S3 has no character arc/development?
Idk if I'm just missing something but I feel like Gabe and Clem were the only main characters whose character have developed over the season.
- Gabe learned to be less stubborn and accept guidance from Kate/Javi/etc. instead of always trying to be 'the big man' and prove that he was capable of handling himself
- After losing Jane/Kenny and growing into a standoffish lone wolf, Clem opened herself up to forming friendships and being willing to help and be helped by others
On the other hand, I don't feel like any other MC's Javi, Kate, David had memorable changes in their personalities.
- Javier learns to be a leader? It's kinda tacked on at the end of E5 with leading Richmond, with no particularly memorable instances of group leadership in the story
- David lived and died as a hot headed selfish guy unable to control his anger. The game kept flipflopping with the beginnings of a redemption arc but he always ends up doing dumb shit and effectively backtracks any the progress made
- Kate got over Javi?
The supporting characters weren't that great either - Tripp and Conrad had something of a forgiveness arc with Javi, but they were really short and resolved in a couple lines. Ava and Eleanor were onscreen for the whole of 3 minutes and had next to no personality.
Compare with S1, a few examples:
- Lee takes on a leadership role and deals with the burden of a group relying on him to take care of them
- Ben comes to terms with his liability and realises that the group would survive better without him
- Kenny learns to be selfless and care about people other than him and his family, he deals with loss and his compulsive need to have something to take care of
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yes, gabe was seriously the only character that developed. what the fuck.
Tfw Conrad is celebrated as having the best arch in this game, but it's only the best because it's the only arch.
Seriously though, even Gabe's arch was utterly tacked on to stop people from loathing him. He completely contradicted his personality in Episode 5. He never had this "moment of realization" of realizing he's a little shit. He just went from little shit to cool dude in like 5 seconds.
Clem is the only one with a semi-acceptable arch. At least she gradually comes up to the point to where she can form bonds with others again. Now, that doesn't negate the fact that the path there was completely forced (Like fuck, all of her chats with Gabe were wince-worthy. I'm glad you got to talk over them, because they are actually so unbearably badly written.) but she at least didn't act out of character in Episode 5 when she was friendly to Javier.
Well, him and technically Conrad, but I agree.
they shouldn't have focused so much on conrad, he was alive for less than 10% of players. focus more on the MAIN CAST, like kate and david
No, Gabe's arc is tacked on because they set up all the parts for it at the beginning and then held off on most of it until the last episode.
Uh...no comment.
Foreshadowing a dime-switch change of character that happens literally at the last episode of the Season isn't how you write a character. There's no progression there.
Says you, Mr. Clem is the only one with development.
What I'm saying is they should've space it out more, or better yet, put half of it in Thicker than Water, the episode where he gets a fair bit of screentime and development anyway. Would've made things that much better for everyone.
For starters, I never said Clem is the only one with development. I'm saying that she's the only one with development that isn't tacked on, but even then, it pretty much is. We don't get enough time in the episodes to develop her character. However, the story begins with her robbing Javi and struggling to even communicate with him normally. Then, throughout episodes 2-5, she slowly develops a closer relationship to him, such as being comfortable enough to ask him what her period means. It wasn't executed the best, but it was executed better than any of the characters.
Speaking of Gabe, I don't disagree that the foreshadowing should be sprinkled throughout the episode, but hinting towards the ending isn't the same as actual progression. Gabe having his outburst about Conrad was a good character moment, but he doesn't really show any regret with having a temper tantrum and never really thinks about it all of episode 4. Then, all of a sudden, in Episode 5, he's all "I love you Javi!!! You're my real dad!!!" It's inconsistent. The character change isn't the problem, it's how it's handled. It would be good if we actually saw some of his internal conflict of "Huh, maybe I am being a bit of liability, and maybe I have to change my attitude".
i do agree that the writing was definitely lacking, but at least it was better than all of the other main cast. at least he did become accountable, in one of the endings he claimed that he is confused as to why javi came after him due to the fact that he was making life harder for him.
Oh, with that I definitely agree. Gabe was miles more interesting than any of the other characters lmao. That doesn't exclude him for criticism though.
Actually, I'd say that they didn't focus on Conrad enough and that focusing on him happened when the other Garcias were off doing their own thing anyway. He's another example of how rushed some character developement and/or subplots are, but we generally forgive since he's determinant and pretty much a side character anyway.
Yeah, the character development in this Installment is pretty haphazard, with or without comparing it to Season 2.
YMMV, but most of Javier's development happened between the time periods and a fair portion of the rest of it is just instantly tacked on when covenient. The family dynamics were fairly good, but each of them had issues, some of them arguably on arrival.
Kate might be my 2nd favorite original character, but I won't lie by ignoring that her development(if you can call some of it that) is about on the level of Javier's. The whole determinate "Let's make a family" thing in particular definitely confounds me considering it's not that big a time skip. Really, only her decision to save Richmond from the herd made any sense.
Gabe was easily the most interesting character to me in part because he had the most going on with him, which was ultimately both a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because it always ensured I had somethings to think about during the wait for the next episode; a bad thing because he felt increasingly wasted with each proceeding episode until the finale finally decided to give him some deep character development...just to make him determinant. FUCK!
Marianna wasn't really the type of character meant to have much development to begin with imho, given her phlegmatic apathy to conflict and possibly work, so no comment to be had there.
Max is probably the one the bigger wastes of a good character because, unlike most of the other villains, he was something of a consistent anti-villain(even if it's purely Type I) in the first three episodes, chroniclogically being around long enough to be know Clementine&AJ to earning his position as a lieutenant(is that really the right term or is there a slightly lower rank?) of David's to being in cahoots on the secret Joan commissioned raids despite being far more orderly and conductive than his co-league Badger. However, after his offer to determinantly expose Joan's actions in front of the other Council Members, he just disappears entirely from the story, taking his connection to major plot elements with him.
Tripp is for my money the weakest character in ANF, which is really saying something given the general reception. We learn next to nothing about him that doesn't relate to the fact that Eleanor and Conrad are in the group as well and even that is underdeveloped. We don't know how he got his job, what his exact job description is, what it is about Javier that he likes, etc. It also doesn't help that his characterization and prominence, as well as the few [shallow] attempts to give him a character arc, are a bit inconsistent and arbitrary. The improved but still questionable handling of certain determinant factors doesn't really help his case.
Conrad is often praised for actually having a character arc and/or subplot in a story where the arcs/subplots tend to be shaky when they aren't outright dropped. And it's probably the main reason I like him, but the issue here is the exact execution. His Level Taken in Kindness is definitely appreciated in this series, but the issue is how fast it happens--well, that and the fact that it apparently happens offscreen despite the beginning of the episode establishing that he means business. I realize it's partially because it's determinant and he was offscreent for a fair amount of time anyway, but they didn't really handwave it properly with a tangible explanation, namely being stuck in the corner of a small room with his suspect Clementine nearby to talk to. And his disappearance at the beginning of From the Gallows if he didn't sacrifice himself is another example of that episode's issues with continuity, not that it really affects his characterization.
Eleanor is a character who I actually wanted to like more given her personality and usefulness, but alas she was consistently relegated to being useful offscreen even after the penultimate episode tacks on the notion of her siding with Joan and the people of Richmond, which the foreshadowing/setup is pretty easy to miss in her few scenes in the same episode. As a result, she is simultaneously one of the more consistent characters but also one of the least complex. The finale only has her show up toward the beginning furiously attending to the effects of shootout at David's 'hearing', in which she lays into Javier for what happened but can be forgiven before being ignored for the rest of the episode. Interestingly enough, this was originally not the case for Pro-David players, as there was originally gonna be a choice where she advocated returning the stolen supplies to their rightful owners opposite of Clint.
David is simultaneously a pillar of the story and also a kneetrick to it. He started out as a necessary weasel to get Javier, Kate, and Gabe's characterization rounded out and then his appearance at the end of part 2 brought a fair amount of possibilities, ranging from being a villainous family member to a anti-heroic ally. But alas, despite the establishment of Badger and Joan as the closest thing ANF has to main villains, David's chararacter kinda nosedives into being near intolerable for the sake of falling back on the angry family man trope yet again, going from wanting to live with his remaining family while protecting Richmond and working to out his fellow councilor's corruption to pettily abandoning it in favor of running away with his family, beating up his little brother because his wife likes him more, and essentially kidnapping his son when his wife wanted to help preserve Richmond.
Joan, and more specifically her co-league Clint, were introduced as well-intentioned extremists trying to prevent their constituents from experiencing the troubles brought upon them that an event they refer to as The Winter. To this end, Joan was using her pull in The New Frontier and her authrority as the Diplomacy Leader to have David's soldiers Max, Lonnie, and Lonnie(and Roxanne?) conduct secret raids on other settlements for supplies. However, while Clint was somewhat distinguished by his adherence to their statutes and his faith in Joan's decisionmaking, Joan was shifted into being a petty political gambler with a jarringly audacious and somewhat sadistic sense of humor, doing things like calling David's execution a hearing, offering Javier a chance to save Ava or Tripps life to teach him a lesson about betrayal, taunting him with the possibility of his group being killed by the herd if he accepts Clint's deal to take his group and leave, and simply standing by as David orders his brother to strike her down with a smile on her face. Depending on how Javier responds to Clint's deal, the surviving Councilor runs off in the middle of the confusion with David and determinantly Ava and/or Gabe in tow. However, neither of them appear in the finale, with none of the characters acknowledging their current status if not dead and the credits simply stating their whereabouts are unknown, seemingly abandoning the settlement they worked so hard to preserve to the Walker Infestation that occured after they fled. However, this was originally not the case, as the two were involved in an unused choice: choosing the presumably captured Joan's fate for her crimes or siding with the presumably truce-bound Clint on keeping the stolen supplies to help repair Richmond opposite of Joan.
And finally, Clementine. I think she is the source of a fair amount of the disappointment for ANF in general to a lot of people, but her character arc in particular is kind of a joke. And what kills me about that is that it probably shouldn't be, given that she's arguably the deuterogonist of the story if you're being generous . Her grudge against the New Frontier for kicking her out without the assumed to be dying AJ and the issue with trust and aggression that it caused her is kinda picked up and put down about as much as her actual presence in the story, with many of Javier's choices to side against her, alongside her conflicting relationships with David and Gabe, not really playing much of a role in her conduct until the climax of the finale. And when everything is said and down, she just kind of leaves with a makeover to go achieve the mission her continued involvement was based around in the firstplace.