Dispatch is full of irreverent humor, over-the-top violent antics, and a fair bit of edgy crudeness. Overall, fans have mostly been along for the ride with some of the more boundary-pushing humor. Imagine my surprise when the moment that actually ended up bothering Dispatch players was one of its quieter ones in the game’s penultimate episode.
I didn’t see it in my plathrough, so when I heard people calling a scene in AdHoc’s narrative adventure sexual assault, I was genuinely surprised. Content warning for sexual assault and spoilers ahead.
In Dispatch’s seventh episode, “Retrospective,” the player decides to either defend or fire Invisigal, the ex-villain with invisibility powers who has been a bit of a loose cannon since protagonist Robert Robertson III became her boss at the beginning of the game. In the previous episode, she went on her own to a dangerous job, putting herself and others at risk. The rest of the reformed villains in the Z-team hold a meeting and decide they don’t want her around anymore. The player is then given the option to agree or defend her. She will temporarily leave the team regardless of what you choose, but whether or not you defend her is noted as she heads to her locker room one last time.
Here, Invisigal and Robert have a pretty devastating heart-to-heart where she confesses that she was once part of the same villainous organization that took Robert out of his hero duties and put him behind a desk. You can forgive her, but either way, she turns invisible and starts to leave. For me, Invisigal left without another word. I guess I’d been hard enough on her throughout the game that she wasn’t harboring any feelings for my version of Robert.
However, if you’ve maybe entertained her romance route in any capacity, Invisigal suddenly pushes Robert against the lockers and kisses him. You can lean into this act or try to get her to stop, and if you do the latter, she doesn’t immediately stop trying to force the kiss.
There’s a lot to unpack here. This kiss is a scene of dramatic, potentially romantic tension, and as a moment that conveys Invisigal’s desperation for any kind of connection with anyone, not even specifically Robert, it is effective. She explains that she’s always felt like people were suspicious of her because of her invisibility, and all she really wanted when joining the Z-Team was for someone to look at her like she could be a hero.
However, even within that context, this is a pretty clear-cut case of sexual assault, as she kisses Robert without his consent, he can’t even see her until it’s already started, and even if you try to lean out of it, she keeps going. That’s more than enough to make some players uncomfortable with the scene, even if it has a narrative grounding.
The relationship between Robert and Invisigal is already a loaded romance because he is supposed to be her boss and mentor, so this scene has added a whole new messy layer to it that isn’t sitting well with some players.
The semantics of what you want to call Invisigal’s actions are one side of the issue, but the nuance of what this scene is trying to convey does, unfortunately, get wrapped up in a lot of fandom debates about perceived “favoritism” that tend to infect games that have romantic options. When a character can make advances on you, even if you’re not interested, it tends to get written off as the game “forcing” a specific relationship on you. Which, like, I can understand that to some degree, as someone who had to swat women away like flies for two Mass Effect games until it let you be gay in Mass Effect 3
But characters’ motivations and feelings are not just built around the whims of the player. Dispatch earns Invisigal having (potentially unrequited) feelings for Robert regardless of whether you entertain them or not. She expresses her lack of belief in herself throughout the game, and Robert doing his job as her mentor, could very easily snowball into a different kind of attachment. This moment is an expression of the lonely woman she is, and even if you’re uncomfortable with the subject matter, it’s not a moral failing of Dispatch for portraying it.
I will admit, Dispatch does tend to gloss over some of the obvious HR violations in its workplace comedy, such as the devil lady Malevola groping Robert on a few occasions with no consequences in what it clearly views as a comedic moment. But even so, I think reading this scene as some kind of glorification of sexual assault is, at best, a misreading, at worst, a hostile one that ignores the context in which this moment happens.
Invisigal is not portrayed as a golden standard partner. She’s a messy, broken person, and it’s perfectly okay to not jive with her. But if stories can’t portray those flaws without being thrown in the trash, we’re just backsliding into something puritanical and sanitized. Dispatch is a lot of things, but it’s not uncritically examining its cast of ex-villains by showing them do bad things.