Stardust Timelord

“Hey man, go around the corner”

“Naw it’s cool”

“It’s really not. (The owner) will ban you if he sees you doing this in front of his bar like an idiot”

“He won’t see me”

“Yeah but I see you. And I’m asking you to go around the corner so you’re not right in front of the fucking bar”

“It’s just weed. Are you scared of weed?”

“Listen you stupid hippie I use drugs that would blow your burnout mind. I don’t give a shit about weed. But do not fucking involve me, do not involve the bar. Just take seven steps to the corner and smoke your heart out”

“Naw man it’s cool”

Technically--although this varies by institution--I'm not even supposed to hint that the possibility exists, by saying things like, "your classmates might have some ideas," or "try asking on Reddit."

I probably wouldn't get in trouble for it, unless they wanted to get rid of me and were looking for something to pin it on, but I'm still not gonna do it. At least, not on our chat service where everything I say goes into a file that could conceivably be reviewed at some point, because one of my philosophies of life is "if they want to hang you, make them bring their own rope."

Additionally, I am a teacher at your school. If you announce your intention of cheating--plagiarizing, citing sources you didn't really use, etc.--I am supposed to lecture you about it, because information ethics is part of my subject.

I'm not any more enthusiastic about doing that than you are about hearing it, so if you already know that what you plan to do is cheating, and you're going to do it anyway, you can save us both some hassle by not telling me about it.

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!

and then he gets yanked directly out of that nexus and despite that the fact that he spent, again, two hundred years in a situation that was sort of a rock tumbler for the human soul, there’s still a pebble left in there. and it’s a pebble that can be grown if placed in the right environment and provided with a support network.

so i think it becomes interesting because it really does i think force you to start thinking about the limits of free will even on as basic a level as the human personality. i think the fact that he becomes such a different character based on player choice, that his end morality is so hugely dependent on player choice, is uhhh. a big part of what the devs were going for probably.

it makes a lot of people really uncomfortable to acknowledge some bad people would be good people if literally nothing changed except they had a good support network and different circumstances. especially because it means the opposite is also true. which is even more uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in Night Vale:

"'fandom' is a vehicle of marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a way that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture"

Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.