#detective sinclair

Let's rewind a bit to when a young, 19-year old Joey Drew lived in Greenwich Village.

According to the Library of Congress,

"Greenwich Village was a refuge for undiscovered artists and free thinkers. The cheap quarters of the village allowed these bohemians to escape the dreary, industrial world and live a penniless, enlightened lifestyle."

It was also famously home to a lot of queer people.

This brings us to Detective Sinclair.

Sinclair shows up to Joey's place of residence out of the blue. They get to talking- he's investigating the murder of Walter Richmond, and Joey notes that Sinclair is taking inventory of the apartment. He suddenly becomes a shade more self-conscious, and after Sinclair later makes a dry comment about its barren appearance, Joey is noticeably very irked. He seems to care a lot about what this detective thinks of him already.

Cut to later on: Joey has now been tailing the detective for a while (per his own personal request.) We're supposed to infer that he's following Sinclair because he doesn't want to be unimportant to the detective's "story" (he even says as much.) But I'm going to be real, you're a 19 year old from Greenwich galavanting around with Detective Looker, this is not a straight endeavor.

Later on, Sinclair invites him to dinner on business terms.

It becomes increasingly obvious that Joey wants Sinclair to notice and appreciate the way he dresses. He not only fixates on this, but gets irritated with him when he doesn't seem to care.

When they arrive, the butler comments that dinner has just finished. Joey's reaction?

You could boil this all down to Joey being an attention whore, which I won't argue with. But he's an attention whore we see making a valiant effort to present himself in the best possible light to this detective that won't remember him by Saturday, specifically wanting him to notice and appreciate the way he dresses, AND he gets huffy when he's not actually going to dinner with him.

However, Sinclair is only our second stop. Let's jump forward in time to a freshly 30 year old Joey, who seems to have his affections directed towards...a more familiar face.

Going for the big guns uh? Buckle in then, let's see what kind of ammo the Fractos has to work with:

Henry Stein - His anger issues. Henry's childhood and adulthood were fairly turbulent because he's prone to getting fits of rage (an issue that was exacerbated when he was drafted to fight in the second world war). There's never been a moment in his life where he wasn't aware that he can hurt people very easily, and it scares him that this is possibly all he's good at. It's why drawing and gardening meant so much to him... For once he could make something good instead of destroying it...

Sammy Lawrence - That he's a weak-willed follower rather than the master of his own fate, untrustworthy and insignificant. His role as the Prophet disgusts him because it's everything he strived not to be, and the hypocrisy of it all left him questioning his identity and sense of self. What is he if he's not Samuel Lawrence Jr? Can he go back to calling himself that? Or is that just another name he can't ever return to ever again...? Just... Who is he?

Jack Fain - Being unable to protect himself and others, no matter how much he tried to be there for his friends. The sense of insignificance and powerlessness left him fearing that every single one if his efforts is in vain.

Susie Campbell - That she's not good enough. Always second best to someone more talented and beautiful than her. That no matter how hard she tried, she should have just given up and let the world step all over her.

Norman Polk - That he's nothing more than an unwanted and unlovable creepy brute. As a tall bulky man of his age and background, Norman's always had a lot against him. But, even when snapping at people or fighting back just as hard was warranted, he never let himself stoop so low. Becoming the out of control and monstrous Projectionist wounded him deeply...

Allison Pendle - That deep down she's just as selfish and careless as Joey. They got along fine because they had a level of understanding about certain arts they were mutually interested in... Maybe that means she's rotten like him. A danger to others if she ever becomes as jaded as he did...

Thomas Connor - The worst part is the guilt. If he hadn't been complacent to Joey's will to begin with, none of this would have happened. He's stuck in a cycle of grief and what ifs, afraid that he's damned everyone because of his own hubris as a prideful engineer.

Shawn Flynn - His willful ignorance will haunt him forever. He knew something was wrong, but he'd rather ignore it and make a quick buck than actually stop to think. It only struck him that he was in too deep when Grant began to deteriorate, and by then it was too late to stop. If only he hadn't been so selfish and cocky...

Grant Cohen - That he deserves all of this in some twisted terrible way. His life has always been one string of misfortunes after another. Maybe he was a bad person in another life. Maybe he didn't show enough people kindness in this one... Maybe he's just destined to suffer. He's always been and always will be unable to save himself...

Buddy Lewek - That he's too weak and cowardly to be of any help. Everyone has been doing so much to keep him safe, and he doesn't have the strength to do the same for them. He feels guilty about it, but he just... He just can't... He's afraid and he wants to go home. He wants his mom... And he feels bad that he's this pathetic when his friends need him most.

Abby Lambert - Regret, guilt, sorrow... She knows them all to well. Most of all she knows hatred the best... She hates that she was so bad a judge of character that she couldn't see just how bad things got. Just how far Joey would take it... She was blind to it all because she considered him a friend, and she'll never forgive herself or him for it...

Doc Hackenbush - That he didn't leave when he could have. He was aware and against the results of the experiments, but he was also curious. Morbidly so. He could have helped stop all of this before it got to this point... But instead chose to stay quiet. A choice that will haunt him forever.

Bertrum Piedmont - That he'd been too proud to realize he was digging himself and Lacie an early grave. What hurts most now isn't even the state he's in... It's that he damned his closest friend to this terrible fate as well...

Lacie Benton - That she couldn't convince Bertrum to not accept a contract with Joey. She knew something was off with the man... She just couldn't imagine this being how it ended... Feels like she failed her dearest friend.

Emma LaMonte - Her biggest regret is not telling her family how much she appreciated them. She'd been a stuck-up unpleasant and difficult lady all her life and now... She fears she'll never have a chance to make amends.

Detective Sinclair - That he failed Joey in some way, thus made him more prone to becoming less interested in being a law abiding citizen. He knows that something broke when he failed that case... That somehow he taught that young and impressionable puppy-eyed boy that justice only matters as long as you're caught... He's a failure of a detective and all of this is his fault...

I don't think they'll put Sinclair in the game. Just by the logic of it- Sinclair is someone who was only briefly in Joey's life, years if not decades before the ink machine was installed. It seems like Joey for the most part sacrificed anyone who was available during the studio's run, so he wouldn't have gone out of his way to sacrifice a man who had never been a part of the studio. By the time Joey was sacrificing people he had a personal vendetta against (like Henry and possibly Tom and Allison), Sinclair would likely already be dead of natural causes- he is much older than Joey, after all. Finally, it's likely that the next game takes place in a sketch dimension created by Nathan, who never met Sinclair.

As for why they added Sinclair... well, I think that the theme of the entire murder mystery arc was how people are not always valued as people, and Joey values people even less than most do. I'm about to write a small English essay, here, so if you only want to know about Sinclair's purpose, skip to the bolded section. Also, I don't have my book on hand to reference, so I apologize for any details I get wrong.

The murder in TIOL was committed by a woman whose relative had died in the war, and was committed against a man who photographed soldiers in a way that glorified war and sacrifice. This same woman terrorized a group of people who attended an art show of his photography by creating an emergency. Her motive was to show people that violence is not glorious, and that glorifying things that hurt people is wrong, because individual people are valuable.

Joey is her opposite in this regard. From the age of ten, he has viewed people as characters. His views on other people are shown in how he talks about the murder victim. The murder victim was a mediocre photographer and had no relevance to Joey's life, and so Joey sees his life as nearly worthless, going so far as to say that the most important thing he did in his life was to become a character in Joey's story and to inspire the name of Joey's cartoon character. He says this within paragraphs of describing the mourning family he was taken from, one member of whom Joey kept in touch with and received money from years later. Essentially, Joey is incapable of seeing inherent value in people- their only value, like the value of fictional characters, is in the "narrative purpose" they serve in his own life.

Sinclair's purpose within this theme is to show that Joey doesn't even respect his heroes as people. As soon as they fail to live up to their "narrative purpose" (in Sinclair's case, being someone Joey could look up to in every way), Joey stops caring about them, as he did when Sinclair proved himself to be less above-it-all than Joey thought. Joey doesn't just have high standards for people- to win Joey's affection is worthless, because he will still view you in a twisted way.

You know, there's something incredibly wholesome about getting these asks where people try to comfort fictional characters that are going through tremendous pain.

It makes me smile thinking, maybe, just maybe, there's a lot more people out there who are willing to offer someone some kindness...

I'm putting all the asks under a cut so I don't flood the tag. Enjoy the responses.

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Every character has a story. Even ones Joey has deemed unneeded or obsolete... Detective Sinclair is definitely one of those characters.

I just hope I have the words to tell those stories.