Originally Posted by Jaded X Gamer
And she fucking complains about how hard it is! You're letting chance decides who eats but then you go whine about what a hard job you got? Fuck you Lilly. Maybe people hate you because you suck at your job. I didn't even think about her rigging a lottery. If you tell Mark that Larry thinks you're dangerous, he says he wouldn't be surprised if Lilly was skimming food to give to Larry. (And he would know, the man is a huge gossip.) Maybe the lottery was how she was doing it.
My experience with Lilly was the opposite of yours. On my first playthrough I was pretty sympathetic towards her, even though I didn't always agree with her. Kenny's reaction to me not helping him kill Larry really put me off him for a while. I (just barely) let her back in the R.V. after what she did, reasoning Lee got a second chance, maybe she deserved one. And in the ends she steals the R.V. and strands six people to die. (Like she knew or cared if the train worked.) Not even looking the least bit sorry as she did so.
On subsequent playthroughs I've just found myself hating her more and more and at this point I'd say she's the character I hate most (barring outright villains like the St. Johns). Even though I said I pitied her in my last post in this thread, playing the game again has mostly eroded that and I really just think she was a shitty person at heart. Yeah her father is a useless asshole and his shitty parenting is probably responsible for a lot of Lilly's problems, but she's a fucking grown woman and she keeps insisting she's the damn leader. Well fucking lead already!
Being leader means taking responsibility, as in something goes wrong you're responsible. Lilly never takes responsibility for anything. From her father treating everyone like shit ("It's just his way!"), to running out of food ("Suddenly I'm a god damn nazi!"), to having no fucking plans on how to deal with bandits or dwindling supplies ("I just want a week where I don't have to deal with this!") Step up or step aside. It really shows she was just a paper pusher at the Airforce, she governs like an incompetent bureaucrat.
She's not even sorry for shooting Carley or Doug. Either Carley wasn't trustworthy (She was!) or it wasn't supposed to be Doug (Sorry he interrupted your surprise execution!) Either way she doesn’t really care. She only regrets it because it caused the whole group to turn on her, which she of course complains about ("I'm tied up like animal!") and then strands everyone because she knows they won't help her anymore.
Carley was right to called her a scared little girl. If anything she was being too nice, I’d call Lilly a dirty coward. She wants to be in charge so she can justify sending people out to do the dangerous work while she sits around somewhere safe. It’s probably why she’s so against leaving the Motor Inn or the Pharmacy initially, she might actually have to put herself at risk. Also probably why Ben is on watch in Episode 3, there’s actually people shooting back now. The only real time she attacks anyone is when their back is turned or she’s far enough away to not suffer a counter attack.
Maybe if she had any backbone she could have worked up the nerve to tell her asshole father to sit down and shut up in the meat locker before he gave himself another heart attack, like he had already did once before. Instead she just keeps meekly pleading with him in her most pathetic voice. Gotta love the one time she doesn’t switch to mega bitch mode is the one time it may have actually helped.
Anyways, enough about Lilly. I actually did feel sorry for the Stranger. Maybe because I was pretty much certain he was coming back for his station wagon. I mean the keys are in the ignition and the lights are still on, which means it couldn’t have been there for more than one night since that would run the batteries down. And the gas gauge is empty, they were out looking for gas probably.
He reminded me a lot of Jolene (whom I also felt bad for). Someone who was probably just a regular person before everything went bad and lost their fucking mind when all their loved ones died since it left them completely alone. I felt it really demonstrated just what such a horrible world would do to regular people, and how desperate it would make them.
You’re right about the Stranger being a hypocrite though. His whole rant against Lee is is just him projecting his own failures onto Lee. Trying to rationalize his family’s deaths as someone else’s fault since he won’t accept responsibility for it, as if Lee and his group would be the only people who would ever wrong him. Grasping at straws to try and make Lee unsuitable so he can feel justified into lying to Clementine and kidnapping her.
And yet I still felt incredibly sorry for him. Maybe because I’m a bleeding heart pansy so I keep sympathizing with him during the conversation and by the end he didn’t even sound mad anymore. He actually seemed to feel bad for Lee for a moment when I told him I was bitten. Then he started talking to his bowling bag and it was kinda obvious he was too far gone to help.
When he died I looked at his corpse for a short moment and whispered “I’m sorry”. Sorry we didn’t wait for him to come back to his car, maybe invite his family to come back to Motor Inn. Sorry he was just another person whom I couldn’t save. Sorry that we had to kill him since I couldn’t convince him to let go of his own bitter revenge. If felt tragic just because if one little thing had gone differently, he could have been another family living with our group, just trying to survive.
As for Ben, I’m pretty much on the same page as you. Could never really be angry with. He’s well meaning fuck-up, which I felt was probably a realistic depiction of a teenage band geek trapped in zombie apocalypse. Scared and clueless to what he should do. Like I said, he really needed a parental figure to guide him. Clementine had Lee to protect her and teach, Ben was pretty much left to fend for himself.
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