btw wes's white face stripe is makeup, it's a reference to 80's punk star adam ant
which was itself a reference to native american war paint, which ties into the HEAVY themes of colonization and displaced indigenous people/culture that shadow (ha ha) the first game's story.
also wes's hair is bleached blond in the style of japanese delinquents
These days it's a lot more common to find even normal jpn people with drastically bleached/colored hair, but back when colosseum was made, it was still very uncommon and heavily associated with delinquents (hence why traditional delinquent manga characters are often blond)
so it's more likely than not that wes is 1) indigenous, 2) not a natural blond, and 3) punk as hell
it's also heavily implied that wes's hometown is the under just FYI
In [PROTOTYPE], what was the logic behind Elizabeth Greene's character being what it was.
Why make a character whose backstory is "in the 60s the government experimented with a superplague on a small town without them knowing it, and the only survivor of that whole shitshow has been locked in a cage for 40 years and experimented on, and had her child STOLEN FROM HER so they could experiment on him too" and then have her role in the story just be "yeah she's just a villain who's just as evil as the military who turned her into this"
We get NOTHING about her actual motivations for what she does. The military is actually more sympathetic than she is, because we understand their goal is "preventing the superplague from spreading"!
Why is Alex "personality of a slice of toast" Mercer the protagonist instead of her?
Actual answer (though yes i do agree with your fundamental point that there are not enough games centering female characters and their struggles):
One of [Prototype]'s central themes is the cycle of abuse. It's not really that obvious until you take a look at the PRIMA bios, and even then, it's still quite vague - and it's not helped by the fact that the entire rest of the company seemed to be waging war with the writer and main character designer (the writer has actually gone on record before to say that working on prototype sucked ass and is why he doesn't write for games anymore).
I have a really longform writeup of this on this blog somewhere, but I can shorten it somewhat here (still long because any thematic dissection of something with complex themes will be long):
Original!Alex Mercer (whom I'll call Xander from now on, to differentiate from his virus son/the game's protagonist) had an outrageously shitty childhood, ft. foster care from ages 1-9, and then parentification/abject poverty/implied violent abuse at the hands of his biological mother (and completely absent father) from ages 10-24, at which point he graduated from college and started ghosting his little sister (though he was obviously still keeping tabs on her, given her photos on his foyer wall and the fact that he knew exactly where to find her when shit hit the fan).
The abuse left him sociopathic, manipulative, and incapable of trusting others, with the sole exception of his baby sister Dana. In turn, Dana saw Xander as her only parental figure (their mom sucked so bad that 10yro Xander was a better parent), and explicitly moved to NYC (presumably from NJ, given it's within commuting distance of his alma mater) to follow him.
In this context, Elizabeth's designation as codename MOTHER carries a lot more significance, especially when paired with the early concept art of her dressed in white and described as a "goddess". In fact, she has a lot of Virgin Mary vibes to her; the fact that she was pregnant when she got infected is a crucial plot point, and the fact that no father is ever mentioned gives the whole thing shades of Immaculate Conception.
And these Christian thematic elements are absolutely rife throughout the Prima guide bios and backstory lore - for example, the guy named Robert CROSS who leads a team called the WISEMEN, who's described in his bio as being a religious zealot, with implications that his original plotline (before some rewrites happened) was that he was going to get infected, come to see the virus as God (or otherwise holy), and defect to the infected side. Moreover, some of Alex's earliest concept art features jackets with angel wing patterns on the back.
But it's also because Xander is the story's "father". He is the man who raised Dana, her only parent as far as she's concerned, but he is also, very literally, one half of Alex's DNA, the other half being the virus - which is why Elizabeth even outright tells him, "I am your MOTHER".
Xander and Elizabeth's relationship to Alex then play out in a parallel to Xander's relationship with his own: Alex's father is absent, and his mother initially abandons him, only to later come back as a hostile entity holding Dana's life over his head. Abuse, trauma, and its tendency to repeat itself. Xander is ultimately unable to escape his own abuse and ends up perpetuating the cycle with his biological child.
However, something is different for Alex as compared to Xander: he has a stable adult in his life from the outset, who's able to show him unconditional love, acceptance, kindness, and empathy.
As screwed up as Xander was, he DID raise Dana to the best of his ability, and while his relationship with her was ultimately too frustrated by his psychological unwellness to be called healthy, he was ultimately a unilaterally positive force in her life, having been the one to teach her how to support herself and survive and escape their mother's abusive household. In other words, in raising Dana, he broke the cycle of abuse. And because he was able to do that for Dana, Dana was able to do that for Alex, shaping him into an ultimately heroic figure by the end of the game - someone willing to risk his own life to save people he doesn't know.
Alex, the virus, is consistently characterized as naïve, borderline bumbling; he barely moves without taking instruction, he makes very simple and obvious mistakes, and he largely relies on brute force to get himself out of tricky situations - in stark contrast to Xander, described as manipulative, cunning, and cutthroat. This is because Alex is LITERALLY a child. And while story scenes are fairly scarce, we DO see his way of thinking get molded by Dana's - her expressing horror and empathy at discovering Elizabeth was 19 when she got infected, her curbing Alex's violent tendencies by rebuking him when it seems like he might go aggro on Dr. Ragland, and her promising to him that no matter what, he's still her brother.
What's really interesting then is that, taking the game's implied original final boss to be PARIAH (the Supreme Hunter is a pretty obvious last-minute addition, probably because they ran out of time/money, or were forced to put in a sequel hook, which is why I don't talk about him), the bosses Alex faces are thematically representative of the ill forces that turned Xander into such a monster to begin with:
Elizabeth, a parallel to Xander's abusive mother,
General Randall, a representative of the government, and representation of the system that failed him, first by putting him in foster care (implied to be a shitty time), and then by awarding his mother custody after she was released from prison (outright stated to be a worse time),
And PARIAH, a child who is currently in foster care, a representation of Xander's own innate worst traits, which were amplified by the abuse he suffered until they ultimately drowned out all his redeeming qualities.
(Also, going back to the religious stuff, it kind of means PARIAH is an Evil Jesus, and Alex - born of a man - is kind of a Good Antichrist.)
Functionally, Xander's ability to break the cycle with Dana karmically returns by being the strength and guidance that allows Alex to dismantle and redeem the cruelties that Xander succumbed to.
Again, I do agree with your fundamental view that there aren't enough games that center non-male protagonists, and even that there are too many games that feature a Default Cishet Milktoast White Man as a protagonist when they could be about literally any other person. Unfortunately, because of how dense Prototype actually is thematically, and because of my fondness for it, I am going to disagree that Prototype is one of those stories. I kind of think that even being white and cishet is working in Xander's favor here, since it helps to obfuscate his trauma/class traitorism (I've seen multiple people default to assuming he comes from a standard upper middle class white picket fence background, which is absolutely the type of image he tries to project), and he's also the exact type of person GENTEK would hire and retain.
It's implied that the Blacklight project started for, um... racist reasons, as they deliberately pulled a sample size of as many ethnicities as they could in order to see how the virus would respond to that. It's probably also not a coincidence that the one Good Guy scientist we meet, Dr. Ragland, who sacrificed his entire career to defect from GENTEK (it's stated in the PRIMA bio that he was outright blacklisted from the industry), is black.
At the end of his life, Xander had become the monster. He WAS the establishment. This fact is highlighted by the fact that his sister turned out to be an anarcho-socialist, as she explicitly writes for magazines with anti-establishment bents ("Bethsheba", "Everything You Know Is Wrong", "The Military/Industrial Complex Report"). So I'd argue that it's actually kind of central to his character and the themes of the story that he's white, because it really hammers home just how much he could've been a force for good, but ultimately failed to rise above his circumstances.
Anyway, sorry to hijack your post, I just think Prototype is really interesting, and I like telling people about it.
Christ, this was a hell of a thing to wake up to. Not used to people writing essays in response to posts we made 2 years ago. This was really insightful, and we learned several things we did not know (mostly because we did not read a prima game guide for a game that came out when we were nine)
oh sorry about that lol i'm literally just the type of person to whip out an analysis essay at the actual drop of a hat, nothing to do with you or anything, i just like to gab about stuff.
In [PROTOTYPE], what was the logic behind Elizabeth Greene's character being what it was.
Why make a character whose backstory is "in the 60s the government experimented with a superplague on a small town without them knowing it, and the only survivor of that whole shitshow has been locked in a cage for 40 years and experimented on, and had her child STOLEN FROM HER so they could experiment on him too" and then have her role in the story just be "yeah she's just a villain who's just as evil as the military who turned her into this"
We get NOTHING about her actual motivations for what she does. The military is actually more sympathetic than she is, because we understand their goal is "preventing the superplague from spreading"!
Why is Alex "personality of a slice of toast" Mercer the protagonist instead of her?
Actual answer (though yes i do agree with your fundamental point that there are not enough games centering female characters and their struggles):
One of [Prototype]'s central themes is the cycle of abuse. It's not really that obvious until you take a look at the PRIMA bios, and even then, it's still quite vague - and it's not helped by the fact that the entire rest of the company seemed to be waging war with the writer and main character designer (the writer has actually gone on record before to say that working on prototype sucked ass and is why he doesn't write for games anymore).
I have a really longform writeup of this on this blog somewhere, but I can shorten it somewhat here (still long because any thematic dissection of something with complex themes will be long):
Original!Alex Mercer (whom I'll call Xander from now on, to differentiate from his virus son/the game's protagonist) had an outrageously shitty childhood, ft. foster care from ages 1-9, and then parentification/abject poverty/implied violent abuse at the hands of his biological mother (and completely absent father) from ages 10-24, at which point he graduated from college and started ghosting his little sister (though he was obviously still keeping tabs on her, given her photos on his foyer wall and the fact that he knew exactly where to find her when shit hit the fan).
The abuse left him sociopathic, manipulative, and incapable of trusting others, with the sole exception of his baby sister Dana. In turn, Dana saw Xander as her only parental figure (their mom sucked so bad that 10yro Xander was a better parent), and explicitly moved to NYC (presumably from NJ, given it's within commuting distance of his alma mater) to follow him.
In this context, Elizabeth's designation as codename MOTHER carries a lot more significance, especially when paired with the early concept art of her dressed in white and described as a "goddess". In fact, she has a lot of Virgin Mary vibes to her; the fact that she was pregnant when she got infected is a crucial plot point, and the fact that no father is ever mentioned gives the whole thing shades of Immaculate Conception.
And these Christian thematic elements are absolutely rife throughout the Prima guide bios and backstory lore - for example, the guy named Robert CROSS who leads a team called the WISEMEN, who's described in his bio as being a religious zealot, with implications that his original plotline (before some rewrites happened) was that he was going to get infected, come to see the virus as God (or otherwise holy), and defect to the infected side. Moreover, some of Alex's earliest concept art features jackets with angel wing patterns on the back.
But it's also because Xander is the story's "father". He is the man who raised Dana, her only parent as far as she's concerned, but he is also, very literally, one half of Alex's DNA, the other half being the virus - which is why Elizabeth even outright tells him, "I am your MOTHER".
Xander and Elizabeth's relationship to Alex then play out in a parallel to Xander's relationship with his own: Alex's father is absent, and his mother initially abandons him, only to later come back as a hostile entity holding Dana's life over his head. Abuse, trauma, and its tendency to repeat itself. Xander is ultimately unable to escape his own abuse and ends up perpetuating the cycle with his biological child.
However, something is different for Alex as compared to Xander: he has a stable adult in his life from the outset, who's able to show him unconditional love, acceptance, kindness, and empathy.
As screwed up as Xander was, he DID raise Dana to the best of his ability, and while his relationship with her was ultimately too frustrated by his psychological unwellness to be called healthy, he was ultimately a unilaterally positive force in her life, having been the one to teach her how to support herself and survive and escape their mother's abusive household. In other words, in raising Dana, he broke the cycle of abuse. And because he was able to do that for Dana, Dana was able to do that for Alex, shaping him into an ultimately heroic figure by the end of the game - someone willing to risk his own life to save people he doesn't know.
Alex, the virus, is consistently characterized as naïve, borderline bumbling; he barely moves without taking instruction, he makes very simple and obvious mistakes, and he largely relies on brute force to get himself out of tricky situations - in stark contrast to Xander, described as manipulative, cunning, and cutthroat. This is because Alex is LITERALLY a child. And while story scenes are fairly scarce, we DO see his way of thinking get molded by Dana's - her expressing horror and empathy at discovering Elizabeth was 19 when she got infected, her curbing Alex's violent tendencies by rebuking him when it seems like he might go aggro on Dr. Ragland, and her promising to him that no matter what, he's still her brother.
What's really interesting then is that, taking the game's implied original final boss to be PARIAH (the Supreme Hunter is a pretty obvious last-minute addition, probably because they ran out of time/money, or were forced to put in a sequel hook, which is why I don't talk about him), the bosses Alex faces are thematically representative of the ill forces that turned Xander into such a monster to begin with:
Elizabeth, a parallel to Xander's abusive mother,
General Randall, a representative of the government, and representation of the system that failed him, first by putting him in foster care (implied to be a shitty time), and then by awarding his mother custody after she was released from prison (outright stated to be a worse time),
And PARIAH, a child who is currently in foster care, a representation of Xander's own innate worst traits, which were amplified by the abuse he suffered until they ultimately drowned out all his redeeming qualities.
(Also, going back to the religious stuff, it kind of means PARIAH is an Evil Jesus, and Alex - born of a man - is kind of a Good Antichrist.)
Functionally, Xander's ability to break the cycle with Dana karmically returns by being the strength and guidance that allows Alex to dismantle and redeem the cruelties that Xander succumbed to.
Again, I do agree with your fundamental view that there aren't enough games that center non-male protagonists, and even that there are too many games that feature a Default Cishet Milktoast White Man as a protagonist when they could be about literally any other person. Unfortunately, because of how dense Prototype actually is thematically, and because of my fondness for it, I am going to disagree that Prototype is one of those stories. I kind of think that even being white and cishet is working in Xander's favor here, since it helps to obfuscate his trauma/class traitorism (I've seen multiple people default to assuming he comes from a standard upper middle class white picket fence background, which is absolutely the type of image he tries to project), and he's also the exact type of person GENTEK would hire and retain.
It's implied that the Blacklight project started for, um... racist reasons, as they deliberately pulled a sample size of as many ethnicities as they could in order to see how the virus would respond to that. It's probably also not a coincidence that the one Good Guy scientist we meet, Dr. Ragland, who sacrificed his entire career to defect from GENTEK (it's stated in the PRIMA bio that he was outright blacklisted from the industry), is black.
At the end of his life, Xander had become the monster. He WAS the establishment. This fact is highlighted by the fact that his sister turned out to be an anarcho-socialist, as she explicitly writes for magazines with anti-establishment bents ("Bethsheba", "Everything You Know Is Wrong", "The Military/Industrial Complex Report"). So I'd argue that it's actually kind of central to his character and the themes of the story that he's white, because it really hammers home just how much he could've been a force for good, but ultimately failed to rise above his circumstances.
Anyway, sorry to hijack your post, I just think Prototype is really interesting, and I like telling people about it.
Hey everyone! Just letting y'all know that i've started moving my more serious art over to this blog instead, if you want to give it a follow. I've been feeling a bit awkward on this one since it's got sketches, doodles, and even some analysis essays on it, so i wanted a place that was more just art-only. Thanks!
A selection of some of my favorite regional variants and fakemon from my RP server. Dex descriptions below:
Vlahian chinglings resemble Arceus's symbol, and are treated as wards against misfortune and the restless dead as a result. Modern research has discovered that they may have developed the shape in order to benefit from the protection of humans, and not the other way around. It's said that they can easily become desecrated with poor treatment.
It's believed that skanters are the result of mutualism between two pokemon - a normal horse and some type of beetle - taken to an extreme. They roam in herds, and while their primary diet is grass, they apparently love to eat ghosts, according to several local folktales. They're sometimes seen chewing on what appears to be thin air.
Prigs are incredibly haughty and difficult. They're prone to ignoring their trainers, and their moods are capricious; what makes them happy one day will make them refuse to fight the next. As such, it's common for people to give up on raising one. Prigs that were released are the most likely to join a new trainer, just to start the cycle over again.
Initially thought to be a regional goomy variant, goopies are actually parasites that infest and control a goomy's body, like the mushrooms on a parasect. They're known for their hypnotic, pulsing colors, which they use to entice prey. They will sometimes latch onto a human host and temporarily puppet them around. They understand the concept of money.
Scrappy and belligerent, Vlahian drifloons delight in combat. Unfortunately, their bodies are extremely elastic and they're very light, so their body slams usually result in the drifloon bouncing comically far. They also strike out with their hands, but they're too short to reach past their long bodies. They are filled with rage for existence itself.
Vlahian elgyems can fly over short distances and to great heights, but only in short bursts. They're pranksters, and enjoy abducting anything that appears precious - including living beings - and taking them as far away as they can. They appear to have a childlike lack of empathy - luckily, like children, they tire easily.
Hi! Actually, given that the show has multiple references to Shiva (the Tomb of Kur is listed in the Field Guide as the Koh Ker archaeological site, one of Rani Nagi's epithets for Kur is "The Destroyer," shared with Shiva, and Shiva's close connection with nagas in the first place (he wears one around his neck, which symbolizes his dominion over all beasts)), it's actually most likely Shiva's trident!
It symbolizes trinities, like past/present/future and creation/preservation/destruction :D
✙ 𝕍𝕝𝕒𝕙𝕚𝕒 𝕚𝕤 𝕨𝕒𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 is a mature, 18+ RP server with a focus on character interaction, exploration, and plotting. We have a whole new pokédex, a streamlined gameplay system, and welcome both canons and OCs!
If you're looking for a place where your characters will be challenged, will be hurt, and will be forced to change and grow…
𝕍𝕝𝕒𝕙𝕚𝕒 𝕚𝕤 𝕨𝕒𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘.
World map, example pokémon, and other art under the cut!
First four issues of The Neopian Inquirer, the webcomic I'm running in The Neopian Times centered around Brillia and her dream of usurping the very newspaper her antics are being documented in.
