Eva Prank SF Rant (SF Spoilers)
Gonna’ complain about the Eva Prank.
Originally, I wanted to write about SF but to do that, you have to talk about 20 other topics because that’s how this game is. You need to talk about sincerity, PTSD, trauma, the time loops, contrived writing, parallel leaps, potential DLC, someone being OOC, the causality of the game, love/romance, themes, character arcs, the courtyard flooding cage escape and so on. It all splits off into other topics, which makes it hard to rant - I mean write. Ya’ keep getting side tracked and it all becomes one big jumbled mess. To refocus, I have chosen the Eva Prank because it is one big brain tumour lump which I need to extract and put on full display, as the internet was meant for.
To start, I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate the Eva Prank. This is the single worst moment in any game’s writing which I have ever experienced. Now to clarify, something like a gruesome death scene of a beloved character is something you hate but you don’t hate the writing. Its hard to watch, for a good reason. Its like a villain you love to hate. Eva Prank, in contrast, is something I hate to hate because it is godawful bad writing. I hate the setup, I hate the execution, I hate the character writing, I hate comedy, I hate everything about it. In my mind, it just keeps gnawing away.
First of all, most of the SDU should reject this. Takemaru, Shouma, Nozomi, Tsubasa and Moko are all too nice to even consider doing this. Kurara hates lies and I think this would count. The rest of the SDU would most likely reject this plan outright, as none of them are sociopaths. Maybe Darumi, Gaku and Yugamu would agree for the lols but that’s it. The fact that all of them agreed is beyond reason. What would Hiruko even have said to convince them? “Its Takumi’s Birthday, so let’s fuck with him by planning to execute a PoW.”
Now from their perspective, Takumi has been “avoiding them”, as of late. How this would fix that, is beyond understanding. Not to mention, to them, Takumi has been sick and/or banging Hiruko, for the past week, which is a good enough reason. Also this being on day 21, when they have no prior knowledge of Takumi, makes it hard for them to call it OOC for him to be ignoring them. Not done the maths on this one but I am pretty sure there have been other routes, in which Takumi (or someone else) was absent/avoidant for whatever reason for a longer amount of time, with less of a reason, to which they never did this.
Later on Hiruko places this blame on Takumi, multiple times, yet she was also the one to drug him during the Nigou talent show. She hogged his time from hanging out with the SDU and now is blaming him for not hanging out with the SDU. Without talking about the rest of SF, I find the SDU’s relationship with Takumi (in SF) artificial and inconsistent. Moments like the Eva prank does not help. It does not endear oneself towards these people, when they pull shit like this.
This also could have very easily gone wrong for Hiruko. What if Eva decided to use her pinkie to explode and kill/injure half the SDU? What if in desperation Takumi revealed the time travel/time loops, as a means to convince the SDU to spare Eva? What if Eva brought up the Box of Blessings, as a last ditch effort to bargain for her life, which lead the SDU to become entranced by the idea, compromising the mission? What if Takumi had caught wind of the prank and decided to play along, turning it back on Hiruko? What if he had a PTSD flashback to the ending of BoC and was knocked out for more days?
A much broader problem with SF is Hiruko’s unrelenting nastiness towards Takumi. Again, a write-up for another time, but the Eva prank is the crown jewel. This is big yikes. For all she knows Takumi is holding on by a thread, with who knows what else he remembered. A week ago he was ready to give up and there is still some heavy trauma, there. This is would be like launching fireworks in front of an old war veteran. Some of what Hiruko does is for fun/flirting with Takumi, in her own weird way. There’s a line in which playful tsundere goes over to unrelentingly cruel. It really sours my love for HiruTaku, when she kicks him in the balls for no reason. Let it be said that I love Nagatoro so I am not adverse to this type of relationship. It takes a steady hand to write it well, though and SF did not write it well, by my standards.
If it were just Takumi, that’d be one thing, but Eva doesn’t deserve this shit either. She is consistently, across multiple routes, shown to be one of the nicest/most sympathetic characters in the game. I wouldn’t wish this on Gaku, let alone Eva. Really makes the one massacre after another ending justified. Its one thing to brainwash Eva, with an ends justify the means mentality but twisting the knife is just needlessly cruel.
Now, if I were Takumi, in this situation… Well I don’t want to break Reddit TOS. Lets just say at best, I would never talk to Hiruko again. At worse, there would be hell to pay towards Hiruko and the SDU. Even though, violence breeds violence, in the end it has to be this way.
Some would say this is just comedy, that I shouldn’t take it seriously and that I need to remove the bundle of sticks from my arse. To this, I have three responses:
1.) Comedy & drama can go together but the main rule is that your comedy should never ever undermine the drama. As said above, this undermines the stakes of SF, Takumi’s potential trauma, the risk towards the SF plan and makes the SDU so very out of character. I think this game struggles with this concept and I am not just talking about the Comedy Route, there is a lot of tonal clash. That’s a story for another time, though. The short summary is that SF should be a serious route with sincere writing, which the Eva prank is not.
2.) When people scoff that “X doesn’t matter” with regards to writing or narrative, its never when the writing is good. If I were unironically praising the Eva prank as the best moment in the game, nobody would tell me it doesn’t matter b/c opinions are subjective or the writing doesn’t matter. While I don’t want to be the snooty stereotype of a Comic Book Guy esque Redditor elitist, I think applying standards to media is important. “Its just a prank bro” shouldn’t cut it. Its like shitting yourself on purpose then claiming that you’re ironic, as a defence.
3.) If you accept that it doesn’t matter, then you could apply that to any moment in the game. Everything from BoB to OOC writing, to contrivances, to poorly handled plot threads and so on can all be negated with a “don’t take it seriously, lmao”. Which, if you’ve read this far, I doubt you believe.
Again, I don’t want to be a picky snooty elitist who beats up on people who want simple fun because they take everything way too seriously. We should all try to be more easy going about media (at least to avoid flame wars) but there’s a good middle ground between nitpicker and giving an easy pass to shit writing.
The Eva prank just really really pissed me off so thank you everyone who read my insane ramblings.