I'm doing a playthrough of Detroit where I make violent decisions for Markus and I never knew how brutal the chapter Freedom March is if you choose to attack. I mean, no matter what happens, it's incredibly sad and violent - the police still shoot if you obey their order to disperse and they will still shoot Markus/John/Simon if you choose to stand your ground which of course are really bad, but at least it ends quickly and you don't see how many androids die by either running back to Jericho/dying yourself/getting dragged to safety by North and the crew. But if you decide to attack and win? Holy fucking shit. First, the brutal fight with a large SWAT team where you can get shot multiple times lasts for such a long time. I should time it to see how long it takes compared to the other fight scenes, but it seems longer than even some of the scenes at the end. You, as Markus, also get badly hurt, getting shot as mentioned before as well as hit and being covered in human blood and thirium. Then, to really dig it in, after you win the fight, you have to see the whole battle field, with bodies of the SWAT team you just killed as well as the androids they killed lying everywhere. And if you think all of that wasn't bad enough, after all of that, Markus goes to an android who has been shot, listens to him, as he's dying, not care about his life and only care about his people ("Did we win?") and then die in his hands. Even compared to if Markus sacrifices himself, that path seems like nothing. This really shows brutality and war, and the horror and terrible losses that come with it.
Playing through this, it makes me think of how the game treats the peaceful decisions as the "right" ones. Although I am pretty much a pacifist myself, I strongly dislike the "pacifism is always good" rhetoric the game displays, especially when it comes to an oppressed people (androids, in this case). Even though it was horrifying, the attack scene was amazing at pulling at your heartstrings and getting you to see the violence oppressors use to keep the oppressed oppressed, even more so than the other pathways. This is almost used as a bad thing, as if making good decisions leads to less heartbreak, when in fact a lot of the time the opposite is true. The public opinion also going down at the end of the attack scene really irritates me. It's like, these oppressed people fought back against the oppressors who were killing them, hundreds of them died anyway, and you're still going to blame them? Meanwhile, if Markus "peacefully" sacrifices himself, John/Simon still attacks the SWAT team to save Markus, and that's somehow okay? Yeah, war isn't pretty. I believe war should be avoided at all costs, as well as any other violence to anyone who is alive. But the blaming of the oppressed that this game does if the player makes the "wrong" decisions is honestly shameful. And it's incredibly disappointing, especially given how emotional scenes can get and how much potential there is with a topic like this.
Honestly I'm thinking of starting a series on this blog where I go through every scene and list what's wrong with it. Not because I hate the game, but because I love it and I'm so freaking disappointed that it was written so poorly when the characters and plot have SO much potential. So tell me if that'd be interesting, dbh fandom.
