#’good cop/bad cop points and how its kim judging yiu but like. its kim. lol’

[daforged]

i think it’s so interesting that the cop points system is literally just your reputation with kim — like, in a certain respect it makes sense because he is the character who will probably have the most accurate read of your cop abilities during the game, but it’s also fascinating that it’s such a subjective marker and not the game “objectively” giving you points depending on how well you do cop shit (not that the whole concept of “good/bad cop” in itself isn’t (1) heavily subjective and (2) irrelevant because acab, but go with this for a sec)

there is no universe in which dedicating a karaoke song to your partner is an indicator of how good a cop you are, and yet that gives you a good cop point. similarly, i’m sure there’s some petty things that take away points because kim just doesn’t appreciate them, and it’d be interesting to see if there are things the most people would objectively describe as “cop activities” where successes/fails have 0 effect on the points—i can’t check right now but i’d assume so?

anyway, i just think it speaks to a lot of different aspects of the game that they decided to call it “cop points” instead of “kim reputation”. the way i interpret that is sort of like this: (1) harry (and the game itself in a sense) sees kim as the arbiter of truth and The Ideal Cop (2) throughout de kim is constantly (re)evaluating harry as a cop but also just as a human being (though he’s doing that because harry is a cop and therefore in his mind has earned that level of attention) so the game’s commentary is then (3) kim, despite being the game’s/harry’s arbiter of truth, is petty, and is prone to adding/removing points based on a number of things utterly irrelevant to doing cop stuff, representative of how cops in general are, hence why they’re “good/bad COP points” and not “good/bad KIM points”