At the risk of preaching to the choir, the trauma dumping feels like compensation for being slop. Kevin thought it was a good idea to have people like Cooper and Dana write therapy and vent sessions, like that's One Neat Trick for artistic integrity. Gameoverse made it more obvious. Look, the humanoid cat is having a flashback! Doesn't she look mortified in her bikini? How affected and vulnerable she is!
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You can have attractive characters, but I think what rubbed people the wrong way isn't that it's goonerfurrygaymerslop. It's that people noticed how the PSTD didn't match everything else. The bikini shit was a bad tactic in the sense that it negated most of the impact. They felt that the flashbacks were there to make Gameoverse look like "more" than it actually is. When Cooper did it, it was so common that it looked artistic. Oblivious people and video essay Youtubers, with their mental minds and physical bodies, just took his designs and fetish shit as avant-garde. Gameoverse can't get away with that for obvious reasons. Whether Kevin put a bug in the writers' ears or what, I can't know. I wouldn't doubt that it's another, very minor, example of Kevin losing dollars chasing dimes.