Novotnus: This is what we - the players - know. But when Susan encounters Joe she can't know that he's not a Parasite. From her point of view, he fits it perfectly:
- He has his place in the Otherworld (that's my interpretation - the Parasites are somehow bounded to the Otherworld and have their places there - X has that theater, mute one - the dock, cannibals' house is otherworldy in general).
- He's probably a serial killer (again, from Susan point of view - we know he is)
- He wants to hurt Susan for no good reason (well, he wants to kill her because of her dellusions - but that's what we know).
Wonderful, that explains why Susan goes to the Flat. It absolutely does not explain why the writers (NOT Susan) decided to include an overly developed interlude giving depth and insight into a character who ultimately is irrelevant to the plot. Again, take that exchange between Parker and the cop in Plunder Squad. It's a cameo and serves the story, just as Susan visiting Joe serves the plot in her quest to find Adam; however, if that interaction had gone from a tense exchange that might ultimately lead in grave repercussions into an expository scene that informed us about the cop's impending divorce or otherwise horrible home life for its own sake without adding anything to the scene, it would have started to feel blatantly flabby and out of place, making the reader feel like they are either missing something (i.e. the character is from a different story) or that the person who edited the final product was a chimp who did so in between flinging their own poo and checking their friends for parasites.
Novotnus: And we can't be sure about Queen's motivation - maybe she doesn't care about the Parasites and sends Susan on her quest only to put her through more pain?
Neat theory. Too bad that exactly nothing in the game backs it up, and in fact the game actively disproves this. I had Susan choose to not blindly follow orders to exterminate random people and possibly find a way to take them down alive, at which point my not at all sinister host began screaming at me that I was a "damned arrogant fool" for doing so; everything indicates that the Queen really wants these people dead. One could argue that this was a ploy on the Queen's part, but, once again, nothing in the game backs this theory up.
Novotnus: Sidenote - you can leave X alive and let him continue his parasitic hobby : )
I am all too aware of this. In case you didn't notice, it was my decision to do so and the resulting display of the electrocution scene that sparked my annoyance with the developers for this needless self indulgence in the first place, thereby causing me to create this very thread.
