#star-text

With the letting Joseph live vs saving Bo conflict, your personal stakes in it are basically optional, as you have the choice to pretty much never interact with Avery at all, and the Calloways are side characters, meaning there's barely any opportunitys to get attached to them in general, making it so it's very easy to not get as invested in the conflict as what might have been intended

But that's just the first of two major conflicts in this episode, and I will say the Saving Kanneka vs MAYBE Saving the town conflict is by far the worse of the two. I can see what BTG was trying to do with this conflict, a sort of trolley problem situation, but it feels like they knew people would be biased towards saving Kanneka and overcorrected way to hard.

For one thing, they had that whole flashback sequence showing sybils perspective (Which I think drove some people further against her ironically), immediately followed by Kanneka herself trying to convince you it's better to wipe her from existence. And then if you have Mystic, Sybil offers to make a deal with you to either give you a WHOLE THIRD TRAIT, or to make either you or Tabitha young again of one of you sacrificed years in episode 3, meaning that you essentially get a big buff for sacrificing Kanneka!

But the thing that makes me truly hate this conflict, is the fact there's several ways for you to be forced into sacrificing Kanneka. not only is there the fact Tabitha can hold you back from saving her if she cares about you enough (If this was the only way this could be forced I would have been much more okay with it since Tabitha has forced major decisions before) but you can also lose Kannkea if you don't have your relationship with her high enough, and we can also assume if you get ANY of the premature ends for episode 5 she will get sacrificed since you won't be there to stop Sybil, which is insane to me because this is the ONLY episode with premature endings, and thus the only episode with so many ways for the conflict to resolve without you (which is more of a problem for the Kanneka conflict because of the lack of personal stakes in the pumpkin baby conflict I discussed earlier)

There is also definitely something to be said about the fact that the main conflicts involving the only two major black characters in the game were not only both shoved into the same episode, but that both of the conflicts that should have focused on them were very much not. (Though I am gonna reblog another persons post for details on that side of things, that person explained it better than I could and this post is getting really long.)