Samantha Allen writes about gender, sexuality and videoRunescape games. She writes regularly for RS3 Gold the feminist gaming blog Border House. Her work has also appeared on Jacobin, Salon, Paste, Kotaku, Kinsey Confidential and in Adult Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @CousinDangereux. The Moral of The Wolf Among Us: Cynical or Pragmatic?. Last week Paste published critic Jed Pressgrove's review of the fifth and final episode of The Wolf Among Us, Telltale's adaptation of DC/Vertigo's Fables comic, in which Pressgrove decried the Runescape game's cynicism. Luke Winkie offers the following response.By their very definition, fables exist to educate the public. They provide life lessons that go back to the beginning of time: don't lie, cheat, or steal; beauty is three-dimensional; build your houses out of bricks not hay; slow and steady wins the race. In the ultimate moments of episode five of The Wolf Among Us, when the Crooked Man was counting the ways I had failed Fabletown in a last-ditch effort to save his life, the only dialogue option that made sense to get the public back on my side was a simple, empty, we will do better. The Wolf Among Us is a game of in-betweens. City hall is corrupt and the citizens are selfish. You're forced to either victimize the pigs or the street cretins. Sometimes the only thing that makes sense is lighting up a cigarette. The Crooked Man is a definitive bad dude manipulative, power-hungry, and sociopathic. So it speaks to the dubious conception of justice you've administered that he can stand before you, couched in all his malevolence, and make a compelling argument that you're the real evil. I tore his head off. I wanted him to stop talking, I was tired of being disrespected and tired of everyone telling me I was coming up short. The rest of Fabletown wordlessly looked on. It didn't feel like winning.It left a bad taste in my mouth for a while. The Wolf Among Us bludgeons you with your failures. Your attempts to do right are minimized by the collective cynicism of the people you're serving, and your weaknesses? When you're too quick to violence or too bound to bureaucracy? Those are magnified, inescapable. You don't finish The Wolf Among Us with any glimmer of triumph, you're standing out in the rain apathetically watching one of your friends get carted out of town. The faint love interest you had is now wrapped up in endless paperwork. Maybe you smoke another cigarette.