@badgersighted
i don’t know a lot about the behind the scenes of ttgot’s production, but that definitely sounds about right. since ttgot got shortened considerably, it makes complete sense that execs weren’t a big fan of a slowburn plot for her. i didn’t know about the andros or sera concepts, so that was definitely eye-opening and very different to what we got. i am quite endeared to the idea of mira blackmailing people, actually, and it seems like just the sort of thing she’d be able to pull off, so it’s a shame that she didn’t get to do a little bit more political intrigue type stuff. like, my wife and i watched a playthrough of married in red yesterday and i was tickled by how bok-su has to talk to various guests at the wedding to craft a believable false motive for murder. a scene like this for mira would have been a lot of fun to play! planting seeds in people’s minds through “idle” gossip and such.
that said, though, what you’ve described sounds like a really ambitious plot for telltale based on the formula of their games. it sounds like killing andros and killing sera would both be choices mira could make. these types of choices are tricky to write and code, and i think that’s led in ttg’s case to the very typical telltale-ism of killing off determinant characters or otherwise abruptly removing them from the story. we see this really prominently in twdg, where no matter if you save carly or doug, the other dies later, or how every season 2 cast member dies … and even characters that aren’t determinant have a way of disappearing from season to season ( like christa and omid, and even aj in season three ). and like, if you look at asher vs rodrik in episode five, the very fact that one of them can die means that the other one is kind of doomed. i wouldn’t care much for this sort of writing for a character like andros, but i think i’d really dislike the idea that sera would just die or vanish later because it would be difficult or annoying to write so many determinant scenes with her. the consequences for mira’s actions would also feel wonky, i think. telltale games historically tries to force you onto a uniform path no matter what your choices are, so i think, had these been determinant murders, mira would end up facing consequences that would seem disproportionate if you’d been playing her mercifully. like, think if gared was able to choose whether or not to kill britt. that imprisonment and desertion plotline would have felt way different!
i guess all this is to say is that while it’s interesting to speculate on what mira’s arc could have been, i do think that there are benefits to cutting out some of this content, and that mira would always have faced consequences for the things that she does. while i don’t think episode 6’s choice-based death was what the writers wanted, who’s to say that they wouldn’t have naturally gotten there, or somewhere similar, by the end of their story? to me, mira is so much more grounded and interesting as a character when we get to see her actions naturally catch up to her. and i do think the writers were planting seeds of characters working against her — like morgryn, or someone that fits his archetype, was in my opinion definitely always going to be an aspect of mira’s story. it just ended up getting handled poorly due to the premature shortening of the story.