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Sep. 9th, 2020 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariSome more spoilery thoughts: End Roll is what happens when you literally can't imagine any form of justice other than retribution.
End Roll is aggressively deterministic, and this fits into how it presents justice. Russell killed people, so therefore Russell will die. That's why he's in the end roll, after all--because every ending is a form of suicide.
What makes it interesting is that it doesn't attach any ought statements to this. It's not really that Russell deserves to die, or even that he's particularly evil. He lashed out and did horrible things, and punishment is treated as the inevitable response to this. Every way this punishment could play out ends in death, so he'll die. There's never any idea that you could possibly do something with a traumatized teenager other than punish him.
Obviously, my answer to this is Utilitarianism. I think Russell has potential to understand and help other people who've been put in impossible situations--what the game flippantly calls "speeches about juvenile delinquency"--and I think that might be a way to find some peace with himself. But it seems like there are several ways you could take this, if you're willing to look beyond just making criminals suffer.
(On a related note, I now know of three different J-horror games where the sympathetic mass murderer's "best ending" is committing suicide. Way to make a point, devs.)
End Roll is aggressively deterministic, and this fits into how it presents justice. Russell killed people, so therefore Russell will die. That's why he's in the end roll, after all--because every ending is a form of suicide.
What makes it interesting is that it doesn't attach any ought statements to this. It's not really that Russell deserves to die, or even that he's particularly evil. He lashed out and did horrible things, and punishment is treated as the inevitable response to this. Every way this punishment could play out ends in death, so he'll die. There's never any idea that you could possibly do something with a traumatized teenager other than punish him.
Obviously, my answer to this is Utilitarianism. I think Russell has potential to understand and help other people who've been put in impossible situations--what the game flippantly calls "speeches about juvenile delinquency"--and I think that might be a way to find some peace with himself. But it seems like there are several ways you could take this, if you're willing to look beyond just making criminals suffer.
(On a related note, I now know of three different J-horror games where the sympathetic mass murderer's "best ending" is committing suicide. Way to make a point, devs.)
