgun and no compromise approach make him the villain.

Morally grey is Walter White, making meth to make money to leave his family after he dies of lung cancer. He doesn't stay grey though. He crosses into evil when he watches Jesse's girlfriend choke to death on her own vomit. (The genius of Breaking Bad, of course, is that even at the end, you still root for Walter. That's good writing.)

Ana and Konstantin's motives are completely egocentric. There's something they want that only benefits them.

Had CD actually considered anything beyond the next shootout, they might have actually made Ana somehow indispensable in their coming apocalypse. If she died, the world couldn't be "cleansed from sin" or something. Give them a fully realized plan and vision rather than super generic and vague "you are not going to die!" and "we will cleanse this world from sin!" cutscenes. Saving the world is a reason to kill thousands of people, at least according to every terrorist ever.
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Old 04-08-17, 04:32   #66
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Exactly. Plus, Konstantin's motivation is only partially that he wants to save his sister; a big part is that he thinks God wants him to murder lots of people. This has always been considered a “less good” intention. That he got tricked by his sister does not change that, it only makes her more evil. Though if he’ll,s stupid enough to believe it then he kind of deserves it.
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