tbarker

I would argue that Gwen Stacy and, to an extent, Barbara Gordon’s treatment might still count as being pure examples of WiR, as their accidents were both used as a device to build on the male characters: Peter Parker learns that he needs to keep his two lives private, the reader learns that Commissioner Gordon could not be driven to a point where his morals could become corrupted.

I watched a Let’s Play of this a while back and haven’t really thought of it since, and this article has got me thinking about it more in-depth. It’s interesting that the first (and possibly most) Wendigos were psychiatric patients getting experimental treatment. Initially I had been annoyed at the portrayal of people with mental illnesses as literal monsters, but I’ve realized that this is more a Frankenstein situation: the real monster is the doctor using psychiatric patients to experiment with potentially dangerous drugs. While more barbaric, this is similar to how Josh, and many others, are treated in the medical world: slap a title on their illness, throw some drugs at them, and hope for the best. i think the real moral here is that mistreatment and misdiagnosis does more harm than good, and leads to a complete failure from the medical system. In this case, the failure led to turning people suffering with mental illness into monsters. In this way, I think that Josh had to have the same outcome as the other patients — either becoming a Wendigo or being eaten by one. It’s a tragic case of doing the same thing and expecting different results.

On a slightly more optimistic side, I think as much as the player wants to help Josh, if you had been able to it would promote the belief that another person can save you from your mental illness. Which is a trope that desperately needs to be dropped from film and literature. As much as you can encourage someone to seek treatment, they have to take the first step to recovery, otherwise it won’t work out. Outsiders cannot save you from mental illness, you have to save yourself. Josh had stopped taking his medication and was ignoring his psychiatrist, at that point he really didn’t want to be helped. If he had survived, his parents would most likely put him back into treatment, and he would probably ignore it again.

A lot of comedies tend to fall into the “revealing too much” category. The producers tend to put as many funny bits into the trailer as possible to make draw in viewers under the assumption that the rest of the movie will match the trailer, only to find out that the best jokes were in the trailer. This leaves viewers unimpressed, especially since most of the movies that fall pray to this have pretty weak plot lines, leaving nothing for the viewer to enjoy.