Red like Cherry

Wow Valvrave can go a lot of directions after episode ten but 90% of those directions are absolutely awful.

tw: rape

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Everyone on my dash basically peer pressured me into getting Animal Crossing New Leaf. Thanks a lot guys. There goes any free time I might have had.

So Telltale (the group behind the absolutely fabulous “The Walking Dead” game released last year) is making a new game based on the Fables comic (“The Wolf Among Us”). As someone who greatly enjoyed their previous game and who has also been a big fan of Fables for many years now, I was really excited. I don’t even know if excited is a strong enough word. I was seriously freaking hyped up about this game.

Then the most recent Game Informer magazine did a feature on it, and it was all sounding great… until they revealed that Bigby’s relationship to Snow White was going to be a major part of the game, and that’s it’s basically going to center on Bigby protecting her and “keeping her safe” while also trying not to do bad things that would make her think differently of him. One of their quotes was something about a major theme of the game being, “if the damsel in distress knew what the white knight had to do to get her out of distress, she might not look at him the same way”. The article talks about how the Snow in this prequel is “more sheltered” and implies that she doesn’t know much about Fabletown and only sees the darker side of town after she goes along on some rounds with Bigby. Oh, and the character profile of her in Game Informer describes her like this: “Deep down, she’s still an innocent girl”.

The whole time I was reading, I just kept getting more and more upset. Anyone who has read Fables knows that terms like “damsel in distress,” “sheltered,” and “innocent girl” do not apply to Snow and probably never have (at least not since she was, you know, actually an innocent young girl in her childhood). This is a version of Snow White who, upon marrying Prince Charming, asked for sword fighting lessons as a wedding gift. She then used those skills to hunt down and slaughter the dwarves who had held her captive and grossly abused her. This is also the woman who, when confronted with Bigby for the first time, in his powerful, violent wolf form, grabbed a sword from a dead soldier and bravely stood up to him, even though she was a shackled prisoner at the time. These are things that happened before she ever came to the “mundane world”, and thus they happened hundreds of years before this prequel game. I’m not even getting into all the awesome stuff she did later on.

So how the hell could anyone interpret her as a damsel in distress? Or ever think that she needed Bigby to constantly protect her? And the whole idea that she doesn’t know Fabletown inside and out is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. She was one of the founding members of the town. She’s been in a position of authority since it began. It’s very clear in the comics that she knows more about Fabletown than anyone else (the only possible exception would be Frau Totenkinder). Snow was the person who went and recruited Bigby to join Fabletown. How the hell does he end up having to show her what Fabletown is really like? Just… no. This is wrong on so many levels.

It’s upsetting, because I wanted to like this game so bad. I wanted to be excited for it and play it and enjoy it and LOVE it. But now I just don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll be able to play a game that so badly screws up one of my favorite characters. I guess I’ll try the first “episode” (assuming they go with episodic releases again) and see how things turn out. But still. How in the world did they get Snow so wrong?