#affo

Jarod : A driver you should not annoy.

Jarod is one of the 7 "main" characters you will meet during your adventures (because I count Stan & Mitch as one person). Not much is known about him at first, except that he is a taxi driver or even the boss of "Happy Taxi", the only taxi company in the country. A boss who works as much as his employees instead of running his business from his office, that’s cool. But unlike the name of his company, he is not happy at all. Jarod is quite tall, must have in his forties, skinny, always wearing a hat and a cigarette in his mouth, displaying a tired face, quite disctinative dark circles under the eyes.  

A heavy smoker so but it’s not very shocking, besides the reason why he smokes, it’s simply because he does not want to fall asleep and be arrested by the police, at least that is the reason he gives. So we can say that he is one of those characters who are not bad but who are uncomfortable. However, Jarod is the most dangerous character, as every scene with him is a sign of a potential death, the cause being an anger management issue. To put it simply, if you annoy him a little too much, he will have the trigger very easy.

Everything is done so that as soon as you see him, you have this feeling of fear, discomfort and stress that rises slowly, very slowly in your mind, and instinctively you only think about one thing, surviving in front of him. You also discover that he feels a hatred towards Sonya Sanchez seeking at all costs to kill her, even managing to call her during her show to threaten her to death. And unfortunately, he has already made victims on his way, given that several people disappear, including teenagers and that rumors of a psycopathe circulate in the country.  

But for all that, very quickly things become clear and the game explains the character in more depth... And believe me, we change our opinion about him very quickly.

Jarod, A desesperate father who seeks justice by himself.

During a scene with Stan and Mitch and in all the scenes with Jarod, we learn the existence of a certain Lola. This person is none other than Jarod’s daughter, who died in the 1986 attack, crushed by the rocks that fell from the peak collapse. We can see that Jarod has a picture of her in his taxi as well as objects and magazines on dinosaurs, Lola being a paleontology’s enthusiast, even wanting to make it her job to the point of documenting everything about them.

We learn from Jarod's mouth that she was recruited by his biology teacher Bob Winters at the age of 16 in the Black Brigade, which he keeps for the end. And that's where we see Jarod differently. He is not a psychopathic killer as everyone suggests, but simply a depressed, desperate and guilty father who wants at all costs to eliminate those who took and led his daughter to death in order to avenge her and have peace for himself. He therefore resents the Brigade, the police and the justice itself for this reason and for Sonya Sanchez, he wants to kill her because she was present at the scene and, according to him, did absolutely nothing to save his daughter from the collapse of the peak.  

This does not excuse what he did but personally I can not really blame him. Losing a loved one is difficult to bear mentally, but the hardest thing is for a parent who loses his child and especially at such a young age and in such horror and injustice. Remember that Lola was only 16 years old, so she still had her whole life ahead of her and unfortunately she stopped abruptly when she could have been saved and no one moved to help her. I think personally, I would have done the same thing if I had been in his shoes.

Jarod : which side to choose ?

So what can we think of Jarod? Certainly what he does is illegal and immoral but we can not blame him for his humanity and his paternal side to want to avenge the death of his daughter. In addition, we can speculate on many things about him since at no time does he talk about his wife. It’s not known if she is still alive, or if she has also died but my hypothesis is that his wife is dead a long time ago given that he seemed to live only with his daughter, and that if his wife was still alive, I think Lola would have lived under shared custody. After, I don’t put out this hypothesis either, but since we have no information about it, all options are possible. However this very protective side, and the way Jarod calls his daughter, such as my "darling baby" or my "sweet daughter" leads me to think that he was a doting-father and therefore that he raised his daughter alone.  

Compared to my future fiction, I intend to keep the personnality of the character, at least I will try while trying to make him evolve slowly both for his relationship with himself and in his relationship with others. We'll see what happens.

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