u/FallingBullfrog

I know, I know, we're all tired of this topic being discussed by this point, but this Mothership article was just published today titled: In Dispatch, Blonde Blazer and Invisigal don't get equal screentime. But it’s “not developer bias,” Adhoc says

The article is an extensive analysis of Blazer and Visi's role in the story, with a lot of new commentary from the game's creative director Nick Herman.

I was a bit annoyed at all the recent interviews where the devs just kept mentioning the "Players thought Blazer was evil" thing as the reason for why so many more people prefer Visi, so this article is actually refreshing in that both the writer and Nick Herman address and discuss the deeper reasons stemming from how the game is structured. I think this should be interesting to Invisigal fans since, to my knowledge, this is the first time that a dev has been this explicit about Visi's role and how she represents the themes of the game.

Key points summarized:

- Nick Herman regrets the way the Episode 4 choice was presented and says he would've done it differently now. Not cutting to Blazer or showing her on screen was both due to budget considerations and because the team didn't fully appreciate how important it was to equally showcase both options in that moment.

- The writer points out how significant Visi's dream scene is to the entire game, as it is the only time that the POV shifts fully to a character who's not Robert, and it shapes how the player understands the story: narratively, changing POV to a different character like this inherently puts Visi closer to the audience and on a level of familiarity similar to Robert. Nick Herman says that their intentions with the dream were to "shake things up" and pull a fake-out by making the player initially think that it was Robert dreaming about Visi only to reveal that it was the other way around. However, he acknowledges that the dream "does carry this subtle implication that maybe [Visi]'s more important, that we're seeing things from her perspective now."

- The writer argues that the dream is what cements Visi as the deuteragonist of Dispatch. When asked if making Visi the deuteragonist was a deliberate choice, Nick Herman says that originally, Robert was just going to mentor one character that the player would have to pick instead of a team: Invisigal, Waterboy or Mr. Whiskey. When it was decided that the game would focus on more of a team effort, it was impossible to give so many characters equal attention, so it was decided that Invisigal would be given the spotlight as her journey closely aligns with Dispatch's themes of redemption and self-actualization.

- Addressing the difference between Blazer and Visi during the dance scene in Ep6: Nick Herman says that showing Visi's sad reaction to Robert dancing with Blazer versus not giving Blazer any reaction was not "developer bias or a writing decision to elevate one character over another", but rather it was rooted in both characters' personalities. Herman says that if not pursued, Blazer has kind of already made peace with and accepted how things are going with Robert not being interested in her, while Visi is the kind of character who would be visibly upset at seeing someone she was pining after dancing with someone else.

- The writer brings up Blazer's breakup with Phenomaman - the closest that the audience ever gets to Mandy's interiority - being relegated to a comic, and how it affected the perception of her character. Nick Herman says they always knew how the breakup scene would go down even before the comic was written, but they didn't want to include it in the game because it would be "weird" to cut to something that Robert isn't around for, "both because Robert wouldn't know this information, which shouldn't affect the player's decision-making, and because there's just nothing to do when Robert's not present." Personally I find that first reason a bit odd, given how they did exactly that with Visi in order to, in Herman's words, "shake things up."

- Nick Herman finally clarifies: "There was no plan to make Invisigal a secondary protagonist. In Season One, the story is really about Robert seeking his own redemption and helping this team turn over a new leaf - prove to the world that they can change. She's directly in line with all of that."

- The writer concludes that for Blazer to have ever gotten a fair shot, AdHoc would've needed to give her at least one POV break akin to Visi's and explored more of her backstory or her identity crisis. As it stands, Visi is "living the main character life" while Blazer is not.

Overall, a lot of the same old topics from previous interviews were covered, but also a lot of new statements, and it's nice to have the devs discuss how the game itself frames both routes rather than simply complaining about the online theories of Blazer being evil.

I do find it strange that they decided the spotlight would be on Visi out of all the characters since she aligns the closest with the game's themes, yet at the same time (by Herman's admission) she wasn't intended to be a secondary protagonist. That, plus the main reason for the Visi dream scene being to "shake things up" and create a "fake-out", does make me scratch my head a bit - it almost sounds like AdHoc accidentally stumbled into creating a deuteragonist for their game even though they reportedly had no plan to do so.

"Temper your expectations" (by @akitridy)

"Was that less of a mistake than the first one?" (by edohidayart)