Keen's Blog

based on this tweet

This is the Tabitha line of all time to me.

There's this slight awareness that her childhood wasn't great, because she phrases it as "Not everybody gets to learn how to clean things" rather than just "Not everybody learns how to clean things." Learning to clean is something she sees as a privilege. But she also treats her position as kind of inevitable, instead of as a failure of the adults who were supposed to teach her how to take care of herself. The phrasing of the sentence doesn't get to the root of the problem, even though the problem is acknowledged. She doesn't say that she wasn't taught, she says that she didn't get to learn. The people responsible for teaching her are non-entities, brushed over like Tabitha just appeared fully formed as an adult who doesn't know how to clean.

And then there's the learned helplessness of it all. "How was I supposed to know that?" she asks. But she does have people in her life who would teach her! Stella and Janey are the first two who come to mind, but I don't even think they're the only ones. And outside of that, she has access to the internet!

This casts the state of the manor in a new light. Keen Eye also directly compares the state of the house with Tabitha's diet, and while Keen Eye mostly puts that down to her liking things to be a specific, unchanging way, another obvious conclusion is that she doesn't know how to cook. I think her liking things to be a specific way is also part of both, but when taken together with her lack of knowledge and learned helplessness it starts to seem like behaviors such as refusing to let Janey clean most of the manor and making sure her place of work has high quality mac & cheese are a desperate attempt to exercise some control of her surroundings.

Just... the complete acceptance of a status quo she admits she doesn't want, and the bizarre ways she tries to get control back without going against the status quo. But how is she supposed to change it? Not everyone gets to.

And, most importantly, she is separate from everyone else. She doesn’t experience the world in the same way. She doesn’t have to face the same stakes that the others do. She makes choices that drastically change people’s lives while not seeing them as people. When we see things from her perspective, every person is a puppet. A doll, a toy, a character. Not real, not the way she is.

She directly tells the player that this is the only way they get a happy ending. Whether or not that’s true, Street Smart confirms she believes it. How would the player’s actions change, if they “knew” there was a Correct sequence of sacrifices to get The Good Ending?

So the question is. Can the player maintain the same investment in the characters that they had the first go around? Or will they start to see the characters the way Sybil does once they’ve played through enough times?