Chel. Like how Dave was joking about the walls of text earlier, this forum has a long history of everyone's instinct being to chime in to help Solve An Problem™, which regardless of good intentions frequently does not end up helping very much, but does generate a whole lot of words. :::')))
Damn. Honestly, the way you lay it out about Epstein, if Chel had actually cared about doing their homework, actually sticking to the facts about Epstein and, say, using that as a storytelling device for Pleasure Island and the Ark could have been more terrifying than what they actually came up with. And plus, I don't think Chel really cared that much about making the Ark members scary, to be perfectly honest, because there were definitely some instances where they tried to act like Ratigan's treatment of Basil was somehow easy to rationalize with "he just wuvs him so much" (which, no. I mean, I definitely played into that too and I take full responsibility, but when I look back on it, it's genuinely icky. I think I was trying to go for the idea of Basil trying to examine the utter horror of the idea that someone who claimed to love him did these horrible, horrible things to him -- killing his pet, raping him, forcing others to rape him -- and trying to embrace a healthier version of love and I think I was going for the idea of "He is not what other people did to him", but I don't think it's a stretch to think that I fucked this up) and even played some of the Ark members' stuff for laughs. I mean, it wasn't even like the Silver and Daisy thing where they were at least trying to banter amongst themselves to deal with the horror (I mean, if not for the whole Daisy-being-kidnapped-off-the-street thing, I think that it could have been pretty good. And on an off-topic note, I definitely thought it would have been better if Daisy's parents were the one to sell her and Gary. As in, better storytelling-wise, because they were already established as molesting her and Gary -- admittedly, it's slightly odd because I'm not a Pokemon person, but I don't recall the Oak parents being abusive in canon -- and yet somehow when Daisy goes missing and doesn't come back, the parents inexplicably have nothing to do with it for a change. I think it would have been more in line with what Sparkles said if someone didn't kidnap Daisy randomly but her parents were in on it; even Ash's grandfather brings up the possibility of the parents being involved even though they aren't. Hell, I remember there was one Cracked article on human trafficking where apparently the girl's mother was involved with hurting her own daughter in that way, which isn't really uncommon in cases like that in general from what I heard); they were actually kind of playing some of the Ark's stuff, like Ratigan's serial rapes, for laughs. (And I wrote for that bit too, and...I'm not proud of it. I didn't really go for the attempted "comedy" thing as much as Chel, I don't think, but I still fucked up.) So yeah, trust me, there's a lot of depth to this rabbit hole, Tez. There really is. So I don't think they can even use "We just wanted the Ark members to be scary" given that even by that logic, it's pretty much inconsistent at times as to what they were doing with the Ark members. And they did it to a degree with God's Will First as well, the whole "playing them for laughs" thing. (I'm not counting the part where Psycho humiliates them in public; Psycho actually did the right thing there and it was a form of protest against basically a hate group) And yeah, I think Chel just really wants nothing more than to come up with increasingly taboo forms of violence because they're an edgy asshole. That's pretty much what it boils down to. And in retrospect, it really drives me nuts that they stole the monologue structure from Haunted. I mean, having a Shout Out (as TV Tropes) is one thing, but this kind of feels like bordering on plagiarism. (Which actually makes it hilarious that they accused me of plagiarism. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, Chel)
