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That is absolute garbage. I had a pretty similar home life growing up, one parent not there, the other one an abusive ass, and neither of my 2 brothers were around to help me get through things. To this day I have high levels of anxiety, chronic depression, and find it almost impossible to talk to new people in a non-professional setting. None of that means anything. I can still be a good person after all of those things. Saying someone had a bad life is an excuse to make others' lives worse is the worst justification possible. It isn't an excuse to go on a drug binge, either, especially when you have friends who are trying to help you overcome the addiction. Just because Brad tried to be a better person, it doesn't excuse the fact he became just like Marty.
I think my own life is most of the reason I dislike Brad so much. I hate to agree with someone who potentially molested a child, but Sticky was right when he said falling down and giving in to the depression isn't right. You need to hold yourself higher than the things that caused you pain, you need to show them that they were wrong and that you can survive. But in the end, Brad didn't so that. He gave in to his own sadness and desperately tried to wring a tiny bit of fulfillment out of his life by basically imprisoning a girl he knew nothing about. Even if he wasn't violent, he was still hurting both Buddy and his 3 friends. The fact that Rick and Sticky had to basically run away with her, and that she trusted them more than Brad, just proves that those 3 weren't being treated much better than she was.
And in regards to the orphans, the player didn't do it on purpose. We, as players watching from a 2d perspective, couldn't tell a bucket of water apart from a bucket of oil. Brad, on the otherhand, can look inside. Did he look inside? Probably not? Even if he hadn't though, the water was more than likely just to douse the match, the entire bucket wasn't going to get used up putting that out. Even if it had been water Brad would have wasted their entire supply of clean water. If he had looked inside the bucket? Well, you can probably see why I don't value him very much.
Sorry, I didn't want to offend you. However, not all people react to stimuli the same way; some people say life is hard but beautiful and keep living until the very end, but others... even if they have problems that could be solved with some help, sadly, they choose easy exits like drugs, or in the worst case, they kill themselves. Now, Sticky said he clicked with Brad because both of them had terrible parents, but when Brad fell down, Sticky kept his chin up. Sure, we don't really know what Sticky did to Buddy, and the heavy abuse/rape/molestation implications makes some of us hate Sticky. This scenario, a world in the brink of extinction, which can be saved by the last girl, is horribly depressing and sad. Yes, the Rando Army is the most powerful group in Olathe, and even when Rando is noble (your first meeting with him indicates that he probably is the nicest man in this decaying world), some of his men think he's too soft and would probably organize themselves to kill Rando and get Buddy for their own sick purposes.
With this, I'm trying to say that Brad dealt with the circumstantes his own way, hell-bent on protecting Buddy, but becoming the monster he hated in the first place. In fact, Brad could be afraid of any kind of sexual approach; some characters constantly mock him and tell him he 'isn't man enough to do what's need to be done', but in his mind, sex only leads to death, if Marty abusing/raping Lisa is any indication.
Once again, I'm not trying to defend Brad; my dad is a great man, but my grandpa beat him in a more or less daily basis. When I met my grandpa for the first time, he was kind to me and looked like a decent fellow. See? Not all people deal with the same thing in the same way, and some of them change once they see the error of their ways.
So- don't just charge blindly ahead, stop to consider the ramifications. Got it.
There's a real sense of ambiguity throughout the game, and Brad's front and center.
He also killed Marty, his father who is the ONLY person left in Olathe who actually understands Brad's problems. And I think the worst he'd ever done is burning the orphans, I know it was meant to be a comedic moment but if you think about it... These were the only children you see the in game besides the flashbacks and the prologue... It's kinda dark if you think about it... These could be the ONLY children left in Olathe.
Exactly! The biggest question asked at the end of Lisa is "did I do the right thing?" Whether or not Brad is a good person isn't an easy question to answer. It isn't supposed to be. On the one hand, there's no excuse for the things he does and the people he kills. On the other hand, he is a victim of abuse, low parental involvement, and drug addiction. He's not a monster: he's sick. Both sides are perfectly valid. Lisa is compelling because, like all great works of fiction, of its ambiguity.
I don't see it as ambiguous at all. By the end of the game, he is literally a monster. As I said before, being a victim doesn't excuse victimizing others. And unless Brad was actually mentally ill, the drug addiction was still on him. He decided to cope with his life by taking the easy way out, which turned him into a shell, and when the normal pain killers apparently weren't enough and he switched to Joy, he should have realized he had a problem. Stopping an addiction isn't easy, but better than going deeper and deeper until the drug has more control over your body than your mind does.
All of the decisions Brad makes are -hard- decision that make it really difficult to tell whether he's a douchebag or not. Why can't we talk about how great of a person he is for sacrificing a limb to save someone he barely knows? What about that?
The ending is the saddest part of the game because his intense realization of how much he ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up let Joy just overcome him and start to make him go insane. He ends up killing one of the most important people in his life and may not even realize it until his (sort of) dying breath.
Brad is not a bad person. I don't think he is in the slightest. I think that he could have taken a different approach but it isn't his fault his drug of choice happened to be a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ super-soldier test.
And that's what I don't get about all of these rationalizations being given here. As far as I'm concerned, Rando, Buddy, and maybe Terry are the only people in the entire game who are even slightly redeemable as valuable human beings, period. You all keep calling Brad "flawed" instead of "deranged" like is actually the case 90% of the time. Drug-fueled killing binges are not "flaws". People with relatable problems can still be bad people. Protagonist is not synonymous with good person. Queen Roger probably stuggled with homosexuality in a decidedly heteronormative world, both before and after the Flash, and he's still a murderous psycho. Geese has a funny name and talks in rhyme like a cartoon character, but he's still a serial killer. So why does having a drug addiction and an abusive father excuse Brad's constant abusive and violent behavior toward severyone else okay?
And another thing, not all situations are binary. There are solutions that can have multiple implications. Just like when we as players come to different reasons for making this choice, Brad didn't have to do this as a completely selfless act. One of the most common things I hear about this choice is that it makes you weigh the importance of back-up and support over the importance of one character's abilities. The exact same thought process can apply to Brad. He could have been weighing the importance of having someone like Rage or Nern backing him up against the importance of one of his arms. We can see that after he loses it, he can still do the majority of his karate attacks, as few of the useful ones rely on upper body strength, and he doesn't need any arms to do his fireball, which is by far the most useful thing he has. Despite the alternative being one-sidedly selfish, the decision to sacrifice your arm can still be construed as either an act of selfless kindness or an act of indirect self-preservation. I still think, no matter what, giving up the arm was the right thing to do, but all intentions aside, one good deed does not a hero make. Why can't we talk about how a flesh wound for Buddy is apparently 3 times more important than losing one of his own limbs? And how the life of Terry or Percy or Olan is equivalent to losing your inventory? Brad and Buzzo don't see the party members as friends, they see them as tools. Valuable tols, but tools.
Well when you put it that way, of course it makes sense! Putting the lives of dozens upon dozens of people underneath preserving one girl's virginity is common sense!
If this were a real world setting, and an actual girl from actual Colorado were abducted from her father's home for breeding purposes, then the men responsible for that are probably undeserving of life. But this isn't a real scenario, it's post-end of the world. Buddy isn't just a girl anymore to these people, she's the last hope for all humans to survive. I doubt she's actually even the last woman alive, but to the people in this story she is the sole possibility for the entire human race's existence to continue. Of course she's not prepared for it, and of course the life she's trying to choose would be painful and probably mentally scarring to an ungodly degree, but what's the alternative? If Brad had taken her to Rando in the first place, the entire situation of everyone trying to get to her at once would have been almost certainly avoided. Brad was unstoppable by himself, imagine what he and Rando could have done working together to protect her. Even if she had been forced into something before she was ready, you can probably bet Rando would have not only ended the person who did it faster than you can sneeze, but, unlike Brad, he could have comforted Buddy and helped her recover from it. I feel like a broken record at this point, but Brad is the sole reason she's been forced into this position in the first place. The only good end for this story I can imagine at this point is that she'll be able to grow up in safety until she's either ready to take matters into her own hands or finds all the safe men and women Buzzo and Yado are probably keeping away from everyone else.
...except the thing is, every time Brad needs to make a decision that really, really would make anything better, he more or less fillibusters the player, and does what he does.
In the end, Brad is a Failure, and the game is about a the miserable journey of broken guy going around breaking other things. Speculations about what drives him, either personally or via external factors, is moot.
(p.s.: a couple of the Kickstarter backers I know initially turned their nose up at this, since out of all the decisions you can make, the biggest ones that could potentially change the story are made for you. But they, in the end, liked the ending of the game, and accept that LISA is a very story-driven game, and that no matter what decisions you make for him, Brad is Brad to the end.)