To all of you who've been responding to my posts about SH being potentially brainwashed, I do want to say I have enjoyed reading your responses. This has been a great exchange, and I am very happy at the extent to which some of you have been engaging in discourse with me in a positive way and not just hating on me as some others have done in the past. So thank you for this.
I do concede (and have done so in the past) that having not played the game it is quite possible I am not seeing certain things about SH that some of you are seeing. Fair enough. But I disagree about simply dismissing any "evil" acts she may have committed in the past, even if brainwashed. Firstly, her story doesn't just begin when we run into her in the nautiloid. So it's not just about what she does or doesn't do while in our company. It's about what she may have done before getting tadpoled. We don't know. Secondly, whereas I can accept the argument that if you had no control, including literally no physical control over your body, then is it fair to assign blame to that person? But it's not about me or anyone else assigning blame. It's about the person themselves, in this case SH, and whether they choose to blame themselves, because for me a truly good person, even in the face of learning they did awful things while under someone else's control, would still feel severe anguish about it and surely blame themselves. I know I would IRL. If someone "forced" me to do something awful, the fact that I was forced would not be of much solace to me in the face of knowing I had done something awful. That to me is what makes a person a good person: their own feelings of guilt and remorse and their own inner torment. So it would matter to me how SH herself reacts to learning about her past.
It's not like were talking about tinfoil theories here. Showdowhearts mysterious light magic is explicitly brought up on the official website now.
Well, the silver lining therein would be that one of my other overall complaints about the game, that of not enough good companions relative to evil/suspicious ones, would be alleviated by SH being more explicitly brought over to the good side. Instead of 5 evil (incl. DU), 3 neutral, and 3 good companions, it would then be 4, 3, and 4, respectively, a much more balanced distribution.
