{"id":4947,"date":"2009-09-14T14:00:10","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T18:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4947"},"modified":"2009-09-16T10:15:32","modified_gmt":"2009-09-16T14:15:32","slug":"the-path-ruby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4947","title":{"rendered":"The Path: Ruby"},"content":{"rendered":"

Her bio from the website<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The other girls call her “goth”… It’s one way of killing people: stereotyping them, putting them in a box and throwing it away. But there’s more to Ruby than meets the eye. A young lady by now, 15 years of age. Life has opened up to her as a rotting flower of corruption. She can see through it all but remains an enigma herself. When asked about her leg brace, Ruby says she’s in pain. But doesn’t specify where it hurts. Ruby does not long for death. She takes a perverse pleasure in observing the extreme decay of adult society. But what will happen when she ceases to be a witness and becomes a participant instead?<\/div>\n

thepath_ruby1.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table>Ruby is playfully morbid. So is her story. <\/p>\n

Some of the girls – Ginger in Particular – have tales that defy logical explanation and challenge the player to dig deep for meaning. Others can be explained just fine as literal stories, leaving the player to wonder if they’re supposed to do so. Ruby is the latter kind. <\/p>\n

Ruby wanders around the woods making sardonic or nihilistic observations until she comes to the abandoned playground. As she arrives, we see a cutscene of a young guy pulling… something. Something bodybag-esque. <\/p>\n

Ruby’s Wolf<\/span><\/p>\n

thepath_ruby2.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table>She sits down next to the guy. He’s obviously a bad boy and bad news. (I really like the animations here. They tell us a lot about the guy just with body language. Note that this is a small indie studio and they don’t have access to motion-capture. Expressive movement is really, really hard using interpolated posing, which is what you do if you don’t have mo-cap. Nice work to the artist.) He offers her a cigarette. She leans away. She doesn’t want to, but she wants the guy to like her. She accepts, and takes a puff with much coughing. <\/p>\n

Camera pulls away. Fade to black.<\/p>\n

Obviously we can just do this the literal way and assume she wound up getting dragged away in a bodybag of her own. But if we’re looking for meaning then there’s a lot to be said for the little exchange with the cigarette. Ruby doesn’t seem that emotionally needy. Whatever her faults, she doesn’t seem to crave the approval of others. She may even despise it. But here she is, doing something she clearly doesn’t want to do in order to gain the approval of a stranger.<\/p>\n

Obviously this is because he’s “a boy”. As her bio suggests, she doesn’t think much of adults and the compromises they live with. Now she’s discovering the world gets really complicated really fast when you find yourself needing other people. This guy is bad news even if the bodybag is symbolic. He’s not good for her. <\/p>\n

Aftermath<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, assuming she’s not dead…<\/p>\n

Unlike Carmen, Ruby isn’t attracted to the guy because<\/em> he’s bad for her. Again, going back to the adult world and its complexities, I think she happens to like this guy but they have an unhealthy relationship. (Carmen is attracted to men who are destructive, Ruby is attracted to a<\/em> man who happens to be destructive.)<\/p>\n

Once again, I want to remind people what I said at the outset. This is what the game said to me. I don’t claim to have any secret knowledge, and I’m just reacting to the game inkblot-style: “What do you think of when you see this?”<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Her bio from the website: The other girls call her “goth”… It’s one way of killing people: stereotyping them, putting them in a box and throwing it away. But there’s more to Ruby than meets the eye. A young lady by now, 15 years of age. Life has opened up to her as a rotting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}