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- May 27, 2021
Well like you said; It's because you're as big of a jackass as Anon. If you really don't like Fang and/or Trish and/or Reed then it's easy to act out of spite and fuck with them. Ending 1 is hard to get legitimately because it requires you to pick the worst of all possible outcomes in nearly all situations but ending 2 can be fallen into by simply lacking empathy, which is understandable. With that said even if they are somewhat unreasonable they're still well written and have that narrative punch to where they don't come across as penalties for being a retard so much as just terrible if understandable outcomes for your actions.
Endings A&B of Age Before Beauty just don't have that, they require you to act like a moron just like Snoot Game's bad ends do but they lack the punch SG's bad ends have. The writing standards are much lower.
SG's bad endings stem more from a lack of emotional maturity whereas ABB's bad endings are more the result of lack of logical reasoning.
Misty's alcoholism in this game is a 1:1 stand in for painkiller addiction. Misty also has some vague and unexplored mental trauma to the point where her doctor wants to put her on SSRIs, which she refuses, but this is mentioned briefly in passing in a single scene and her drinking is never really given the gravity that it should have. She literally out drinks a borderline homeless Navy veteran in one scene but yet maintains enough functionality in her day to day to maintain long term employment in the public sector with almost no one realizing that she regularly drinks on the job. This is not normal alcoholism, this is advanced alcoholism. Not the sort of thing that someone just falls into but a long term sustained habit that has been going on for presumably a decade or more.
Which is especially dumb that this goes unaddressed because alcoholism makes chronic pain worse, not better. The longer an alcoholic drinks for physical pain the harder it is to stop since the cause of the pain just becomes more and more aggravated over time, and this is something that is never addressed or laid out in the game.
Slight powerlevel here but I was a serious cougar hunter in my late teens and early twenties, and yeah, this matches some of my experience with that where older women are not automatically more mature, especially not women who are single in their 40s and 50s since they've typically got something wrong with them that makes long term relationships highly unappealing. But that's the problem and I think that's a realization that most cougar hunters eventually (if not quickly) reach is that cougars are fun to hang out with but they generally aren't serious relationship material, which fits Misty to a T. Her and Anon have no chemistry beyond what you'd expect from a high-school fling.
It makes it even worse when Misty and Anon are arguing over her drinking after it causes a major health scare and she continues to drink behind his back, that's shit that happens shortly before a divorce and doesn't capture Ending 3's vibe of hope for the future and second chances. Age Before Beauty doesn't manage to capture this with Roberts because in her ending she hasn't turned a corner and is the exact same Roberts as she was in act 1 except now she blushes instead of sneers when she sees Anon.
I understand wanting to avoid Ending 4 because it is the saccharine sweet ending but Stella is objectively the more sensical route in this game since she's a way for Anon to reconcile with his past, she doesn't act like a total cunt when he first meets her, and she's just a generally more put together person than Misty if for no other reason that because she's half the age of Misty and thus has more room to grow. Plus her situation more closely mirrors Anon's and so the two of them acting as pillars for each other makes more sense than Anon gravitating towards the stone cold bitch who's old enough to be his mother and talks to him like a bratty younger sibling.
Maybe I was too harsh with the skinwalker accusation but I still feel like the paralels between Ending 3 Lucy and ABB Stella are more than skin deep. Frankly I feel like Stella is just plain superior as a romantic option for Anon because she's similar enough to him for there to be a connection but the two are different enough to where they aren't going to simply reinforce each other's worst aspects. I still haven't finished Ending D yet though so I'll let you know my full thoughts once I do.
We were talking about it a few pages back but overall concensus in the thread seems to be "It looks really good so far and I'm excited for it".
