Thread:Killshotarcher/@comment-32712012-20180724030152/@comment-32712012-20180724123959

These are interesting points, and this is definitely a good argument for Badeline being the game's main antagonist. However, if for no other reason than as a thought experiment, since the game has a wide range of interpretations, I'd like to put forward a case for Badeline not being the game's main antagonist.

A recurring theme that I see in the game is that, while Madeline herself is usually capable of handling all her problems and is usually pulled down by Badeline, the "twisted defense mechanism", Badeline's called a defense mechanism for a reason: there are occasions when Madeline goes too far, is too confident, and actually can't handle what she's facing, or if she can, she'd have had a lot less trouble if she'd relied on Badeline.

Take Chapters 3 and 5 again as examples. In Chapter 3, she spends the entire night helping Mr. Oshiro, and he repeatedly refuses to acknowledge that she could have any rational reasons for wanting to leave; it's only when Badeline appears and breaks a hole through the ceiling that Madeline is even able to leave. In Chapter 5, when Madeline encounters the horrors in the Mirror Temple, while she initially blames Badeline, Badeline explains that she was just trying to protect Madeline by holding her back, and that none of this ever would have happened if Madeline had listened to her.

As I see it—at least by this theory—the breakthrough that Madeline discovers in Chapter 6 is that, for her, she actually needs Badeline to balance her out. Sure, Badeline overreacts frequently, but Madeline does too sometimes in the opposite direction; neither's perfect alone, and they can only work at full efficiency when they're working together. As such, I'd say that it's not 100% obvious that Badeline is the main antagonist, and so, while by some theories Badeline is definitely the main antagonist, since she's not the main antagonist by all interpretations, I'd like to use the recurring character phraseology, as I'm pretty sure that that's always going to hold.