Days of Ruin: Brenner, Duty, Morals

We should assume the best of people.
Brenner is interesting to me. On the face of it, he doesn't seem to play off Will in the way I'm talking about -they both are basically idealistic and want people to work together to make everybody's lives better and easier. It's easy to just think of Brenner as the figure Will aspires to be -which he does, mind, but...

... Will is, contrary to stereotypes about young/old pairs of people, the relatively cynical one. Well, maybe not cynical, as Will doesn't actually go around expecting people to be bad, but less forgiving or something like that, anyway. There's a few points in the game where Will is confused as to why Brenner is putting up with dubious behavior from dubious characters -the mayor and Greyfield, primarily- is my point. This ties in part into Will's willingness to fight in self-defense and other justified situations, that he's not actually blindly idealistic/optimistic.

Brenner, in spite of being a soldier, actually does seem to be basically blindly idealistic/optimistic. It's kind of interesting.

That said, I'm covering Brenner more because of how the last two COs play off of Brenner, specifically how they play off Brenner being a Good Soldier/Warrior. Brenner is loyal to the chain of command (Even when he dislikes individuals within it), honorable (To those with honor), and will fight for his country even if he's not sure he really should be advancing the conflict he's involved in. (Which this last part admittedly plays more off of Will, who seems less concerned with patriotism and more with basic human decency)

So let's get to it.

Honor and duty.
So. Forsythe. Like Brenner, he's a Good Soldier/Warrior. Unlike Brenner, he's the enemy.

Since I wrote the previous post, I've changed my mind a little: it's not so much that Forsythe plays off Brenner rather than Will as it is that Brenner and Forsythe together play off of Will. Brenner and Forsythe are both old-school honorable soldiers who cling to chain of command and code of honor even when they have reason to suspect the people they're dealing with are not actually trustworthy. Will trusts Brenner, even though he's not so sure Brenner is making the right decisions, but pretty much the instant they actually meet Greyfield he's baffled as to why Brenner is working under the guy at all.

Then, whaddayaknow, it turns out that simply assuming everyone in the entire world is trustworthy is a Bad Plan that gets Brenner and Forsythe killed and only doesn't get all the surviving Lazurian soldiers summarily executed because Brenner finally makes his stand and saves them -which costs him his life and also gets Greyfield freaking out and trying to kill all the Wolves in addition to the Lazurians, using complete overkill. I mean, he drops a Not-Nuke on Brenner, who is a lone man at that point!

Mine is not to question why.
I always felt Gage was a bit of a boring character, but for a long time I wasn't really sure why. It was only recently that it occurred to me:

Brenner has lines he will not cross. He is a loyal, dutiful soldier, enough so to overlook personal dislike in a superior officer, but he won't obey an order he feels is unequivocally Wrong.

Gage more or less can't imagine disobedience. It doesn't matter whether the people in charge are horrible or not, nor whether a given order is reprehensible or not. There's just obedience.

So Gage really plays primarily off of Brenner, which has the problem that almost all of Gage's time on-screen comes after Brenner has died. So actually he doesn't play off of Brenner, because they don't interact. The other members of the cast? He doesn't really play off of them, except to a very limited extent Will: Will needs to trust the people in charge to feel okay doing as they tell him, which contrasts some against Gage's willingness to do whatever so long as it's an order.

But even that small bit has little done with it. When Gage first shows up, any possibility of him interacting with Will is overshadowed by Tasha's interaction with Will. When he shows up later, any possibility of interaction is largely overshadowed by the combination of the urgent need to flee -and later, fight- Greyfield and Caulder's forces and, again, Will's interaction with Tasha. There's a bit in there where Gage is sort of puzzled by Will being willing to help the Lazurians at risk to himself, but compared to blowing Tasha's mind with the idea that Rubes aren't all Evil it barely registers. Nothing really comes of it and it wasn't set up particularly. It's just a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment.

It's too bad, because Gage could've pretty easily been used to illustrate why blind obedience is a problem. Have him obey "legitimate" orders that actually got faked by Caulder -and have Tasha object that the orders aren't anything Forsythe would approve, let alone issue, as a hint. Maybe have a mission where Brenner's Wolves and Gage's forces are both moving into an area to engage in humanitarian efforts, and Brenner suggests they just work together instead of fighting -and Gage insists he has to call up his boss to find out what he's supposed to do. Tasha could be in the background, pushing for Gage to kill the Rubes, and still be shocked when orders come along to kill the Wolves and slaughter all the civilians they were here to help.

Of course, that would make it harder to sell the player on the idea that Gage isn't a bad guy, but that's what redemption arcs are for: just having Gage realize he did something his superior officer explicitly says they would never want him to do (Sometime after the mission) would go a long way to putting a hole in his "I just follow orders instead of thinking" approach to life, and could turn into him having to learn how to be a whole human being -which would also fit well with the story ending on a hopeful/positive note after everything, actually. The more characters you have managing to pull themselves together, the more you support your core message that even in the face of the apocalypse things can get better for people. The world's infrastructure may have collapsed and require reconstruction, but individual lives are managing to improve after the initial shock.

So it's really pretty unfortunate the story didn't get him and Brenner interacting in a substantial way, nor even manage to give him a proper character arc of any kind.

Alas.

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