#bunny rants about the quarry

[ghostradiodylan]

Probably a lukewarm take, but other than the (lack of an) ending, the Laura and Ryan scenes are some of the worst written and conceived parts of The Quarry.

And this is completely separate from whether Ryan is interested in Dylan (he is, but that's another post and not important to this rant) or Kaitlyn; even if Ryan had no other potential relationships in the game, even if Laura wasn't practically married to Max, wearing his ring around her neck the entire time they're talking, it still would feel flat to me because nothing about it is earned.

Laura is on a killing spree with the single-minded goal of saving Max. She genuinely believes the only way to do that is to kill Chris Hackett. Even if you've made her argue with Max to the extent that they can, they're still a strong unit when she goes out to solve this werewolf thing once and for all. Even if you don't believe in love think their relationship would survive all this trauma, she deeply believes she owes it to him to rescue him, that is her entire guiding ethos during the game.

Ryan is going with her to try to keep that from happening because Chris has been his friend and mentor for years. We know Ryan has an absent mother, unmentioned father, and a potentially turbulent family life, and he's been coming to HQSC for so long that it feels like home to him, that Chris and his kids feel like family. Laura has already killed Kaylee. Even if Ryan completely bought into the werewolf thing by now, that would be a tough pill for him to swallow, given his reaction to her death.

Then, they fall in the titular Quarry and suddenly have the option to express a completely unearned sort of camaraderie with each other. Why is Laura asking Ryan about his love life in the first place? The question about him being single makes sense as a dig, but it doesn't make any sense for her to ask about him being a 'brooding and mysterious loner' because... she hasn't actually seen him do anything brooding or mysterious? How did she even get that impression? If Laura's got some kind of borderline psychic intuition then this is really the worst possible use of that ability--she should have foreseen her need to go to that motel and stay the fuck out of locked storm shelters instead.

It doesn't make a lick of sense for her to say that Kaitlyn looks up to him either. She hasn't seen that. Hell, we as players haven't even seen that! Kaitlyn seems generally tolerant of but unimpressed by Ryan. She has the option to be impatient with him multiple times and even get the chyron that she's ‘losing respect’ for him if he suggests she take the gun and go after Nick instead. This seems like an objectively good idea, since she's a much better shot than Ryan, a fact which the game keeps telling us despite refusing to give her a gun until the last possible second, though maybe the concern is that she'd have to drag Nick back to the campfire herself. (Honestly, I think Kaitlyn could do it, I think she's like a mighty ant who can lift many times her own weight, but that's not what this post is about.)

Ryan, for his part, shouldn't really be willing to talk about any of this with Laura either. He canonically doesn't even want to talk to his coworkers about his animation school decision (in the office scene with Dylan and at the campfire with Emma if you choose truth like a lunatic) and he's known them for at least two months, if not for years attending the same camp. But he met Laura a few hours ago and is suddenly willing to spill his guts about who he does or doesn't have a crush on and who does/doesn't have 'the hots' for him, despite the only experience they have together being her leaving his friend of several years dead facedown in a pool and expressing a strong desire to kill his father figure? I simply do not buy it.

I'm not sure if this was supposed to go along with the relationship system that they scrapped or what (there's not a single shred of Ryan and Laura stuff in the datamine that I've been able to find), but all it really serves to do is muddy the waters by trying to force some level of intimacy on Ryan and Laura before the big confrontation at the Hackett House. But that confrontation itself should have been the thing that forged that intimacy between them and allowed them to go on to fight Silas together.

Overall, I think it's a major sign that the back third of the game got a very rushed and, frankly, bad chop job (which we know is true) and that they struggled to tie the resulting loose threads off in a way that made any kind of narrative sense. It's a shame, because the writing in The Quarry is actually way better than most people give it credit for, it just wasn't allowed to pay off in a lot of ways that clearly were intended.