Dispatch, AdHoc’s superhero workplace comedy (also known as “Twilight for dudes”), has two love interests for protagonist Robert Robertson III. Blonde Blazer is the more standup superhero, while Invisigal is the angsty ex-villain. They contrast each other pretty well, and which relationship players choose can change a fair bit of the game. However, regardless of which lady you woo, Invisigal has substantially more screentime and interactions than Blonde Blazer. However, AdHoc claims this wasn’t a matter of the studio favoring her.
In fandoms where shipping and romance are a central point of community conflict, the perception that some options are being given special treatment can breed a lot of resentment. Having lived through the height of the Mass Effect trilogy’s heyday, I vividly remember the way that Liara fans had to fight for their lives every time BioWare gave the Asari biotic more dialogue or a sex scene with higher production values than those some other potential love interests got. So I’m not surprised to see that Dispatch has some of the same tension around it.
Speaking to Mothership, AdHoc co-founder Nick Herman says the screentime discrepancy between the two wasn’t meant to “elevate one character over another,” it was just a natural result of the story the team was telling. It’s important to note that Blonde Blazer is not part of Robert’s team of superheroes, so Invisigal gets more face time with Robert just by the nature of the game’s core structure. As a dispatchee, she takes part in missions, and her arc is reactive to how she’s treated by Robert as an employee. Blazer, meanwhile, checks in from time to time, but is less involved in the moment-to-moment.
Herman says that one scene in which either Blazer or Invisigal dances with Robert at a party, and which seems to center Invisigal’s unrequited feelings as a friction point regardless of which relationship the player is pursuing, says more about who these characters are than it does about AdHoc having a preference for the reformed villain.
“We make acting choices for these digital puppets that are true to who we think they are. Invisigal is someone who, if she saw someone she was pining after dancing with someone else, she would be upset and you’d see it on her face,” Herman said. “Blonde Blazer, by that point in the story, has kind of already made peace with how things are going. She’s not going to smash a glass or get into a confrontation. She’s accepted it. It’s not developer bias or a writing choice to elevate one character over another—it’s us trying to stay true to who they are.”
Fans have also leveraged accusations of “favoritism” over a late-game scene in which Invisigal can force a kiss on Robert while obscuring herself from his vision. As I argued at the time, this scene really captures Invisigal’s character and the loneliness she expresses to Robert (without condoning the way in which she does so), but some fans read it as Dispatch “forcing” the character on them despite them trying to avoid the relationship. Obviously the specifics of that scene are thorny and worth unpacking, but the fact that some players interpreted this scene as the game expressing some sort of preference for Invisigal feels like a misreading. Character development doesn’t always have to exist specifically in service of the player, and this moment with Invisigal goes far deeper than a ship war.
Asked if Ad Hoc intended to make Invisigal a kind of secondary protagonist or if it just happened organically, Herman told Mothership, “There was no plan to make Invisigal a secondary protagonist. In Season One, the story is really about Robert seeking his own redemption and helping this team turn over a new leaf—prove to the world that they can change. She’s directly in line with all of that.”
Of course, his mention there that what we’ve gotten of Dispatch so far is “Season One” certainly implies there could be more to come, and that perhaps future episodes will continue to evolve the game’s use of perspective and more overtly frame Invisigal as the secondary protagonist. However, no concrete information about a second season has been released just yet.
