Okay, let's look at Javier with a CLEAR mind
So it's very noticeable that a lot of people are hating on Javier. I think that this is largely due to the fact that he seems to be the main focus of Season 3 instead of Clementine by what Telltale has been saying.
So let's all try to push that thought out. Let's not think about Javier taking Clementine's place, let's think about his character based on what we've seen so far.
So with that in mind, here's what I think about Javier so far: his family, which btw is pretty huge, seems to be the main focus of his personal story. For some reason I'm getting these weird feelings that Javier's whole family is cliche due to that new trailer/extended look. Just think about it, I can't quite place my finger on it, but I find that a huge foreign family with one family member dying and then the mother or father lashing out at their son or daughter, who is usually the main character, is very cliche and familiar in a way.
Something I do like however is Javier's background of being a former baseball player. That's a pretty unique background that is pretty rarely used in zombie apocalypse stories.
Coming back to Javier's family, his quest to find his family seems like it could be very interesting and gripping IF it is done well. I'm afraid that we will not get enough time to care about Javier's family before they are separated from him, making his quest not that exciting since we don't care. But hey, anything could happen. In the Michone Miniseries, I didn't really care about Michonne's daughters, yet the last flashback with them at the end of the episode 3 finale hit me a lot harder than I was expecting. I legit reared up due to the powerful writing and acting in that scene. Hopefully Telltale can pull the same thing off with Javier and his family.
Now let's all face the truth: Clementine can't ever be fully replaced. It doesn't matter if Telltale creates an amazing, evolved, multi-layered character. Clementine will always be at the top no matter what. However, I think a character could definitely be worthy enough to stand equal and next to Clementine. And that is what I am hoping Javier will turn out to be.
Comments
I think they're trying to make us like him because Clem already gets the love from fans and Javier doesn't. So whenever they talk about Season 3 they try to make us interested but it's having the opposite effect since Javier is all they talk about. So fans get angry at him. Honestly, I think Javier is going to be a good edition to the series but I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little annoyed at TellTale for saying how important he is compared to Clem.
I was personally a lot more excited for him when there was less information.
I absolutely agree with everything that you said. Telltale's constant pushing about Javier has been making the character just look like an annoyance lately. I understand that they don't want to really spoil anything about Clementine, but of course people are going to be mad and upset when you say "Well, Season 3 is really Javier's story..."
On a more negative look, I also think TellTale is pandering to new players because they wouldn't know characters like Lee, Kenny, Jane, even Clem herself. So they add a new character for them to get know. I find that a little ridiculous since I would assume the majority of your fans are returning players.
That and another reason is for people who complained about playing as Clem in Season 2.
Don't get me wrong though, I think and hope Javier becomes beloved by fans.
Telltale has said that you will be playing as both characters at times, so I'm guessing it will be similar to 400 Days with the exception being in the same time frame and each character working together. I'm guessing that in a similar way of the choose to go as Batman or Bruce in Batman Telltale, at times we will be asked to choose who to play as to go to a certain character. I couldn't care less if Javier is the main focus. In a way Clem was the main focus in S1 and you play as her in S2 so there's that lol. My problem is that the writers focused on her so much in S2 that the rest of the writing got thrown all over the place. Good characters like Alvin and Pete were thrown away and characters like Carlos, Nick, and Luke were just poorly written. Rebecca started out as a really annoying person, yet redeemed herself later. Jane was just....moving on lol. The only good character besides Clem in S2 was Kenny and he was the only rational adult also. The man loses his family twice and still was sane when the rest of the group wasn't messing up constantly lol. Rig said that the 400 Days group should have replaced the Cabin Group and I 100% agree. Clem bonding with Shel and Rachel would have been a cool moment. I didn't like how in S2 it's like the writers were saying "We know Bonnie and Arvo just screwed you over two minutes ago, yet they have changed now". Lol I love how the game tries to make you feel bad for Bonnie. Yeah the woman that got Walter and Alvin killed when she could have just lied to Carver about meeting Kenny's group. Thanks Bonnie for enslaving us, I'll trust you.
I'm honestly pretty excited for Javier. Have been since he was announced as the second playable character. I'm also glad Clem is still in the mix but Javier is a nice breath of fresh air and could help lead Clem's story in a great direction as well.
I'll judge him once ive played the episodes but so far the comments that he seems a bit generic seem well placed,
Face it - he's a coward. Watch the trailer. Girl goes to grandpa room, grandpa who was dead but "woke up" and Javier is peeking around a corner of long corridor. Shame.
Someone wrote "family was confused". Lee never was "that" confused in s1.
To tell you the truth I was only excited when I seen Clem at the end of that trailer. I really can't say I'm excited about playing Javier. But I guess I'll have to wait and see.
You're not being very fair. This is the start of the apocalypse and no one knows what is going on. He's just a teenager, maybe early 20s at most at this point. He's never killed anyone before and has no idea how to deal with the situation. Plus we don't know the full context of the trailer. I think we're reaching here a little bit to insult a character we know little to nothing about.
I think it's more noticeable when people vigorously defend him, we literally know nothing about the guy so let people hate in peace and be corrected if Telltale is up for the task.
It was their decision to give Clementine the back seat, now they have to prove that they can make us care about white guy #371 instead of the character we've been nursing for years.
Javier, a traditional white guy name lol
Yeah, if you weren't aware, what's considered "white" by most communities that actually care to define people that way span the people living around the mediterranean, in the Americas of non-african and -asian descent (but not the natives either, lol) and in Europe west of the urals.
You know, except for that time he shouted at a cop with half of his head blown off, asking if he was dead
I guess. I'm from Philadelphia and Puerto Rican, the last thing the community I grew up in would describe themselves as is white lol. But most peoples perceptions are built on culture, not government statistics. I don't think many people are going to see a Spanish family and think "white people".
It's the beginning of the apocalypse, what do you expect? They don't know that when you're dead, you come back.
“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life” (Confucius).
Then why aren't they checking old man's condition? Why are they hiding around a corner?
I guess you must have seen someone in your family die and come back to life, huh?
How about you tell us the proper way to handle the situation if you're such a fucking expert?
Hey, you don't have to be mad, mr moderator.
My answer is - I wouldn't hide, I wouldn't let her go alone there. Even if they don't know about zombies yet.
Liar (Sarcasm)
That didn't work to me. I was neutral about them at the beginning but when Episode 3, I started to hate them MUCH more because they almost got Michonne killed.
"Except when you ask a man whose face you just blew off if he's dead, then you're just a fucking idiot lmao" - Confucius (continued quote)
No you are probably right, but for most of colonial America's history hispanics were the white community towards the black slaves and amerindian natives
I think they used different terms though, I don't beleive they called them "white"
In terms of Javi's focus being on family, and considering they currently seem kinda generic, I figure I should look at previous family focuses by Telltale to see if they can pull it off. For fairness, I'm excluding games that either aren't finished yet (Batman), do not focus on the players' families whether stated to be adopted or blood-related (Minecraft, The Wolf Among Us), and were headed by a writing team that is not working on New Frontier (Michonne, any games prior to Season Two):
So I think they CAN pull it off, but only time will tell.
The Spaniards? I can't speak for colonial terms, but Hispanic wouldn't be an inaccurate description for the Spanish migrants. Mind you, Hispanic is a broad term that covers people from many places, basically any place that's been a colony of Spain from South America to the Philippines. The actual populations are quite diverse, though, its been enough of a hassle that the next US census is likely to shift away from the traditional race answer and instead ask for identity.
The whole Prodigal Son coming home thing is a well told story. Doesn't make it ineffective.
I completely agree that people hating Javier simply because he is "replacing Clementine" is dumb. The fact that the series is branching out a bit is actually making me kind of interested in it again.
...what?
none of the main playable characters in telltales twd have been white yet, Javier doesn't count at all.
Hispanic covers all the people mostly ethnically descendent from the Roman province(s) that made op Hispania, so Portuguese and Spanish.
Which in turn covers what you mentioned; the Americas south of the United States (mostly) and the Carribean (mostly), I have no clue towards the Philippines
Some people use Hispanic and Latin(o)(a) interchangeably, but the latter also covers the French, Italians and Romanians.
Because Wyatt is that forgettable, apparently.
If you're replacing the main focus of a series suddenly, that's not branching out. That's jumping into another tree.
I had this feeling too. It felt like I was watching a really bad Spanish (I know he's not Spanish, but you get the idea) soap opera. I speak Portuguese so I can understand Spanish very well and the acting was just... terrible and not believable at all, which just made things worse for me. The thing that bugs me the most though is the fact that Telltale is constantly trying to make us care for Javier and his family, and I know this was only a small preview, but even if we get a 20 minute intro about his family, I will still most likely not care about them at all because they seem so damn generic. I couldn't give a crap about the Fairbanks family in the Michonne series and we had plenty of interactions with them. I'm also concerned about Javier as a character because so far we haven't seen him doing anything of interest, while Clem gets all the badass spotlight. I mean, we see him being scared, getting slapped, hiding around the corner, being tied up, watching Clem kill walkers (twice). These previews instead of making me hyped for the new main character and his story are only making me want to play as Clem more and more and not care about the rest. But I don't hate Javier, I'm just completely indifferent to him and his story so far, which to be honest, is not any better. But I kind of get people who are angry at Javier and already hate him. Telltale constantly trying to force us to like him and his family is just making fans more riled up, specially when the footage they show isn't that interesting and doesn't exactly put him in a more favorable light, you know.. I'm praying Telltale will be able to prove me wrong, because I really want to like him and this season.
People should have a more open mind because people were fine playing as Rhys and Fiona in tales from the borderlands. Another thing is the game is called New frontier not season 3 if it was called season 3 it means Clem's story New frontier is the new title because it's not exactly about Clem. I'm actually looking forward to playing as Javier because playing as the same person every game would've been boring imagine playing as lee for 3 seasons that's 15 episodes so I'm glad telltale is switching up a little.
Javier is gonna be a motherfucking badass. Clementine will still be a badass as well. One will not detract from the other, if anything they will complement one another. But you best bet that Javier is going to cave some skulls.
First off, let me start by apologizing for that above post. I was being an asshole there, no excuses to be made.
Yeah, that's you. That's how you would respond to the situation at hand. But that doesn't mean it's how other people will. I might want to run in and tackle the bomb to the floor, but I'm not gonna criticize the bomb squad for not doing the same, you know?
You're basing Javier being a supposed 'coward' off the fact that he's not handling the situation the same way you would. He's a coward for taking a cautious approach to an unfamiliar and unusual situation, instead of immediately walking right into it? His family's acting stupid for not all barging head first into the room of their supposedly dead relative? Maybe letting the girl enter the room on her own isn't the smartest idea, sure, but you could make the same argument for sprinting after her and barging into the room yourself.
From the sounds of it, he passed in his sleep, one of them eventually went to check on him, found him not responding, and figured out he was dead. Javier arrived back home at what I'd guess is only an hour or two after it happened. They knew he was gone, and were still in shock, trying to figure out what to do next. Then the girl comes into the room, and mentions that he's 'awake'.
It's not a common situation to find yourself in, but there's more possibilities than immediately assuming that whatever happened makes him a threat.
What if he is indeed alive by some freak circumstance, and you end up freaking the hell out of him by barging in like a crazy person? Probably wouldn't exactly help his case. Or maybe the girl just thought she saw him move and mistook it as him still being alive.
The last thing you'd expect is that he's a zombie, especially considering that popular zombie fiction (Romero and the like) doesn't exist in TWD universe, meaning the concept of the zombie as we know it doesn't exist. So for them, it's a completely new concept. The thought of him actually being a danger to anyone is far beyond anyone's expectations. Either he's alive by some crazy circumstance, or he's still dead. Those are the two logical conclusions they would come to. But it never hurts to be cautious, does it? They wouldn't want to just storm the room and cause unnecessary panic in the very, very slim chance he's not dead.
And besides that, this trailer isn't the full sequence of events. There's still some missing context here. We don't know how much these characters know as of yet; have they seen news reports about strange attacks happening around town? Is the outbreak official, as of yet? Is what we see happen in the trailer the chronological order of the scene itself? Are there things that happen in between what we see happen in the trailer? There's pieces of the puzzle still missing, so to speak. Relatively crucial ones, at that.
When you think about it, this game series has had some pretty good diversity when it comes to playable characters
I never forgot about him, I said main playable characters, or I would have mentioned Bonnie aswell. Wyatt and Bonnie where only playable for what, 5 to 8 minutes.
Not really. Three seasons, three main characters. It's about on par, I would say.
It has some pretty good diversity in general. Which is an unfortunate aspect of the way Season 2 treated some of its cast. Oops.
This new frontier I believe feels almost more akin to a spin off that just so happens to feature Clementine than a direct sequel to season 2 since Javier was never introduced in season 1 nor 2.
I've tried to be optimistic for the new protagonist but even before playing as Lee I was interested in learning what the character was about. Now to try to get invested in a stranger and his lost family for 5 episodes doesn't sit that well. Telltale has pulled of a few tricks in the past with what seemed to be impossible to like or understand and I'm hoping they can perform a miracle with this new dude. Or at least come with it much stronger than season 2 ever did this round.
I sorta got that vice as well.