We’re derailing my own threads now #meta
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Psh… Baird hasn’t yet gotten the most skins. Kait has if you count all of the “promotional” skins on her. Not sure on the exact number but it’s at least 10 in total as of yet. Probably even more than that.
And I still would argue a better way to handle this “choice” would have been for the player to choose between Lizzie or Oscar there instead of Del and JD. That way you wouldn’t choose between characters who would have more importance or relevance in the story. But one died an undeserved death(presumably) in a scene that makes absolutely no sense at all because she could have easily survived it, and the other got brutally murdered by a Warden not quite halfway through the Campaign, so…
Either way it probably would’ve been better if it hadn’t really been there at least in this form. Hell, could even have been made so that if you didn’t choose anyone in the time given for you to make the “choice”, TC just put in an automatic outcome that was always the same to tell the player that it was canon, but then they could just as well have made it like that straight away instead of a choice that wouldn’t have mattered beyond for a few more minutes.
And yes, Lizzie still deserved to live. Instead of TC using a character they created themselves, that could have been great in some secondary or supporting role, as a ridiculous, outdated throwaway “meme” that isn’t even funny, without even giving us any time to get to know the character. The death didn’t even feel deserving of her. But I can’t really make terrible decision making for character handling better, can I?
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Her last name is Carmine, excluding Clayton, all the other 3 Carmines on-screen died before Act 2, she’s no different. Even the Comic-book Carmine wasn’t able to escape this fate.
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Clayton only lived because of that vote, and whether you like it or not, just because someone has a certain name doesn’t mean you can’t just use the character for something good instead of a sh*tty throwaway meme that is old and outdated as well as having lost its meaning with Gears 3 when a CARMINE survived an entire Campaign and the following events after it. Particularly if you’re going to give the character five minutes of screentime and then kill her off in a scene that made absolutely no sense whatsoever once it’s looked into. When the Hammer of Dawn beam is circling around the back of Lizzie’s truck, why would she not get out through the intact door while she still can? And why does the beam then magically teleport back to where it was in one second once the cutscene switches over to the inside of the cabin again?
Sorry not sorry, but they created a character with potential and they utterly wasted it in the worst possible way for a dead meme that also had no meaning when the character has had less screen time than freaking Anthony in Gears 1, and has lost its meaning since Gears 3 with a certain other Carmine being alive. Nobody cared about Gary because he wasn’t shown off in any significant way. He just stood around for two seconds, ran off to man a Troika on a wall in an Outsider village and got smacked by a DB drop pod. He was even more meaningless.
But when you make the character out as something good, then proceed to kill the character off in a scene that isn’t remotely deserving of the character who you casually had ramming a Snatcher and then tagging a frag to its face like it was another day in the life, and that makes no sense? No bueno.
And the Carmine in Rise of RAAM was pre-Gears 1 even, if we’re speaking in the Gears timeline itself. His absence had to be explained in some way. I’m not counting him.
And yes, I did just go on a wall of text rant about an apparently meaningless character whose only purpose is to die because it made no sense for her to die and just wasted a potentially great character. Deal with it.
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“Redshirts,” - Characters that can be killed off for the sake of drama, or to prove the prowess of an antagonist, with no major hindrance or affect to the plot.
Carmine - A shade of red.
It’s not really just “an outdated meme,” it’s in fact a very old concept in storytelling that Gears gave a new spin on by taking the literal "Red"shirt definition, and applying it to a character(s).
That’s why this is a thing to begin with.
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Yeah well, I couldn’t give less of a damn about it. I’m not that much into Star Trek even if I watched some of it(and I’m not really that old with 21), so I’m not really familiar with the redshirt thing. But the point of those is that you literally don’t care about them, if I got it right.
But if you give us a character like Lizzie who then dies a pointless death - at the hands of “idiot JD”, I might add, rather than the Swarm/Locust killing her - with the kind of introduction they gave her? No, I ain’t buying it. If they’d at least somehow made her death feel deserving maybe I wouldn’t care so much, but with the way they handled it? That chance is about as high as finding a needle in a haystack.
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It’s not mainly a Star Trek thing, is as old as the characters in some of even Shakespear’s writing, the newer Star Trek “Redshirts” term is just more modern in the 20th century.
It kind of is, Lizzie was a background secondary character-- a “Redshirt.” Her purpose to the story was to influence JD’s grief and kickstart his downward path and propel his character development going into Act 2.
Did Del bleach his hands?
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Too much photoshop for me.
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And how exactly does killing her off instead of just making her injured and also placed in a coma more severe than JDs not make him feel guilty? He would still have been responsible for that and have killed the drivers and civilians of two convoy trucks with his reckless act of reliance on an unreliable satellite based WMD. It would have opened up more opportunities to use her to, you know, build on that clear relation between her and Clayton, and for relations to other characters like, you know, how things stood between her and JD even, from before he went AWOL. And before he would almost have killed her with his reckless activation of the Hammer, if she’d survived. What exactly would the issue have been for her to be present in Act 2, 3 and 4? Or at least Act 3 and 4? Instead of getting killed where it was not even necessary to kill her to trigger JDs guilt and change in behavior, which would also have been caused by the injuries he suffered from the explosion or close proximity to the Hammer beam?
Her death is utterly meaningless because of that, and because JD does not even go into that subject at all even once to show regrets about it. Instead he just shows up, wants to redeem himself with Kait and Del, and happily goes along with bringing the Hammer of Dawn back online. He just mentions once that he now knows how dangerous the Hammer can be, and that’s literally it. They don’t even give any indication of how Clayton reacted to it all.
So in the end? Her death is a complete waste of a character that could have been more if given the opportunity.
And the reason why her death scene is also underwhelming is because after the way they introduced her you’d think they’d give her an appropriate sendoff. Instead we get a half-■■■■■ scene that makes no sense when you look into it.
I think Kait is at 12
as long as Del dies and JD, MARCUS and Jack could return I think we’re all set… Del well its just that necessary…
I really hate Del.
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I think a death is much more meaningful than a coma–not to mention they talk about how JD and Del were trained under Clayton, probably Lizzie too, so her death would impact JD more than any of the (ironically) faceless civilians.
That’s just more bad writing on TC’s part not using it correctly and rushing it, I agree with that.
Same thing, it’s just TC hasn’t out a whole of work into making the story solid, which was my main point behind the OP’s point of contention being that the final choice further impacts that already fragile story.
Are the civilians actually faceless or do you just mean JD may not have much of a reason to care personally about their lives more than you know, trying to not get them killed because they’re people rather than someone he closely knows?
And while I’m not a psychologist, I wouldn’t underestimate how much of an impact JD being somewhat responsible for killing the civilians in two of the convoy trucks could have on him. Not like he’s a murderer. Couldn’t this be somewhat similarly viewed to when Marcus doomed his squad when he left them to try and save Adam? In terms of effects on the character, even if JDs actions were down to pure recklessness and a misplaced need to “prove himself”.
And my main point was, if they had instead kept Lizzie alive to make her one of the characters you could choose between when it came to the choice as her impact on the story in and on itself would not have been as great, rather than killing her off where it was not necessary to - don’t forget that Marcus tried to tell JD that he should just get the job done, and I bet those words had some effect as well when it came to a point where JD didn’t just “do the job” and it horribly went wrong on him -, though it would probably also have required some presence of her prior to Act 4 for us to know if Kait would even have any motivation to save Lizzie, and it doesn’t solve who the other choice would be as I really don’t know how anything would have saved Oscar from the Warden, and I very much doubt Kait would have chosen to save Paduk… but then again, who knows.
Marcus never really cared about them to begin with, or at least he never showed it.
And having any choice about saving/killing a character I think would have an impact too great to be risked, as I argued in the OP.
Ok… but I could swear I read it somewhere he showed some kind of regret in his actions or that he forgot some part of the Hammer of Dawn system on him that caused the battle he was taking part in to be lost(I do not remember its name or where it was). Though it does not seem to have had as much of an extreme effect as what JD did had on him.
And regarding the choice idea, I just thought it’d have been better if TC had insisted on making a choice in the story, rather than using Del and JD for it. But we can’t change much of what’s been done now. I vaguely remember hearing they have a canon planned for Gears 6 anyway, in a dev stream, so I question why they let us choose in the first place anyway, instead of just having the game be set in its choice already and we just see Kait do it when it comes to that point…
Still, I find Del and JD would have always been the worst possible choices in there regardless. Instead of putting less important characters like Lizzie there.
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I bet you always pick paper.