Shock value
Remember in season 1 When Duck was shot out of frame and you barely could even see his dead body afterwards?
Now we got little girls in closeup having their brains being practically splattered over the camera.
I dunno. It just makes me uncomfortable. Not to mention we got to know Duck for longer.
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I think that's the point. having known Duck for longer made it harder to show us his dead body.
Mariana was less developed and adored.
He was younger too.
Because Telltale decided that she didnt deserve any character development, so it was a-okay to just kill her off for that good ol SHOCK VALUE!
Well the thing with Mari was that she was murdered right in front of us. The game put us in Javier's shoes.
She got the Omid treatment.
You could say...
She got Omid'd.
i will leave now
I don't really have an issue with Mariana having her brains blown out in front of us, personally. If anything giving a character a particularly brutal death, where they're disfigured and reduced to just a splattered mess of their former living selves, can be quite effective in making it all the more emotional, especially when you've built a bond with them (eg, Carley). It can also help in establishing hatred for those that committed said act.
No, instead, my issue lays in the way Telltale decides to go about these deaths in recent times. Usually, a character will have a few scenes, we'll get to know a little about them, and then suddenly- bang, dramatic moment, everybody's screaming- they're dead. It all happens just too quickly and we've yet to even develop much care for the character, so instead of having the emotional effect Telltale should be striving for, the death is used to induce a "dramatic" moment, to bring about shock value. The problem with this is, shock value only lasts so long, a few minutes tops and it gets repetitive, and with the dead character being someone you barely knew, there isn't even the emotional connection to let the death have meaning. It seems as though the character is only introduced to be killed. And don't get me wrong, sometimes this can actually work, where it's genuinely surprising and can change the tone of the story drastically, giving the sense that no one, no matter what, is truly safe, but it feels as though Telltale are relying too much on the technique and it's becoming stale by now.
The only reason I feel, and this is of course, all in my own opinion, that Marianna's death has gained such a response from fans is that she was a child, and quite an innocent one at that. Those who played season 1 were probably reminded of the old Clementine and the need to protect her, so for young Marianna to just be killed in such a manner, is horrible for those individuals. Now, I wasn't really effected much by Mari's death, as I feel I didn't get enough time to have care for her, and by this point, the "unexpected" deaths have become expectable to me.
We've seen worse.
Agreed. We didn't have much time with the characters, Javier may have a strong emotional attachment but how am I supposed to? I have four nieces, I would be absolutely devastated if something happened to one of them, more so if I was watching something so horrible happen right in front of me. But I've been around these girls since they were babies. I've had 3 or 4 talks with Mari before the big moment, I sympathize with them but I don't feel it the way Javier does. It ends up being less like me feeling his pain and more like me reading about what happened in a newspaper.
It could have been a real big moment if it happened later, but it just feels like a plot excuse to help Kate get to Richmond and set up Davids reaction.
Exactly. It's like Telltale just expect us to care about the characters simply because Javier or someone else in the game does, instead of giving them time for development and making sure that we, the players, actually grow to really care about them. It was the same with Conrad's wife (forgot her name). Why should we be effected by their deaths if we didn't even know them?
It seems everything now is just a way for the writers to get from A to B, but without the connection that's needed to invest the players. Obviously all stories do this, but there has to be some emotion in it, so that we can relate to the protagonist's motivation as well, otherwise there's no point experiencing the game.
I think it's b/c the world is much more brutal and savage by S3. Duck dies in S1 ands they're only about 2-3 months into the apocalypse. When Mariana is shot, we're 4 yrs in. I also think each death was done to illicit emotion in a different way. When Duck is killed, it's his father or Lee that has to do it out of mercy. Showing Duck's death wouldn't have added anything to the story other than gore. Mariana's death on the other hand is supposed to take us by surprise. We're supposed to feel the shock of seeing someone we (as Javi) care about get cut down right before our eyes. You can't get that if you kill Mariana off screen.
Yea, not even a "shock" to anyone. Seriously we didn't even talk to her more than like 4 or 5 times so we didn't know her at all. Stupid TellTale trying to hook people with UNBELIEVABLE SHOCKING DEATHS, because apparently they don't know that EPISODE 1 DEATHS DON'T MATTER IF IT'S NOT A CHARACTER THAT'S BEEN AROUND FOR MULTIPLE SEASONS.
The sad part is it didn't even shock me when she died, my brain just went "Telltale c'mon youre gonna leave me with the whiny brat?".
Well, you can barely classify it as "Omid" tier, we didn't even get Mariana to develop. With Omid, we actually cared about his character (actually made me laugh a few times), and he at least died in a dumb, yet borderline-okay tier, Mariana was just "Oh, okay, smile for the camera, that's the pos- FUCK!".
dead
Mariana and Duck are the same age.
wtf? really?
Between her and Sarah's multiple death scenes, Telltale's treatment of children's death is becoming pretty gross.
Because they're seen as innocent and pure, having them grossly brutalized and mistreated in the narrative is also perceived as being far more impactful to the audience and is one of the very few things in any form of artistic medium I truly don't feel comfortable with.
Using her for literally that one moment of emotional cruelty was quite disgusting.
Yep, both characters are/where 10 years old when they died.
I thought Duck and Clem were the same age.
Clementine was 8 in season 1 and duck was 10, this was officially confirmed by Telltale on their old website before they updated it so you will need to look at the archive but i will also post a screenshot of his bio from the website.
Jeez, talk about a trip down memory lane
Looking back at the old site is bringing me back all kinds of feelings
The tender kiss of nostalgia. Gotta love it.
duck must have been mentally challenged then. i assumed he was about 7 or 8.
I do think her death can serve a greater purpose for the story after all we are going to have to tell her dad what happened and that in turn can cause a lot of friction between us him and rest of the frontier thus moving a lot plot points around the board over this death but only if telltale can do it right if they plan to do it at all.
The old forums are pretty nostalgic
.
Kenny says Duck is "as dumb as a bag of hammers" so i think he thinks a similar thing.
oh man, it's all coming back to me now. damn, season 1 was brilliant.
"Shock Value"
Yes I am quite shocked that the only normal character we don't have any beef with, dies for drama sake. This is so lazy and predicable now that I didn't even cared when this 10 minutes in total screen time character died, the only word that come out of my mouth was "meh", unlike those other Youtube clickbatters with their "this REALLY shocked me" titles.
They should take example from those old Microsoft games that come with your Windows, like Pinball or Solitaire or Minesweeper, have the player invest some time on it and then once he's near the top, ruin it for him so that he falls down.
When did the forum design change again?
I'm drawing blanks on when it used to look like ProBoards. It was changed in late 2013, early 2014, right?
There's some things you never forget... for me, this is not one of those things.
I seem to remember it changing September 2013.
How badass would it be if Duck was still alive and kicking ass
Somebody should make a fan art of 14 yo Duck with a shotgun. :P
I don't get why TellTale enjoys killing kids so much. It's not "shocking", just tasteless and, more often than not, poorly done. Duck was at least put out of his misery. Sarah's deaths were downright sadistic and Mariana was someone you barely even got to know.
Oh, so TVTropes used that description for their characters page. Neat!
Fiction should always strive to put us in the protagonist character's shoes.
Ten points for A New Frontier.
Preach!
That is objectively false.
I am somebody and I was shocked.
Except when it serves to make the subject matter banal and trite as a direct result.
That was an effective way of establishing the tone of a post-apocalyptic video game's season, right?
NO.
And why does a kid getting her face blown apart in front of us have to be the seismic nuke used to display the established tone?
Hmm, okay. I guess I forgot that. Wow, imagine? Duck would be 15 now if he had lived.