Don't hate the player...

We're at the point in the development cycle where there's not going to be any previews to show yet and it's all writing and coding.  So this is the time when I like to do posts introducing the important characters and themes for the story.

Melanie is one of those secondary characters that's kept popping up here and there, but not really been the focus of anything as of yet.  As a key member of the fourth year Popular Girls, the de-facto queens of the schoolyard, she is one of the most powerful and influential girls in school.  She'll be getting a bigger role in Avenging Angel, and already has her own face set to replace the default image that she's been using up to now.  Let's go over what we know about her.

Brains and Beauty

We can see just from looking at her character model that Melanie is highly attractive, and this can sometimes be enough on its own to make one a popular girl, but this is far from the whole story.  She is exceptionally cunning and devious, even for a popular girl, using her natural attributes and social confidence to extract useful information from every interaction.  We see this in Chapter 4 when her main interests in Missy are finding out why she is being punished and admonishing Malia for once again helping her without asking for anything in return.  If Malia is the heart of the popular girls, Melanie is the head.  

We also see during this interaction that Abbie, knowing more about her sister's friends than most, doesn't trust the cold and calculating Melanie as far as she could throw her.

Samira's Crush

Melanie is also more than willing to use sex as a weapon.  If you played Down with the Bad Girls! in the last part of the story, you saw that Samira's entire reason for helping Isabelle was because she could arrange for her to go on a date with Melanie.  Later, in Chapter 4, we see that while Melanie honoured her end, she was uninterested in pursuing the relationship further.  It's left to the imagination how far she let Samira go with her on the date itself...

The Bad Girls Bitch

Poppy's first victory, and her opening salvo against the Popular Girls involved framing Melanie by planting alcohol in her bag.  Players on the subby route, after finding out how dangerous this mistress of manipulation can be, must be praying she never finds out about it!  Regardless, even if you chose to betray Poppy at the end, and the popular girls won in part 1, Melanie still suffered this, and is furious and personally incentivised to strike back at the bad girls.  The only way she was spared it is if you were not Poppy's slave.

Long live the Queens

It is because of girls like Melanie that the popular girls maintain their dominant position at Saint Alancia's.  Every girl in school is forced to deal with them in some way, either trading information or favours, or at least staying on their good side.

Girls who end up owing them too many favours become de-facto slaves - lackeys doing their will to pay off a debt that just seems to keep growing; but at least they, unlike Poppy are not interested in sexually humiliating those they dominate. (Only their enemies.)

They do expect everyone to respect them though.  Those that err are made into an example.  This will be Poppy's fate if she fails to defeat them.

Have a great weekend!
Trinian