Game Theory: Until Dawn's Tragic Hero

MatthewPatrick13

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Until Dawn's Tragic Hero

Until Dawn is all about making sure you make the right choices to make it out alive... But what if the most important character in the game is the only one who gets NO CHOICE in whether they live or die. What does that mean for you playing the game? What does that say about the game itself? Get ready for a completely new understanding of Until Dawn! (plus a few spoilers!)

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flying_whimsy

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Yeah, I never blamed Josh throughout the entire game exactly for those reasons: dude needed help, and what he got was neglect and murdered sisters. In the ending where he becomes a wendigo, I can't even imagine what realizing the truth that one of his sisters was a monster did to him mentally. I'd kind of hope for a sequel where wendigo josh hunts down all of his 'friends'.

The only actually innocent people in the game are Josh (seriously, no court would convict him), the black kid that's emily's new beau, and the surviving miner with the flame thrower. I thought it was a real waste that they killed off the miner guy so quickly. Everyone else would end up with manslaughter charges for the sisters.

I was never keen on how fast the game was to declare josh evil and be done with it, nor how easy it was to miss the clues that showed you just how far gone he truly was.
 

TP Potato

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This was a great video. I don't own a PS4 so I had to watch a walkthrough of this game. Unfortunately the person who was playing didn't find the psychiatrist notes, so I really didn't grasp how bad Josh's condition was until those hallucinations he sees towards the end. I feel games like Until Dawn, Life is Strange, and Spec Ops: The Line all have underlying messages in them that try to draw attention to mental health issues, which is definitely a good thing.
 

Adamantium93

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flying_whimsy said:
Everyone else would end up with manslaughter charges for the sisters.
Just saying, Matt was a part of that group (he's the one with the selfie stick), while both Chris and Sam were elsewhere in the house when the prank happened (Sam was trying to find Hannah to warn her, Chris was passed out with Josh).


OT: I thought this video was great. Josh definitely struck me as a tragic character when I saw it the first time and its cool to see his condition broken down like that.

On a related note, there is actually a psychological condition where one believes that they're turning into a Wendigo. It's rare but has been found among Amerindian populations that have Wendigo legends.

The process of becoming a Wendigo sounds kind of mental-disorder-esque. Unlike most monsters which require physical contact with the creature to become one (virus metaphors), becoming a Wendigo only requires that you resort to cannibalism. So Hannah is rejected by her peers and abandoned by everyone who she cared about. She becomes sick and, desperate to survive, does anything that will help her continue living. Gradually, she becomes unable to control her actions and seeks the destruction of the relationships she once held dear (notice that she doesn't eat the kids, just kills them when she captures them). At this point, there is no saving her, no finding the Hannah that once existed.

It sounds like a very extreme case of depression that was left untreated if you take away the monster parts of it.
 

EternallyBored

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flying_whimsy said:
Yeah, I never blamed Josh throughout the entire game exactly for those reasons: dude needed help, and what he got was neglect and murdered sisters. In the ending where he becomes a wendigo, I can't even imagine what realizing the truth that one of his sisters was a monster did to him mentally. I'd kind of hope for a sequel where wendigo josh hunts down all of his 'friends'.

The only actually innocent people in the game are Josh (seriously, no court would convict him), the black kid that's emily's new beau, and the surviving miner with the flame thrower. I thought it was a real waste that they killed off the miner guy so quickly. Everyone else would end up with manslaughter charges for the sisters.

I was never keen on how fast the game was to declare josh evil and be done with it, nor how easy it was to miss the clues that showed you just how far gone he truly was.
Not sure how you got that out of the story:

First off, the scene with the sisters is not even close to manslaughter, certainly a colossally dickish thing to do, but embarrassing someone and then them deciding to run off into the forest only to die to a completely unrelated set of circumstances does not count as manslaughter, there isn't a court in the world that would convict them for that. It's not even negligent as they attempted to look for them after both Hannah and Beth didn't come back, likely under the assumption that she would go a little ways into the woods and cry for awhile before returning, there was no way to reasonably assume that they would run into a monster and fall off a cliff. The people responsible for the prank are massively insensitive, like many teenagers are, but they didn't commit any crimes.

Some of them may have been culpable enough to lose a civil suit and have to pay out money to Hannah and Beth's family for emotional damages, but even that would be a long hard case to prove, playing a cruel prank isn't a crime, and them running off into the forest would not be assumed to be incredibly dangerous in most realistic scenarios.

What Josh did was a whole hell of a lot worse than what they did to Hannah, I mean Josh would be fully justified in never talking to the assholes that pulled the prank, but what he did was in fact criminal, and broke numerous laws, especially the kidnapping, assault, and the whole choose who to shoot scene would rack up at least a couple of felonies.

Yeah, Josh is kind of tragic in that he was someone that obviously needed help, but most of the other people there did not deserve any of the sick shit Josh did to them, he's not responsible for the Wendigo stuff, as all that was unexpected on his part, but he responded to a cruel prank that resulted in a tragic accident by kidnapping and assaulting the people responsible. Even the people that weren't involved at all, so basically that kills most of his sympathy right there.

So yeah, every court would convict him, even if the prankers were guilty of a crime, considering he drew an entirely innocent person into his scheme with involving Matt (EDIT:I meant Chris, who wasn't in the room when the prank happened, sorry got them confused) . Also, kidnapping is still a crime, even if the original group were guilty of something, the court system doesn't let you just kidnap people for a crime they may have committed a year ago. Even if they were wanted by the police, you still get in trouble if you torment someone you've put under citizen's arrest as you are responsible for everything that happens to them once you restrain them.

I will agree that the Wendigo hunter should have lasted longer than he did.
 

EyeReaper

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flying_whimsy said:
Yeah, I never blamed Josh throughout the entire game exactly for those reasons: dude needed help, and what he got was neglect and murdered sisters. In the ending where he becomes a wendigo, I can't even imagine what realizing the truth that one of his sisters was a monster did to him mentally. I'd kind of hope for a sequel where wendigo josh hunts down all of his 'friends'.

The only actually innocent people in the game are Josh (seriously, no court would convict him), the black kid that's emily's new beau, and the surviving miner with the flame thrower. I thought it was a real waste that they killed off the miner guy so quickly. Everyone else would end up with manslaughter charges for the sisters.

I was never keen on how fast the game was to declare josh evil and be done with it, nor how easy it was to miss the clues that showed you just how far gone he truly was.
So, why is Josh innocent for his prank getting people murdered but the Beth/Hannah prank manslaughter? How is it any different besides Josh being loopier than a hula hoop? Josh being insane doesn't get him off the hook for the much more extreme "pranks" he tries to pull.

Not to mention that realistically even if there were only blanks in the gun, putting it directly to your skin and firing would have killed Chris. Who was also passed out drunk with Josh and thus shouldn't be involved in the revenge scheme anyways.
 

Casual Shinji

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EyeReaper said:
Not to mention that realistically even if there were only blanks in the gun, putting it directly to your skin and firing would have killed Chris. Who was also passed out drunk with Josh and thus shouldn't be involved in the revenge scheme anyways.
Can that actually kill you though? Because if it's just hot exhaust fumes the worst it could do is burn your skin, or blind you should you fire it in your eye (thank you, In Bruges). Not that I'm an expert on blanks or hot gas.
 

Patinator

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Casual Shinji said:
Can that actually kill you though?
It was how Bruce Lee's son Brandon died filming the movie "The Crow". Granted it wasn't so simple as shooting it right into his skin, but it can still be deadly.
 

Casual Shinji

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MC1980 said:
Casual Shinji said:
Can that actually kill you though? Because if it's just hot exhaust fumes the worst it could do is burn your skin, or blind you should you fire it in your eye (thank you, In Bruges). Not that I'm an expert on blanks or hot gas.
Quite a few cases of people offing themselves like that actually. The pressure would have shattered Chris' skull in that area and propelled shards into his brain.
But then how do they film suicide or execution scenes in movies? There have been numerous movies were someone has a gun to their head, which is then fired. If blanks truly are that lethal you'd think they would never dare film a sequence like that. They're obviously using some pyrotechnics that are completely harmless. And I assume that's what Josh used for his pranks, because his dad is a bigshot from Hollywood.
 
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Casual Shinji said:
MC1980 said:
Casual Shinji said:
Can that actually kill you though? Because if it's just hot exhaust fumes the worst it could do is burn your skin, or blind you should you fire it in your eye (thank you, In Bruges). Not that I'm an expert on blanks or hot gas.
Quite a few cases of people offing themselves like that actually. The pressure would have shattered Chris' skull in that area and propelled shards into his brain.
But then how do they film suicide or execution scenes in movies? There have been numerous movies were someone has a gun to their head, which is then fired. If blanks truly are that lethal you'd think they would never dare film a sequence like that. They're obviously using some pyrotechnics that are completely harmless. And I assume that's what Josh used for his pranks, because his dad is a bigshot from Hollywood.
There are a few different kinds of prop guns used in movies. Blank-fire guns are the most common, basically real guns that have been slightly modified to fire blanks, and are lethal when misused. There are also function guns (very realistic looking for closeups, but incapable of firing anything) and rubber guns for when you need a bunch of cheap guns to be held by goons. There are specially made suicide guns, with sealed barrels, that do not create a muzzle flash (that's added in post) and cannot fire anything out of the barrel, neither a round nor gases; they just bang and expel the expended cartridge.

Based on the fact that Chris didn't die, we can assume that Josh gave him a suicide gun, but it's still dangerous (they have failed in the past, and you always have a weapons master check over the guns before they're used on set). If you told me that a deranged man had acquired a suicide gun and loaded it (suicide guns require special blanks, btw, not the standard 5 in 1s) I wouldn't want it anywhere near me, despite the class of weapon being generally safe. Even if the weapon itself was correctly prepared, there is still a lot of hot pressurized gas coming out of the extractor along with the spent casing, and Chris (who IIRC had put the gun under his chin) might have seriously burned his throat and injured his trachea. For shots like that, it's a lot easier and safer to have someone put a function gun under their chin, the director yells bang, and they make it look real in post-production.
 

Bat Vader

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EternallyBored said:
flying_whimsy said:
Yeah, I never blamed Josh throughout the entire game exactly for those reasons: dude needed help, and what he got was neglect and murdered sisters. In the ending where he becomes a wendigo, I can't even imagine what realizing the truth that one of his sisters was a monster did to him mentally. I'd kind of hope for a sequel where wendigo josh hunts down all of his 'friends'.

The only actually innocent people in the game are Josh (seriously, no court would convict him), the black kid that's emily's new beau, and the surviving miner with the flame thrower. I thought it was a real waste that they killed off the miner guy so quickly. Everyone else would end up with manslaughter charges for the sisters.

I was never keen on how fast the game was to declare josh evil and be done with it, nor how easy it was to miss the clues that showed you just how far gone he truly was.
Not sure how you got that out of the story:

First off, the scene with the sisters is not even close to manslaughter, certainly a colossally dickish thing to do, but embarrassing someone and then them deciding to run off into the forest only to die to a completely unrelated set of circumstances does not count as manslaughter, there isn't a court in the world that would convict them for that. It's not even negligent as they attempted to look for them after both Hannah and Beth didn't come back, likely under the assumption that she would go a little ways into the woods and cry for awhile before returning, there was no way to reasonably assume that they would run into a monster and fall off a cliff. The people responsible for the prank are massively insensitive, like many teenagers are, but they didn't commit any crimes.

Some of them may have been culpable enough to lose a civil suit and have to pay out money to Hannah and Beth's family for emotional damages, but even that would be a long hard case to prove, playing a cruel prank isn't a crime, and them running off into the forest would not be assumed to be incredibly dangerous in most realistic scenarios.

What Josh did was a whole hell of a lot worse than what they did to Hannah, I mean Josh would be fully justified in never talking to the assholes that pulled the prank, but what he did was in fact criminal, and broke numerous laws, especially the kidnapping, assault, and the whole choose who to shoot scene would rack up at least a couple of felonies.

Yeah, Josh is kind of tragic in that he was someone that obviously needed help, but most of the other people there did not deserve any of the sick shit Josh did to them, he's not responsible for the Wendigo stuff, as all that was unexpected on his part, but he responded to a cruel prank that resulted in a tragic accident by kidnapping and assaulting the people responsible. Even the people that weren't involved at all, so basically that kills most of his sympathy right there.

So yeah, every court would convict him, even if the prankers were guilty of a crime, considering he drew an entirely innocent person into his scheme with involving Matt (EDIT:I meant Chris, who wasn't in the room when the prank happened, sorry got them confused) . Also, kidnapping is still a crime, even if the original group were guilty of something, the court system doesn't let you just kidnap people for a crime they may have committed a year ago. Even if they were wanted by the police, you still get in trouble if you torment someone you've put under citizen's arrest as you are responsible for everything that happens to them once you restrain them.

I will agree that the Wendigo hunter should have lasted longer than he did.
I wouldn't say it killed the sympathy for him. You can still feel bad for what happened to him and his sisters but at the same time dislike him for what he did.

I think we can both agree that everyone in the game is a horrible person and they all deserve to get punched in the face a few times.
 

DemomanHusband

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Patinator said:
Casual Shinji said:
Can that actually kill you though?
It was how Bruce Lee's son Brandon died filming the movie "The Crow". Granted it wasn't so simple as shooting it right into his skin, but it can still be deadly.
Well, wasn't the whole issue that there was a bullet stuck in the prop-gun's barrel that basically ended up being helped along by the blank, rather than the blank being at fault? Blanks can still be dangerous, but that's kind of like slipping on a well-waxed floor and landing in a bed of spikes. Sure, the slip on the floor could have gone pretty badly even without that bed of spikes, but something that's already lethal to begin with being in the mix kind of skews things.

The whole business of Brandon's death just makes me cringe harder the more I hear about the comedy of errors behind it. Using live rounds to create dummy rounds instead of actually getting/creating actual dummy rounds, sheesh.