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titian-kestrel · 2 years

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Corine Myers Analysis (with a bit of comparison to Jake Rogers)

Heads up: this is a LONG analysis–in my Google docs, this is over 2100 words lol

So, after reading @naancypants really good Jake Rogers analysis (sidenote–I’ll probably make one, too at some point when I get the energy to write another long post), I was reminded of another often-overlooked evil genius character–Corine Myers. I thought I’d be fun to analyze Corine and also compare and contrast her with Jake.

So, Corine Myers. She’s got one of my favorite, most relatable, in a way, motivations out of any Nancy Drew culprits (technically, she has three motivations: find Poe’s manuscript, get the scholarship, and, at the very least subconsciously retaliate against her classmates). The game isn’t clear if she was planning on selling Poe’s manuscript or not (I have a feeling she would either keep it to herself or sell/give it to the school in order to increase her reputation with the faculty and garner some respect with her classmates, but she definitely wouldn’t, like, drop it on eBay). All three of her motivations tied nicely into each other–if she got rid of the competition to be valedictorian, she could retaliate against all of the people who treated her poorly, and the less people around, the easier it would be to find the manuscript.

It’s the scholarship and retaliation motivations that I really want to talk about. We’ve had (very boring) culprits whose motivations are “money,” but, like I said, I think Corine would be very selective with who she’d be willing to sell the manuscript to, and would probably only consider Waverly itself. But a culprit who’s also somewhat motivated by wanting scholarship money? I think that’s a unique twist on the cliche money motivation of other culprits (and is another game that once again shows how expensive college is). But even with this unique twist on the “greed” motivation, that’s not even her primary motivation, either. The following is an exchange between Nancy and Ned:

Nancy: I think she’s real bitter about how the kids here treat her, and is doing all this Black Cat stuff to get even with them.

Ned: What about being valedictorian?

Nancy: I think that’s just another reason she’s bitter. I think she thinks she’s got being valedictorian in the bag, and she resents being compared to kids she feels are clearly inferior to her.

Nancy is right. Corine is very proud of her intelligence. When Nancy asks if she got in on a legacy, Corine says, “I earned my way into this place. I was accepted because I was the most deserving applicant like ever.” And she makes it very clear that she thinks that she’s the only one who will actually get the spot of valedictorian, even if she isn’t as popular as Leela and Izzy. (Sidenote: Waverly’s faculty is absolutely terrible, but that is a post for another day). Becoming valedictorian would be amazing for her: she’d finally get respect, her political aspirations would benefit greatly from such an honor, and she’d be getting revenge on her classmates who treated her poorly (especially Izzy, who is equally as confident that she will become valedictorian). This leads right into her third motivation, which Nancy calls her “subconscious desire to retaliate against her classmates.”

This is where I think it’s interesting to compare and contrast Corine with the franchise’s other high school senior evil genius with a penchant for blackmailing people, Jake Rogers.

Corine was smarter than Jake, in my opinion. Even if it took astute observation to stalk/observe his classmates enough to discover their secrets and intelligence to leave around a bunch of clues nudging along whoever he hoped would solve his murder and/or bring his classmates to justice, Jake ended up biting off more than he could chew and paid with it for his life. He also directly went to people and blackmailed them, while Corine hid behind her threats, and her two blackmail victims didn’t even know it was her blackmailing her, since she never directly approached them and always used a different email to contact them (contrasted with Jake, who directly approached people to blackmail them and, in the Remastered version, literally gave the professional criminals he was trying to blackmail his name and phone number…bit stupid there, Jake). Jake’s also described throughout both versions of Secrets Can Kill as lazy (most likely primarily academically, since works enough at his job at Maxines in the Remastered version to avoid getting fired). Compare him to Corine, who is swamped with work but is determined to graduate at the top of her class, and is very confident that she’ll get the scholarship (though she does make you do her homework on one occasion, so I guess she was lazy in that one instance and that was definitely cheating, though if we reported all the cheating going on in the game all of the valedictorians save Leela and Mel would be out of the race). Corine also survives the game (though with a ruined academic career and not much of a future) while Jake gets himself tossed down some stairs. I guess both are pretty bad and not ideal but…I don’t feel too bad for getting her expelled, since by the end of the game, she’d tried to kill two innocent people and deeply traumatized another person.

Oh yeah, she tried to kill two of her classmates. While an argument could be made whether or not she was intending to kill Megan or not, since Megan says she’s been to the hospital several times on account of her allergies and eventually recovered, she was CERTAINLY trying to kill Nancy/get Nancy killed in the endgame. Even Jake didn’t go that far.

In a way, Corine is also a lesson regarding the potentially negative consequences of bullying, because as you play the game, it is impossible to not pity her. She’s a bit awkward and lacks a filter, which she hastily tries to cover up, and she openly admits to being insecure. It’s also just depressing when talking to her about Izzy and, conversely, Izzy about Corine, because Izzy was just horrible and, in my opinion, one of the cruelest non-culprits in the franchise. But…wow, the hatred Corine ended up having for her classmates was alarming, and, as sympathetic her motivation was, by the end of the game, her actions were beyond justifying.

Another contrast: Jake is described by Hal to be a bully. Conversely, Corine was obviously being bullied and, unlike Jake, was NOT excluding herself by choice. The nicest emotion characters have is ambivalence towards her. Mel and Rachel/Kim aren’t popular either, but they’re content with this, and thus are more respected by their classmates, unlike Corine. While Jake was a loner/outcast by choice, who didn’t seem to care that everyone hated him and was introverted to the point that in the Remastered version, his goal for the rest of his life was to literally move away from everyone and live in solitary luxury (sometimes I feel that, not gonna lie), Corine was very, very clearly lonely and wanted to belong, she wanted her reputation to improve, she wanted people to like her. But when she discovers through her research that the manuscript was hidden in the school, and that she REALLY wanted to find it and needed everyone gone in order to most efficiently do so, she realized this would be the perfect opportunity for revenge.

I don’t think we as a fandom recognize how twisted the things she did was, and how observant she must have been, and, like Jake, the technical accomplishments she’d have to do to carry out some of her sabotage (and she was planning on majoring in English, good on her for having some STEM knowledge, too, couldn’t relate…). She targeted people perfectly, and, while Megan’s allergies were and Danielle’s claustrophobia likely was common knowledge to everyone, she somehow (and I do mean somehow, since the game gives no explanation as to how she found out), discovered Rachel was, in fact, two different people. And she was patient, too–unlike Jake, who seemed to have immediately jumped into blackmail once he found out his classmates’ secrets, Corine discovered the twins’ secrets months before the start of the game, but then waited until she had something that the twins could do to her–be her backup, leave the notes, so that they could take the fall if something went wrong. Jake was kind of a chaotic evil since he didn’t seem to have a grand overall plan except “buy this island,” Corine’s blackmailing did tie into her grand scheme. She was more careful and methodical than he was.

And later, she successfully reformats Izzy’s hard drive to wipe away any trace of her essay. Maybe that’s common knowledge or easy to do or something, I wouldn’t know, I suck at tech-y stuff. But I certainly didn’t know how to do that as a high school senior. Though I think that’s more cruel than we realize, since, while Megan was rushed to a hospital but able to recover, Izzy had to watch a semesters worth of material get wiped away and be forced to realize that becoming the valedictorian was no longer possible. She likely couldn’t get any accommodations, since she wasn’t in the hospital like Megan. So…I doubt Izzy became valedictorian. (My personal headcanon is that Leela became valedictorian, but that’s a post for some other time, too).

Something that I think is interesting is that the people she targeted the most viciously–the twins, Danielle, and Megan–weren’t even her primary bullies, Izzy was. In fact, the twins were social outcasts themselves, and Megan hated Izzy, too. And don’t get me wrong, reformatting someone’s hard drive is a very malicious thing to do, as said above, but pales in comparison to trying to kill someone via spiking their food or taking advantage of someone’s fears to psychologically torture them. All of this was very opportunistic, and if you ask me, not necessarily an effort to target the people who had made her suffer the most, and was more of an effort to exercise control over people, and retaliate the social environment that had wronged her.

Corine has much more sympathetic motivations than Jake. While Jake’s ultimate goal was to buy an island and he was a bully himself, Corine was being bullied. I think part of us can all find something relatable in Corine if we’ve ever been mocked, excluded, or even bullied. And yet, by the end of the game, she completely lost her humanity and sunk to violent lows that, as I said, Jake never did. She tried to kill Megan and, at the end of the game, Nancy. I do believe that eventually, finding the manuscript while important to her, became less important, or at least, having control over the people that had treated her poorly, making them scared of her, rather than the other way around, and having their lives in their hands, became just as important, and why she was on a power high and willing to kill Nancy, who had treated her well throughout the game, in order to preserve her secrets. I feel like we don’t recognize how twisted the line, “You’re pretty smart. But are you smart enough to live to tell the tale? I don’t think so” is when it’s coming from a SEVENTEEN/EIGHTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL. Like Nancy/us are used to being threatened by middle-aged adults, but by a high school senior? Yikes.

Corine was proud of being the Black Cat; at the very beginning of the game, she’s the one who initially brings it up to Nancy. Now, she was bullying people, she had their lives, in Megan’s case, social and academic reputation, in Rachel and Kim’s case, and grades, in Izzy’s case, in her hands. And she would kill someone in order to keep that power and control over Waverly Academy. She’d find the manuscript, perhaps give it to the school, and destroy everyone else in order to become valedictorian, and show them exactly what she was capable of, despite the years of bullying and exclusion she’d suffered at their hands. But, like a lot of tragic villains, in my opinion, she had some morals–she never hurt Mel, who she considered to be the only person kind to her, her only true friend, since the plagiarism issue was likely orchestrated by Izzy, since there’s no indication Corine knew who Jacob was, and would have had little sway over him to frame Mel for plagiarism. And that kind of villain–one who does horrible, despicable things, but still has some sort of moral compass and feels like everyone around them deserves what’s happening to them, because they never did anything to help them when they needed it the most–that is a well-written villain.

Corine was an incredibly smart, calculated, cruel, yet tragic villain. She knew how to play her cards and should definitely be recognized as one of the best, most intelligent villains of the franchise.

#this is I love tumblr #wac #warnings at waverly academy #nancy drew #nancy drew games #nd games #her interactive #clue crew #corine myers

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