That. was. BRILLIANT. That’s exactly what I’m going for with this Guen (who is now untitled)!
@Mirabella Wow, that’s something to think about. I never thought about the personality disorder side of things. Hmmm…
@poison_mara Thanks for the suggestions! Feel free use her if you want. After all, I did the same with your Ruthless Guen (who I’m having a great time with, BTW).
At first, this Guen’s actually going to be even more eager to sweep this under the rug than Arthur. She wants to forget it, and all the feelings it brings up…but she can’t.
But after some time passes (maybe in Book IV), I can picture her thinking “Did he really abandon his own son? What if one of our children becomes inconvenient to him? What will he do then?”
Is she getting paranoid at this point? YES. But when you (or at least, this is how it happened for me) have deep buried anger/resentment towards someone, you often start seeing slights where there are none, thinking the worst of EVERYTHING they do until they seem like the most evil, horrible person alive.
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I think that if playing good Guen at start, Arthur will look just too good and straightforward for Guen to have such feelings about him, Especially that we know that Arthur will be terribly shaken by the conception of Mordred.
But if @buggygirl11 untitled Guen is a little unstable from the start and a bit of psychotic, but wanting to be good, then i think your outcome is very good. Like poison queen is often behaving good, but when given option of what she actually think she is ploting against others, the same Untitled Guen could behave good, but given option states she is worried in the inside, and gradually those worried choices became “evil” choices. That way i think game would be able to track that kind of personality.
Overall i think that Untitled Guen to feel plausible to behave like that would need to be a bit unstable and paranoid from the start. In normal situation someone who is wanting to be good and avoid confrontation, burying the feelings inside, would at one moment just snap at the other person. There would be a point when they stop liking the other person enough to snap at them, yell and be angry, but not carry forth being nice and start ploting evil things toward them.
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Totally agree, she sounds really unstable and little stressed to me. I mean she was forced to marry a guy, then she found he loves him and them he bangs his sister and have an incest secret son . I would ended crazy if that happens to me I swear.
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I disagree about the Guen in question having to be unstable to begin with. I think everyone has a breaking point - most people are just lucky enough to not reach theirs. A good person can still snap if pushed far enough…
Admittedly, that’s my opinion, and I’m a bit unstable myself, so that could just be how I see it. ^_^;
Thoroughly enjoying the game, just wanted to help out a bit with the following that I noticed:
Morana nods. “You’re right. We’ll figure something out.” She looks at Dreamchaser, who is just finishing the remains of the food. “I think Dreamchaser should be okay,” she says. “He’ll heal very quickly, especially if he can rest for a while. He should be able to defend himself and follow us.”
‘Morana’ is lacking a G, there. The line is when captured by Meligaunt but able to use light and dark magic to heal the fae cat, here named Dreamchaser.
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Additionally, my Guenevere has been attempting to be the best queen she can be but conflicted by attraction. She loves and respects Arthur’s vision, even if not Arthur as husband. Morgana is both strong and vulnerable, which I like a great deal. All three characters are distinct entities who can appeal on their own grounds.
Great story!
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@Ponku @poison_mara OtherGrimm Mmm…was this Guen unstable from the start? Slightly, but it’s not something you would notice unless you were looking for it. I wouldn’t say she was psychotic (yet) or secretly evil already, just ever so slightly off.
I’ll use the “cards short of a full deck” expression to explain.
Before the events of Book III, this Guen was maybe one card short of a full deck. You can still play most games with a deck like that, and unless you’re counting up every card, you might not even notice that one’s missing.
Case in point: Nobody suggested that this Guen was unstable when I posted the original comment…nobody noticed a thing until they learned about this Guen’s eventual descent into insanity and evil, and began really looking.
This Guen was genuinely a nice person, and would have probably continued her life that way; protecting the kingdom, living happily with Arthur…if the traumatic events of Book III and her own bottled up emotions about them didn’t cause her to snap.
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Most of unstable or even sociopatic never shows any symptoms, they need an event, normally traumatic to unleash the psychological trauma. So your Guen could be nice and more or less happy and genuinely be normal until the button is pressed in her brain. And as I said before noticing your first moment forced husband even if she ended happy with him. He has not only banged her half sister and her best friend. Not only that he left her pregnant!! And just hide that to almost anyone and send the baby away with a fake name.
Heck, I probably ended depressed and unstable after that. If she has a feble tendency to have a mental problem, it would unleashed over her.
And if she tried at first racionalize the issue trying to shallow her real feelings about Arthur or the fact he cheated her. That is not healthy, so It is completely normal she ended developing a hatred over them. At least for me, I never thought your character is insane at all. But events like that makes anyone angry!
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@Buggygirl11 And the word “nice”.
Exact wording (and yes, I know, I’m being literal minded and obsessive):
“The crazy thing is, if Goodie-Goodie Guen were just a little LESS nice, and just yelled at Arthur and let her anger out in a strongly-worded discussion/argument, all of this could be avoided.”
I think whether she goes over to the dark side or not - and the idea that someone who has been seen. as nice, loving, idealistic, and trusting doing so is perfectly plausible - and that bottling it up turns out to overwhelm her is a good idea - but being less nice but just as assertive about her feelings would lead to the same place, and I congratulate you as a writer for working out “Hm, how would this work with her weak points?” for all my quibbles over the word “nice”.
It’s a moment only Guens who already hate Arthur beyond all acceptance - as in, there’s no way he could be worse in their eyes than he is now - would not be shaken up by, after all. Good hearted otherwise or not.
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I’ve played the game (well, Book I and first half of Book II) three times now and it won’t be my only times. I LOVED it and I’m so looking forward to what’s coming next. I can’t wait to see how everything turns out!
In my first run-through I couldn’t really decide between Morgana and Lancelot and ended up with neither of them (bisexual, light magic Guen), in my second one I happily romanced Morgana (lesbian, light magic Guen) and in the last I endet up with Lancelot (hetero warrior Guen). I couldn’t say which ones I liked best, really - but I felt the Lance romance is the one most strongly “advertised” in the story. But I liked that I could choose how Guen actually felt about the physical “forced” attraction.
Can you tell when the next part of the story will be available? I really can’t wait. 
Edit: Okay, I only just realized that there is an on-going discussion which I kind of missed. Sorry for asking the probably most-asked question yet again, I’ll read up first 
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@OtherGrimm But that was exactly my point. Ofcourse good person can snap if pushed far enough, there is no question to that, what she would do at that point is. There would be a point for that Guen that she will break and snap and it will result on her having a fight with Arthur.
She was not saying anything to Arthur, because she likes him, and kept all the bad feelings inside. Which made her dislike him on the long run, so at one point she cease to liking him enough to keep bad feelings from him, and release them. The result at that point would be a fight and she may dislike Arthur even later. My point is that normally it would end like that. If she reach that point, and instead of snapping she started planning doing evil things to Arthur, to get a revenge and hurt him - then she must have been sociopatic.
For normal person reaching breaking point would mean a fight, not of planning to kill or hurt someone.
If @buggygirl11 Guen reach the point of snapping and then plan to hurt Arthur, then we can see that she was more prone to sociopatic behaviour, if that was the course of action she decides. And only in that moment it was able to be seen her tendencies. She was perfectly normal on the outside, but still she had something different in her all along, that’s why i suggested choosing options to act nice, but think worried in game.
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I don’t know if you have to be sociopathic, but I agree with Ponku that if you plan to hurt someone something very un-nice is going on - someone like, oh, Fluttershy might bottle her feelings up until she explodes but she’d feel bad about having exploded - even if you don’t feel any good will towards that person you still were unable to keep control of your feelings, which I would think she wouldn’t feel good about.
Continuing to cling to ill will without exploding suggests that you’re feeling vengeful, not just unhappy, although unhappiness can lead to vengefulness.
But anger and bitterness festering and festering and changing her attitude and behavior suggests this Guen has more going on than simply feeling hurt and not dealing with it well - that would certainly be ugly on its own, but it might lead to this Guen feeling she’s a terrible person more than to anything about Arthur.
I think an important thing to note is that this Guen may feel like there’s nobody to turn to, either because she is isolated from people who would empathize with her, or she at least feels like she is. She was too dependent on Arthur and the fairytale nature of their relationship for her happiness and companionship, so Mordred’s conception has her feeling betrayed and lost, I suppose. That’s where the first part of her snaps; when the relationship fails her ideal (rather spectacularly) she is no longer capable of loving Arthur the way she did. On the other hand, she wants it so badly and (maybe) has nobody to turn to so that she can move past the problem. I think those parts are key. She doesn’t have or doesn’t give herself an outlet for her pain, and she doesn’t feel that she can escape the source of it.
Edit: also, this takes place over years instead of, say, 22 minutes. ;p
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Oh, and @buggygirl11 I like your “one card short of a full deck” analogy. That was exactly what i’m saying about her. You are absolutely right that we would never noticed she was any differnt (and like @poison_mara said many people do live their whole lives like that, never showing any symptoms) And it would only be “released” when something so traumatic as that happened in her life. Overall she is quite interesting character with a lot of development.
It still amazes me how many so different Guens people have. Look at it, In Mass Effect, a huge game made by huge company, you basicaly can have 2 personalities: paragon or renegade, and here we already can have few dozens of so many different personalities for the main character, and it isn’t even the end of the second book 
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Being fair with Bioware. There is more that just paragon renegade. And voice acting is extremely expensive same doing tons of animations and arts in a video game. That’s why video games never would destroy pen and paper rpgs and of course our beloved interactive fiction. You can write by yourself something as amazing as @jeantown if you have her talent. Thankfully written words are free for writers (being free doesn’t mean they don’t deserve being paid for their hard work, it is not easy write) but if you have to paid other people things get complicated
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A Guen who thought she had the bestest possible marriage with Arthur and who trusted him could be spent spiraling into thinking of herself as having somehow done something to “deserve this” or to have “made him do this” because of some failing on her part, and how she tries to put on a brave face and pretend all is well but secretly regards herself as a loathsome, despicable person.
Or blame Morgana for somehow making the bestest husband do something wrong. Whether through prior ill feelings for Morgana or feeling that Arthur would never do something like this if it wasn’t for something like that or both.
She (this Guen) has defined the problem in terms of Arthur wronging her and that she’s innocent and that Morgana is at best a secondary part of it. That’s very, very different than if she defined it in terms of “What did I do to make you not love me?” or “What did Morgana do to you?”
One can define this in multiple ways as far as this reflecting Bad People being responsible for this - all apart from the rejection of it reflecting innocent idiocy or something else without Bad People. Choosing to describe it as about the badness of Arthur and/or Morgana is saying something that’s pretty dang significant.
Not to say it’s the wrong answer, but it is revealing, and not of a forgiving and generous nature.
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Maybe Guen could decide that neither her wonderful perfect husband not her best friend forever could have done that deliberately and suspect a third person to have manipulated, perhaps even mind-controlled them using some dark magic. Paranoia ensued as she investigates who this evil person is but couldn’t find them. @jeantown I hope you’ll make this a possible reaction for Guen.
@WulfyK Also doable.
I’d personally suspect a Guen who was in fairy-tale romance land to think of something like that, but that’s me.
To be fair, Guen didn’t have anything to with it, so blaming herself doesn’t make sense either. Trying to predict how an emotionally fragile person will react to trauma can be like standing a pencil on its point and predicting which way it will fall. Regardless of who she blames, I’d expect her to fixate on it, and I like the way the story would shift sharply if Guen decided to blame Arthur, particularly since she’d have to reconcile her previous feelings toward him with that blame.
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