#fan srtt

[whoredmode]

i just wanna hear pierce’s music

[vinkumakkara]

it's "funny" just how much more conventional if not just plain conservative srtt is underneath all the fluff

beyond the turtleneck shit like maybe i just hallucinated it but i coulda sworn the excuse they gave for no longer having female cops was that "people would confuse them for the strippers dressed as cops" or something. like those were the priorities. also they made a big deal about how they "listened to the fans" when they made Boss whiter (and yes it was specifically expressed as Boss not being "white enough" in the past) like Baker replacing Mendoza and the way the marketing shifted to have the most generic white dude on the covers that you can imagine was a very calculated marketing move and they talked about it openly and proudly back then. i remember specifically reading about it on the official website/forums that have since been nuked. it's all just kinda weird and gross and depressing to think about idk

[bigboyplaya]

i like Saints Row as a series (and have fun in most Volition games that aren't directly related to SR like Red Faction and Agents of Mayhem) but post Saints Row 2 definitely has a different vibe. I dunno why. I like crime games like GTA and Mafia ect which are more than just gang wars but something feels weird.

I don't know how to explain it. I kind of miss street gang warfare and am not a huge fan of huge crime syndicates duking it out tbh.

And nothing really got fleshed out unfortunately. Saints Row and Saints Row 2 actually had some hard hitting points, like character deaths, but the deaths and low points in SRTT didn't feel as impactful. Like, yeah Shaundi and Viola dying sucks, but the game sort of just moves on into hunting Cyrus or whatever happens. I haven't killed Shaundi in ages so I don't remember exactly what happens lol.

Would have been nice to have SOME emotional beats in SRTT. SRIV does this a bit better I think, but I feel like the world blowing up should garner more of a reaction than '😳' from everyone on the ship. They just move on to hunting Zinyak then dance about it. Like everyone is dead?!?! 😭

[dizzblaine]

Well I guess after spending a little over a decade as a fan of the series, it was about time I quit being a huge coward and threw my boy out there into the world. Or at least in the fandom itself—not that I do much in it to begin with.

So, hi there! My name's Andre, and this is my pride and joy who I've been tinkering around with for many many years now. I'm fully aware of how much of a cop out it is to go with SRTT's default Boss option, but I was 16 at the time and thought he was real neat. I do like to think I've sort of made him my own over the years with the amount of time I've spent just working on background stuff, his personality, and in general my thoughts on where the series could have gone, but I digress.

So this here's Django, he's a big boy who's also a huge fuckin' weirdo and has fully embraced the role of being a monster in the eyes of the people. I really liked the idea of having a customizable character and taking that to the extreme by having him not really develop a sense of identity or purpose up until he was brought into the Saints. He had always been self-aware of the fact that he had some sort of disconnect between himself and other people, which kept him from truly forming any bonds outside of his immediate and extended family.

Joining the Saints would forever change that as he found himself drawn to not only its members, but the criminal lifestyle as well—which was totally not helped by the fact that nearly most of his family were practically in the life as well in one way or the other. Bit by bit he would take notice of how others would act and adopt those traits for himself in order to form his own kind of identity and fit in with the gang better. Yet his true fully realized identity wouldn't be born until a certain Revelation much later in life.

Django's someone who I would consider ruthlessly ambitious—wanting nothing more than to see just how far he can take things with the Saints because he both loves the hell out of his gang, and wants to spite everyone who has ever doubted him. He holds no regrets for his actions and fully embraces the worst aspects of himself. He is not someone to be proud of. He is not someone to aspire to. He is a sick man who lives for this shit because not only has it given him a sense of purpose and identity, but it truly makes him feel alive.

I'll probably make more posts going off about him in the future. But for now, I think this is a pretty decent introduction.

Thank you very much to @spengs for this art that I commissioned a very long time ago!

[megafreeman]

SRR spoilers. A lot of people talk about how Saints Row Reboot doesn't have any proper direction for it story, but I've been think and I think that directionless approach was their direction; the direction was deliberately crafted to be anti-alienating. I talked before how characters and gangs were crafted to appeal to every side of the fanbase, but I just realized why everything is so poorly executed. I think they deliberately choose to make the cast vanilla (as in no conflict and stuff like that) because they were afraid it would alienate one of their fanbases if they pick the character made to appeal to them and said "This person is objectively wrong" (think about how in SRTT, they treat Shaundi as a crazy one for taking the narrative seriously). More under the cut

Hence you get bare minimum "conflict" where they make a joke about a character's idea and then go with it. Just think about the game. None of the jokes ever land because they always go ahead with the idea the guy they were making fun of made. For example, in the prologue Kevin once makes fun of Eli for saying they should "Make Connections" instead of "Finding more people that can shoot a gun". Yet, despite turning his comments into a joke, we never really see any of the other character disapprove of Eli for having a nerdy approach towards gangs in a same sense how Boss would simplify and outright change Pierce's ideas to fit more with their simple outlook of how a gang should work.

Compare this to Pierce being a punching bag in SR2. Punching bag Pierce was usually there to create a lot of character conflict. Either with him and Gat, who have gravely different outlook on how they should do things, or him and Shaundi, who always steals his ideas and is a polar opposite of his character.

Now imagine if Kevin (who is made to appeal to SRTT fans) suggested in SRR that yall should get a dildo and beat people up with dildos for impact and Neenah and Eli then spent next 15 minute of mission just shitting on him for having a godawful idea. Imagine all the temper tantrums people that play SR for dildo bats would have

Same applies for Neenah (Made for SR2 fans). Imagine if she suggested you should do something serious and then Eli and Kevin spent 15 minutes shitting on her for wanting to take narrative seriously "because this is Saints Row and Saints Row is all about goofy fun! xD" Idk about yall, but a scene like that would leave a bad taste in my mouth.

That why I think they avoided any conflict, they didn't want to make any of the characters seem flawed, bad, or as if the narrative wasn't on their side at any moment because they were afraid it'd backfire. Same way how in SRTT, treating Shaundi as a bad guy for caring about Gat's death backfired (ironically, not doing that is what ended up backfiring the most lmao)

Ofc, Nahualli is there to contradict all this. But that's why they delibirately choose to make him a bad guy with 0 pre-release marketing. Because that's not a character they want you to like or be attached to uwu (which ironically, turned out to be the opposite)

[kikidewynter]

i’m actually a big fan of the homies changing beyond recognition going into srtt. you have everything you could ever want, so why do you feel so lonely? alienated from your closest friends? fame and money change people, that’s a fact—you wanted this, now live with it. feel like everyone’s moving forward and you’ve been left behind? times change, at least try to keep up.

[piratekenway]

SR Bosses Ask Meme: #6, #14, #21 :)

What is their birthday or date of birth OR how old do you see them as in the games you play them in?

Audrey Langston my beloved. in my head, she starts out 19-20 in SR, then 25 in SR2, 27-28 in SRTT, 29 in the prologue to SRIV, then 34-35 in the rest of IV. her birthday is April 7, but that, along with most personal information about her, she keeps solidly to herself. (and to Johnny, Pierce and Shaundi, the people who have been with her the longest time.)

Which is their voice?

I’m a Critical Role fan, so I obviously immediately went for Laura Bailey voice. in-universe it’s somewhat raspier.

Who is their second-in-command or are all their lieutenants equal?

Johnny was her initial second-in-command, but after his apparent death she split the role between Shaundi and Pierce. I imagine the moment Shaundi was kidnapped in SRTT, Audrey’s response was to say “fuck it” to revenge and to being Feared—at heart, she cares deeply for the Saints, who she sees as Hers, and she especially could not bear to lose Shaundi after losing Johnny. getting even more fame and fortune actually barely even registered in her brain, although she did bask in it and the power very happily.

with Johnny’s return, she’s pretty much made him her second again, but now he and Shaundi and Pierce kind of make up an advisory council to her. it actually kinda played into Keith’s betrayal—he found it galling that Audrey made him VP but listened more to Shaundi and Pierce than to him, and that just built up over years and years until he broke.

[the-binding-of-gekko]

Saints Boss' favourite radio stations

Vicky's a die hard fan of R&B and old school hip hop so she religiously listens to Khryme in SR1 and SR2 but in SRTT and SRIV she listens to K12 cause Khryme became more rap than the classics she likes.

Vicky's favourite artists:

Nelly

Aaliyah

Missy Elliott

Antonio on the other hand listens to indie / alt rock so he's always switching it to GenX. He was only a little bit confused when he heard Veteran Child on the radio after his coma.

Antonio's favourite artists:

Deftones

Red Hot Chili Peppers

The Killers

Marty's more of a old school punk and british rock kind of guy. He also occasionally listens to ska and pop punk, though Blink-182 is the bane of his existence. He likes Krunch in SR2 and The Blood in SRTT and SRIV.

Marty's favourite artists:

The Clash

Mayhem (yeah the infamous Black Metal band)

Meshuggah

[and-its-with-one-l-bitch]

As a Saints Row blogger, are there any characters you would consider your favorites? And your least favorites?

I definitely have favorites, thanks for asking! I'm always gonna be a fan of the OG games (2006-2008) but I do think SRTT & SRIV have some good times too.

If I had to rank a top five?

1. Lin

2. Shaundi

3. Johnny Gat

4. Benjamin King

5. Tanya Winters 🫣

As for least favourite? In no particular order we've got:

1. Matt Miller (Yuri Lowenthal's voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me)

2. William Sharp (FUCK that guy "YOU SHOT MY GIRL MAN")

3. Zinyak (Did we rlly need this guy)

4. Donnie (Sorry dude you were under the mistaken impression that Lin was your girl and your haircut is stupid)

5. Cyrus Temple (like do we really need a 2 dimensional cop as one of our main antagonists...)

[saintslaughter-a]

im being silly in my thoughts and i just think its so funny that an actual collectable in srtt is photo ops for fans lmao

[masschase]

hi hi!!! for the boss ask meme, 18 19 20? :D

Hi lego! Big fan! 😊

18. Do they have a best/closest friend? Probably not unexpectedly it's Johnny. They are surprisingly platonic considering I'm a huge fan of GatBoss, but that's how it works out with this character. She still had a crush on him when they first met and sleeps with him when they reunite due to having a false epiphany about the two of them but that is the jumping point for them to realise it felt wrong as they have more of a brother/sister love. Johnny will always be her stock answer.

But realistically when Johnny was supposedly dead she split her attentions between Pierce/Shaundi/Kinzie. She was not as close with Viola and Oleg post-SRTT but becomes closer friends with Viola during her presidency. I think she gets a little scared to get too close to Shaundi in case of previous feelings for her returning because they were pretty strong and she's so apprehensive about relationships. So overall Pierce is probably who she's closest with during this time due to being her second, perhaps also partly due to their pseudo-relationship for the press. Not long before the destruction of earth he steps back from that responsibility due to having a partner he wants to settle down with.

Post-SRIV she ends up confiding with Matt over Nyte Blayde an awful lot. They have a very different friendship to her and Johnny. Less shooting together and more snacking, watching Nyte Blayde, painting of nails, eventually cuddling. She kind of compartmentalises that hour or two every Friday in her head so she takes a long time to admit how close they are. She kind of only admits it to herself when she breaks it to Johnny. (spoilers for my next ff chapter but who's actually reading lololol):

Pre-SR she has a best friend named Mori (Moriarty Alleyne) who is quite an interesting character but I've not had a chance to draw him for his intro post.

19. Does your Boss have a favourite gun or other weapon? She always reaches for her .44 Shepherd/45 Shepherd/Heavy Pistol (game dependant) first. She has a gold plated one once she has the money to do so. In more serious combat she likes the AR-55 (much debate with Johnny who prefers the Krukov. She did name her virtual pony Krukov though.). Post-SRIV/GOOH she is also very fond of the purple thumpgun, plus a new restraint gun.

20. Do they have any tattoos? Are they from the game or something you created? She has the single bullet from sr2 on her right shoulder and the huge cobweb from sr4(might also be in 3?) on her left side. I want more on her right arm but I want to come up with some good designs for that.

Some time in the White Crib era she gets the fleur-de-lis on her neck- in game it's like a quite bright purple but I generally draw it black and a little smaller/curlier. That's part of a whole headcanon of her encouraging all the Saints to get fleur-de-lis tattoos during that time (apart from Matt and Asha who get theirs later; around 1 and 2 years post SRIV respectively, and Johnny who already had one)- I do have hcs about where most of them have them but that's a long one and there's a few I'm not sure about.

[whoredmode]

god i just really wanna know if other characters had sprite portraits in total control. did the antagonists have proper designs. there’s something charming about the art in a 2010s fb game type way. like i’ll stop talking about total control as soon as i can learn what torque looked like in that game. i know someone out there is just sitting on a bunch of assets and/or screenshots from it

[bigboyplaya]

My (proper) Thoughts on Johnny Gat

Aight this is gonna be long. Might seem disjointed, but trust I have a point to make.

I don't hate Johnny Gat as a character at all. I loved him in Saints Row 1 & 2. I thought he was funny, a semi-decent foil for characters like Julius Little, and I love Daniel Dae Kim. But I do hate the way Volition treats him.

I think it's because they noticed the fans really liked him, and why wouldn't they? He was a crazy ass gangster who preferred to shoot first, don't ask questions later. On top of that, he was pretty charismatic, you know, despite not ever wanting to talk things out. He was a wild-card and someone that literally had to be babysat whenever he was sent out to do something for the gang.

Johnny himself didn't change, honestly, it's more the way the characters and world around him did. It's quite hard to change a character's personality when they didn't have one to develop in the first place. It irks me how all the characters put Johnny on a pedestal, as did the fandom and developers. Thinking him as an unkillable beast. In the writer's mind, it might make him come off as 'totally badass and cool and WOW', but from a character perspective, it dehumanised Johnny greatly.

In Saints Row, he had his leg shot. In Saints Row 2, Johnny survived being stabbed in the stomach, albeit barely. It's not immersion breaking to think of someone being able to survive an injury such as that, even though with the internal bleeding and the fact the weapon was removed from the wound probably would have meant Johnny was more likely to die than survive. But because he lived doesn't mean Johnny's so untouchable that he couldn't be killed at all.

I will preface that I am autistic, and as such, this likely clouds the way I feel towards other's grief and loss in the way where it's very difficult for me to empathise, if at all. But, I have been able to feel for fictional characters in the past, so I'm not a completely stone-cold robot.

Slightly controversial part here, but Johnny's death in SRTT didn't affect me very much at all. Like most Saints Row death's, except maybe Lin as I haven't played enough of the first game to judge, though I wouldn't be surprised if my point still applies to her, the characters aren't fleshed out enough to have much more than a brief shock moment. Or, the deaths are written quite shallow. For example, Carlos' death was horrifying and well executed, I just wish I got to know him a lot more before he was gone so the emotional effect lasted longer and immersed me in Playa's grief, if they felt any at all. I won't speak on Aisha's death either because of the aforementioned reason as to why I won't speak on Lin's, but I also wish we got to know her a little bit to help us empathise with Johnny. If we got to see more of her in Saints Row 1, feel free to disregard her death from my argument.

Johnny had been around for three games at the point of his death so we did get quite familiar with him, yet he was gone off-screen. Not even a shot of the plane cockpit and a fade to black, which, arguably, would have been less of a screw you to his fans than what we got. If Johnny had been killed off in a more tasteful way, and perhaps a few missions later, it would have had a bigger impact on me as a player and I would actually be able to put myself in the characters shoes. And perhaps make Shaundi's reaction to his death less of a poor attempt at character development an actual turning point for her.

In SRIV, it's revealed he was abducted because Zinyak was scared of him, dubbing him as the alleged most dangerous man in the world or something like that. What makes this trigger happy gangster turned celebrity such a deadly threat that an alien dictator is afraid of him? A threat to the general public Johnny may be, but definitely not to the galaxy.

It's just such a cheap way to double down on yourself and bring a beloved character back after backlash. If the devs had maybe done anything other than a blatant deus ex machina, Johnny's return would have been fine. Disregarding the fact that it cheapens Shaundi's entire side plot in SRTT.

Onto the fandom part, and a more personal gripe, it irks me how people claim Johnny Gat is Saints Row, when he barely had main character presence in any of the games, with the exception of Gat Out of Hell. I believe that if Johnny had been written off well, they wouldn't have had to bring him back the way they did, and they would have opened up many possibilities for character development.

That's all for now, I think, as I've gotten kind of lost in my writing. I'll clarify later if anything comes up.

TL;DR - Volition cannot write fleshed-out characters and plot points.

[dizzblaine]

Becoming a wrestling fan was a mistake cause now I get irrationally mad every time I replay SRTT and hear Killbane say "Montreal Screwjob" like it's not such a VERY SPECIFIC THING that happened.

[megafreeman]

TBH I don't think that's the case. Whenever I got a chance to talk to devs about this topic, they always talked fondly about being called a GTA clone, cause they considering an acomplishment to be compared to giant Rockstar's product as a relatively tiny studio (SR1 and SR2 had like 120 devs only working on it). In fact, the whole "GTA" comparison was first brought by their publisher's marketing (IIRC they described it in launch trailer as "Our GTA")

But I do think that the reboot has an identity crisis, and I don't think its born not out of devs lack of confidence for their, but rather their desire to please the fanbase. Saints Row as a series is in this unique position where they managed to make two popular games in the same series with worlds apart tones (SR2 and SRTT). And I think they're worried about not making a game that alienates one side of the fanbase too much, hell when they announced they're toning down from SRIV, I've genuinely seen posts on here that were raging about Volition "pandering to the annoying GTA fans", and not to mention how spoiled the so called "OG fans" can be.

And I think that's why the game struggles to pick a direction and stick with it. In the reboot, the tone changes every few missions. I feel like this is because they want a tone that pleases both fanbases. And I think in the end, that gave us an inferior product; because no plotline ever truly felt finished or fully explored except for Dustmoot (which is actually from what I hear an idea they wanted to do for a really long time). Panteros get destroyed in Neenah's personal mission, Marshall get destroyed in 2 missions. We get missions where they go into incredible detail how stuff work, like in Dustmoot where we get told half the rulebook, and then we got missions where its 2 minutes of meta jokes without any actual substance, like when Kevin teaches you about collectibles. It honestly feels like they were randomly deciding which mission they wanna lean into crazy and which into serious.

I don’t think Saints Row has an identity crisis as much as it has a confidence issue. Yeah that can fall into “identity crisis” but the series has always had “eccentric crime game” as it’s vibe.

Like “gta clone” really did something to their confidence and it makes them either not be fully like “THIS is what Saints Row”. It comes out like a whimper.

Even Saints Row 2 is guilty of this. “See we’re better than GTA cause we don’t make you go bowling.”

The thing is you’re open world crime game is ALWAYS going to be compared to GTA solely off of the fact that more people have played it. It’s not an insult as much as it’s a point of reference. My friends never heard of Saints Row when the reboot trailer dropped and telling them “it’s a crime game like GTA but you get to create a character and it’s more chaotic” was the best way to explain it.

of course, there are outliers who use GTA clone as an insult but those are just assholes who act like GTA invented the genre, who cares what they think? Like legit, who ACTUALLY cares?

The series doesnt need to figure out it’s identity, it needs to be confident in itself. Trust that it’s gonna find the audience that’ll gravitate towards it.

cause literally, Saints Row 2022 is not bad. When it released? Yeah, cause of the bugs but it’s hard to attribute that to the game itself when Triple A games nowadays seemed to be released when publishers and investors want them to be and not when the devs are ready. In Cyberpunk’s case, they tried throwing the devs under the bus.

Literally the game was just lackluster in certain areas but could be improved on. And it’s ironic that a series that has such “tits out” energy has a self-esteem issues.

[rachmir]

Fanart of Roseanne, also known as Ho04 from Saints Row The Third!