#yet another kliff essay

[gamebunny-advance]

Hm.

I think one of Kliff’s worst qualities as the “number 1 fan” is that he really doesn’t “geek out” that much.

Call it cliché, but I feel like if you’re gonna have a character that’s a self-proclaimed "biggest fan”, then you’ve gotta show them geeking out at least once. Kliff doesn’t *really* have a scene like that. We kinda get that when he’s reminiscing about Kul Fyra to Mayday after she properly geeks out, but Kliff’s whole lecture really isn’t a geek out so much as it is recalling fond memories. It’s just too sentimental to sell the idea that he’s as obsessive as he turns out being.

I get that he’s supposed to be “mature” or whatever to contrast with the “childish” Mayday, or how maybe he’s trying really hard to repress that side of his personality, but I think just one or two “cracks in the facade” would have done a lot for his character. Something like B2J making an off-hand comment and he starts fangasaming about it, but he stops mid-sentence when he realizes what he’s doing. Ya know, little moments like that.

Like, the dude doesn’t even have a single band sticker on his tablet, and you want me to believe that he’s such a big fan of rock that he helped orchestrate the takeover of an entire city?

[gamebunny-advance]

Thinking... (Scrapped)

As much as I like to ship them as bitter exes, I’ve always taken note of how NSR seems to deliberately go out of its way to deny that Kliff’s feelings for Tatiana are romantic in nature. Romantic language is never used between the two and even when Kliff gushes about her, it’s all about her aesthetics: her clothes, her attitude, her music. So with that in mind, what exactly was Kul Fyra to Kliff? What does she represent to him that would drive him to be so crushed and vindictive after they split?

The easy answer is that “he’s just like that”, but I refuse to believe that in a story where even the most shallow of NPCs has some depth to them, that Kliff, the primary antagonist of the story, is the only one that’s so one dimensional. The narrative has already ruled out romance as a motivation, and it’s dubious that they were even friends at any point. It could be that he always saw her as a symbol for his ideals, but he does seem to take it personally that she “went EDM,” and he ultimately says that what matters to him wasn’t the music itself, but Kul Fyra the person. It could be that he’s just trying to get sympathy points by exaggerating, but I think that reading would be inconsistent with how Kliff had been portrayed so far. Kliff lies by omission, not by distortion. The instances where Kliff is untrustworthy is by him not giving all the details:

He doesn’t tell B2J that he knows that Tatiana was Kul Fyra.

He doesn’t hide that he wants B2J to takeover Vinyl City, but he never mentions/considers the negative consequences of them doing so.

There are only 2 instances in which he lies by distortion, and both of them might not even count.

Mayday mentions that his photo doesn’t seem to match with who they meet, but since we never saw this photo, we don’t know in what ways it was different. It doesn’t make sense for it to have been a “catfish” since they met in person almost immediately afterwards, so it’s more likely that the photo refers to a profile picture, and the picture just didn’t reflect what kind of person Kliff was IRL, like a cute animal pic or something.

When B2J are trying to free the districts, he does lie about the bots being not dangerous and encourages them to get closer to their attacks by saying that they’re helpful, but this is in a high-stress situation after all his good will between them was destroyed, so this is arguably out of character.

Even if you want to discredit that Kliff is being sincere in his confrontation with Tatiana, Tatiana does not call him out for lying, so it can be implied then that what he says is true. To counter, it’s possible that she’s just not interested in deconstructing his claims and just cuts straight to the heart of the problem, but she does give that time to Mayday. With that in mind, I feel like it would be reasonable to assume that if there was something to deconstruct, she would have done so in this instance too. Therefore, I think it’s safe to assume that Kliff’s claims can be taken at face value.

I feel like Kliff and Tatiana’s conflict is somewhat supposed to mirror Mayday and Zuke’s conflict, or rather how they resolve it. If you do the Pirate Radio interviews, they reveal that regardless of your personal choices, Mayday will wind up breaking Zuke’s NSR branded drumsticks in protest. Mayday will always feel somewhat guilty about this after the fact and Zuke will forgive her, and they work out their differences on the subject, ultimately proving that despite conflicts, they’re best friends

It partially feeds into my theory that NSR is about different kinds of love, and that Kliff, Tatiana, and Mayday’s love conflict is based around fandom.