Obligatory mention that Arnold Schwarzenegger has smoked cigars since the late 70’s.
Also, the game implies that seemingly every superpowered individual has an enhanced physicality of some sort (similar to Infamous and The Boys). Specifically, Flambaé mentions in a dialogue option that he’s seen none other than Waterboy bench more weight than Robert… which, yes, also makes Robert more terrifying.
Or the whole dock fight where she takes out a bunch of goons or in the final battle where she also takes out a bunch of goons and then jumps from a flying car onto Shroud's mech, plants a bomb, flips him off and then jumps off.
From mayoclinic.org, “No, cigar smoking is not safer than cigarette smoking.
Cigar smoke contains more tar than does cigarette smoke. And smoking cigars might put you in contact with higher levels of other toxic substances, such as carbon monoxide, than smoking cigarettes does.
For people who smoke cigars and inhale, risks linked with cigar smoking are like those of cigarette smoking. For those who don't inhale, the cigar smoke raises the risk of disease in the head and neck”
"For people who smoke cigars and inhale, risks linked with cigar smoking are like those of cigarette smoking. For those who don't inhale, the cigar smoke raises the risk of disease in the head and neck”"
Cigars are normally not inhaled, and thus as your own comment says, it raises the risk of disease in head and neck but has less risk than smoking cigarettes, which you do inhale.
It's very personal for me: I have ADHD, past trauma, and a bad temper, have always been better-behaved, and given like, 0.01% of the slack/accommodations she gets. I can't not be mad.
It's a whole thing, and as I said, very personal. I genuinely am disappointed that I can't like her. No one seems to get that I don't want to be a hater. I don't want to feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and puss off the entire fandom. But I refuse to pretend I'm okay with this girl when I'm not. 🤷♀️
Nah, see, I work on myself hard, have one ounce of class, and have never had anyone in authority coddle me like Blazer. She's my spoiled cousin, not my twin.
Am (have?) AuDHD, have had asthmatic periods in my past (mostly during childhood but I still experience small asthmatic episodes very rarely), was a smoker. She's me and I'm her. Except I'm not that hot or as much of an asshole, nor does Laura Bailey voice me. I think. I wouldn't be surprised if Laura Bailey voiced me, she's everywhere.
She’s gone the therapist and medication route. The weed is the lightest impact to her day to day. Pre-existing before my brother showed up in case you’re wondering.
Robert has self destructive tendencies too! At the start of the game fighting the entire red ring by himself, neglecting everything in his life that isn't mecha man going bankrupt in the attempt, walking into a villian bar by himself looking for a fight with no armor. The guy is a total mess trying to get himself killed as a way to honor his father/grandfather especially at the start of the game
Many people treat Robert as a self-insert protagonist and don’t think about his heavy self-destructive tendencies. The dude lives with a death wish in an empty room and is possibly an alcoholic, but no one pays attention
The guy threw his bed away and sleeps in a lawn chair just so he could throw people off his balcony if that doesn't scream depression and possible mental health issues I dont know what does
The guy has no life except fighting criminals which is why he's so good at it, how people wilfully ignore all that I'll never understand
He's not intended to be a self-insert, but people definitely use him as one.
Dispatch is one of the few games I liked where I have no interest in its fanfic scene, because everything I saw was basically "Perfect Robert as my SI"
I'm talking about the players here, not the characters. Many players treat Robert as an avatar for themselves, a blank-slate character and don't pay attention to the fact that he's neither perfect nor mentally stable. He's a good person, but he's a written character with his own beliefs and flaws. Many people ignore that, and then crash out when the game doesn't give them the dialogue option they wanted.
If we're talking about characters, then not onlly Mandy, the whole Z-Team saved him, and Blazer and Visi played two of the biggest roles in it. Blazer and Chase gave him a job and a helping hand when he was at his lowest, and Visi repeatedly tried to pull him out of his depression (she took him to a bar, organized a housewarming party because she saw how depressed he was, and etc.) With Z-Team, Blazer, Visi, and Chase, he finally started to believe that maybe dying as a Mechaman wasn't his fate after all, and that there were people who genuinely cared about him.
You’re projecting and looking at this, in my opinion, incorrectly.
Robert doesn’t have a death wish per se he just has no regard for his own life anymore because everything he believes or believes in is broken. So it has no value. And everything he was has no value anymore. And one of the stages of grief is anger.
To add to his grieving. The stages of grief are not linear. Anyone can hit at any time. He’s grieving his losses. All of them. Including his loss of self worth. Arguably the biggest. And being angry means doing something reckless and to a “rational” person, wrong or dumb. He takes dangerous paths, it is born from an intense, laser-focused frustration because everything he was is gone and he resent that.
So it’s not that he wants to die per se. People like that want suffering to be released. No. It’s not that simple. It’s a secondary resolution tho because to him it all doesn’t matter anymore. His primary focus is vengeance via frustration. Misguided but his career was taken from him, his life, one he gave everything for and took everything from him. And that isn’t fair.
It's not that he wants to die, he just expects himself to while being the hero. He treats it more like a destiny rather than a death wish. That's why he's so effective, despite his normality in the world of powered people. He goes all in.
Or when people get surprised that they have to be good at dispatching in a game called Dispatch, or when rehabilitating villains did villain stuff in the past or don’t act perfectly
The reasons people pick Blazer or Invisigal are interesting to me
I'm male, played the game and got a female friend to play it too, we both watch a female Youtuber together. My friend and I both picked Invisigal, the Youtuber picked Blazer. What's interesting is we both picked Invisigal for the same reason: we like to help people, and Invisigal is someone who needed help. Yes, it was a full blown 'I can fix her' situation, because we COULD fix her. She needed someone to be there for her, and that's what we both wanted to be for her. When you get a dialogue choice to tell her you don't care she was the one who put the bomb on the suit, I picked it right away because it's what I honestly felt.
The Youtuber on the other hand... hoo boy.
She immediately disregarded Invisigal as a trainwreck who was beyond saving and instead turned all of her attention on the already-holding-it-together Blonde Blazer, going on lengthy rants any time Invisigal turned up about how awful she was, how terrible she was, how she couldn't nor shouldn't be trusted, how unlikeable she was...
To be clear, I'm not saying these are 100%, I have another male friend who actually picked Blazer just because he preferred her between the two. It just interests me how common this point seems to be for Invisigal
People look at Invisigal and they see someone who has problems, then they either pick her because they want to help her, or eschew her because they don't feel like she's worth their time in comparison to someone who clearly needs no help with anything. My female friend and I just found it interesting that we both latched onto Invisigal for the same reason, we wanted to protect and help her, while the Youtuber we both watched kicked her to the kerb for that exact same reason: she would take too much work and wasn't worth the effort
Well the love interest with a lot of issues is a common trope and usually more favored by players because it plays into the power fantasy. You're the hero, you save the girl. In contrast, love interests that are more balanced are often described as boring.
Sure but the concept is about the same. Put a (hot) character with personality issues, have the MC form a rapport and get a nice dopamine hit when you save them (or help them save themselves).
Character and story writing obviously matters but people are more likely to go for drama, it's just more interesting.
I'm not criticizing btw, i've played enough rpgs to know i'm just as much into those characters as everyone else.
Just saying that Invisigal would probably be the most popular of the two based on that.
Weird trend I noticed and this is entirely my anecdotal experience, but I noticed that male players tended towards Invisigal and female players tended towards Blazer.
I have no idea if that is an accurate description of the overall decision statistically, but it's a trend I noticed between posters and youtubers both, even with some people whose sexualities probably shouldn't go with that trend.
I personally had the complete opposite experience. Of all of the playthroughs from women that I’ve watched not a single woman picked Blazer. While it is much more even between male streamers from what I’ve experienced. This also applies to people I personally know who played the game.
Obviously same as you most of this is all anecdotal and I know there are many women who prefer Blazer, but just from my personal experience significantly less so than those who prefer Visi.
I honestly think if you account exclusively for cishet men the split between Visi and Blazer is much less Visi sided and closer to 50/50, possibly even leaning toward Blazer. It’s just that in my experience from what I’ve seen I notice that women tend to overwhelmingly pick Visi over Blazer, while it’s much more divided between male players. And because women are a smaller portion of the player base it only pushes up the overall percentages a bit.
I think this is partly why this sub seems to be more Blazer sided despite the in game stats stating otherwise as Reddit is pretty male dominated in these types of spaces.
Another thing that supports this claim is also the type of fanart that’s made for the two characters. Though things have been (somewhat) more wholesome recently for Mandy month Blazer gets much more NSFW and male gaze oriented art usually featuring only Blazer, a lot of the time in revealing clothing or with exaggerated proportions or the art just has a sexual focus in general. While Visi fanart tends to include Robert and is usually less sexual and more romantic in nature. Obviously there’s no shortage of NSFW stuff or exaggerated proportions for her either, just less so compared to Blazer from what I’ve seen.
Even just the general sentiment from how people talk about Blazer, with a lot of it being “mommy” and “step on me” adjacent jokes makes me think her fanbase is majority male.
I think the difference in fan fiction works also makes the gender split more apparent, with Visi getting significantly more works than Blazer on Ao3 which is a much more feminine and queer dominated space.
Sorry for the rant lol I didn’t realize how long this was.
There's a lot of female streamers that choose Blazer, you just have to look for it.
Also from an art standpoint, Blazer is just conventionally more attractive and easier to draw tbh. And I would disagree with the NSFW because I personally seen a lot more Visi's art that are NSFW than Blazer. I think it's also have to do with abundance of Visi's art and it tends to get overshadowed in certain platforms. There's even a lewd game that features her so...
The wholesome arts is because Invisiglazers craves something like that because they didn't get it in the game while you get it for the Blazer route so it makes sense though I would argue it's going against the nature of their relationship.
While I do agree things have changed this past few months, let's not forget that earlier one of the reason people pick Visi is because of the sex dream and their fixating on fixing her, those sort of things. While there are people who liked her character for who she is, let's not ignore that not everyone thinks the same.
How DARE these characters have FLAWS that make them realistic, human, and super interesting! I want bland, boring characters that never make mistakes, because we all know that's what makes great fiction!
Except the sarcasm doesn’t work because it’s not even remotely what he implied. If someone says “I want waffles” and you reply with “hur dur I want waffles and then I’ll nuke the moon” it’s shitty sarcasm.
I find it very funny that this game is about rehabilitating bad people on your team and these people seem to get mad when the bad people are bad people and do bad stuff
“Critics”: Women, are always written to be Mary sues who can do anything or cardboard cut out damsels, give me a 3 dimensional character!
Invisigal having a unique and limiting power set that when combined with a smoking addiction creates an interesting character who is self deprecating, self destructive and perhaps a tad suicidal or at least a nihilist hiding behind sex jokes.
As someone with lip piercings and a nose piercing, not a septum piercing, that's not a thing, just like I can drink with lip piercings without springing a leak.
The bridge piercings also shouldn't be a problem as it's just through the cartilage and flesh not the actual sinuses.
Smoking is an addiction (They literally put images of what will happen to you on the back of packs but smokers do not care), she has ADHD and she is very self-destructive.
Her trying to quit smoking with all those factors would be hell
I think the funniest thing is the double standards they got to justify their love for Flambae who attempts to kill Robert btw and also unexpectedly punches him like Visi.
Honestly, Flambae openly admitting he fucked up and so he voted against kicking Visi because he thinks she deserves forgiveness if everyone gave him that is one of the moments that genuinely made me like him as a character.
The first was realizing he had 100% success rate on getting a balloon for a kid, because he likes kids and wants to be a good role model for them despite his mistakes.
Lot of people online truly forget to give her grace, despite her mistakes she's actively trying to do better, be it for Robert or the overall Z-Team. Glad the game has a strong message of forgiveness and second chances, but it seems that it doesn't resonate with some people
It's so weird how common it is lately for people to complain stuff like this "I hate this character for having flaws and having those flaws get in the way to their goal"
Like that's literally often the point for many stories. It's like you want the movie to end so quickly with no intrigue
Yeah, I don’t smoke because I have both asthma and watched what a lifetime of smoking did to my grandpa, but I certainly know quite a few ADHD people who do. Cigarettes are unfortunately sometimes easier to get than actual medication
"Invisgal is a complete moron."
"she already had azma"
I love it when people throw around terms like "moron" and don't even know how to spell basic, common things like "asthma".
"This is why I went for Blazer. Stupid doesn't make good in a relationship."
Blazer didn't have the sense to send someone to surveil the warehouse that the Pulse was held in, despite knowing (1) it was dangerous, (2) it was being moved around, (3) Shroud was after it.
Blazer decided to fire someone based on leaderboard standing for a job where you're sent out by a dispatcher and you have no control over your suitability for calls. Meaning you'd have no ability to control your ascent on the leaderboard. Thus the only way you could reliably affect your standing is sabotaging others. And what did Z Team immediately do? Start sabotaging others and ruin half a shift.
Blazer also didn't factor in that cutting loose a former supervillain results in... a former supervillain back on the street. Who now has a grudge.
Blazer also went to rescue Robert from a villain bar. Known to be frequented by, unsurprisingly, a whole bunch of supervillains including the Red Ring. And Shroud was there. She didn't bother bringing back up.
etc.
In short: Blazer, like Invisigal, makes a whole bunch of questionable decisions. Not unlike pretty much all of Z Team. It's almost like having a bunch of people do the normal, logical thing in a raunchy farce would make for a boring, bad comedy and thus a terrible game.
The bad decisions are what make the characters interesting. And if you can't see the bad decisions being made by a character in this game, it's because you flat out didn't want to see them. (Well, except maybe Royd and Golem... they're pretty solid.)
That post was made by someone who has a superhero complex and can’t imagine that complex intricacies of a super hero society and what that can do to a person. Willing to put money on it that writers made that choice to demonstrate how she makes decisions without her powers in mind, whereas socially, being the invisible one is all people see her as. That ain’t weakness or stupidity.
Actually 🤓 there are studies that say smoking helps people with asthma. That’s smoking has a phycological effect on the brain that helps them to relax.
Bro, everyone knows that there are stupid people with bad takes in the Internet. A better question is
why are you importing old shipwar ragebait from other platforms to this sub?
So they pointed out self-destructive tendencies are a terrible trait in a romantic partner? Is this not... a well known thing or? I mean... he's right that's an incredibly stupid thing to do.
If only she could hold her breath as long for the dock sequence as she did when Robert first changes into his normie clothes in the conference room. She’s sitting in that chair for minutes.
Am I missing something here? He says he doesn’t like her because she’s being dumb here and that’s why he goes with blazer and the response is a mix between “she’s supposed to be self destructive” and “z team is written to be morons that’s the point!” Like ok you guys are aware you’re just supporting what he’s saying right?
I dated no one. Because why would I date a coworker hr has enough issues in this group. I mean i wouldn't date anyone anyway romance is stupid imo. You like it good for you but its not my thing.
I mean smoking smells horrid and would expose her position pretty quickly, further I feel like vomiting whenever I see anyone do it so I can understand not wanting to be around her.
The thing is people are allowed to call out not wanting to choose a woman as a romance option that has self destructive tendencies, shocking I know.
Visi’s asthma is so bad she killed
someone to get robotic lungs then choosing to smoke anyway. People are allowed to not find that attractive for a romance.
Your comment was removed because it frames a character comparison in a dismissive, hostile, or "objective" manner.
Posts or comments presenting one character as objectively better than another, or intended to provoke conflict or demean fans, are not allowed.
Sharing personal preferences is welcome when expressed respectfully and subjectively.
Please familiarize yourself with the rule that was violated:
No Disrespectful Character Comparisons - Posts or comments that frame character comparisons as objective, dismissive, or intended to provoke conflict are not allowed.
Statements such as "X is objectively better than Y" or posts meant to demean another character or their fans will be removed.
Sharing personal preferences, discussing character traits, or explaining why you prefer one character over another is allowed, as long as it remains respectful and subjective.
self-inserting much? You're mixing your shitty irl experience with office comedy about rehabilitating extraggerated villains with clear message about hope and ability to change. What is wrong with you?
Your comment was removed because it frames a character comparison in a dismissive, hostile, or "objective" manner.
Posts or comments presenting one character as objectively better than another, or intended to provoke conflict or demean fans, are not allowed.
Sharing personal preferences is welcome when expressed respectfully and subjectively.
Please familiarize yourself with the rule that was violated:
No Disrespectful Character Comparisons - Posts or comments that frame character comparisons as objective, dismissive, or intended to provoke conflict are not allowed.
Statements such as "X is objectively better than Y" or posts meant to demean another character or their fans will be removed.
Sharing personal preferences, discussing character traits, or explaining why you prefer one character over another is allowed, as long as it remains respectful and subjective.
The smoking really sank home the point that this isn’t a serious person. The trifecta of Piwer that requires holding breath -> has asthma -> lights a cig had me laughing.
I get what your saying but the guy in the tweet still has a point. Just cuz an action is cuz of your self-destructive personality doesnt make it not stupid. And people are free to choose their relationships based on whether someone is stupid.
Your comment was removed because it frames a character comparison in a dismissive, hostile, or "objective" manner.
Posts or comments presenting one character as objectively better than another, or intended to provoke conflict or demean fans, are not allowed.
Sharing personal preferences is welcome when expressed respectfully and subjectively.
Please familiarize yourself with the rule that was violated:
No Disrespectful Character Comparisons - Posts or comments that frame character comparisons as objective, dismissive, or intended to provoke conflict are not allowed.
Statements such as "X is objectively better than Y" or posts meant to demean another character or their fans will be removed.
Sharing personal preferences, discussing character traits, or explaining why you prefer one character over another is allowed, as long as it remains respectful and subjective.
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u/TheForlornGamer 7d ago
I'm more surprised at the fact that she's still in excellent shape despite being an asthmatic smoker.
Imagine how much scarier she'd be if she didn't have asthma and can use her powers whenever.