Bully 2

Thanks to Kotaku staff writer Zack Zwiezen for bringing this one up! I adored the original Bully (yes, yes, I’m sure it had some problematic elements) and so desperately want to see a sequel that I’m surprised I didn’t throw this one at Dall-E myself.

But okay. What do we have here? Well, it looks like more Bully in the same way that future Grand Theft Autos will look like, well, more Grand Theft Auto. We’d be running around a school campus causing all sorts of havoc. (Apropos of nothing, I am deeply sorry that my high school theater teacher had to sit through a cyber security meeting after, uh, someone broke into district admin accounts they weren’t supposed to.)

Dall-E mini pulls information from the internet to compose its images, and so naturally many of these sequels look like what came before (like most sequels do anyway). One thing that stands out to me here is the familiarity of the uniforms—and that’s where I think a hypothetical Bully 2 could actually work some plot magic.

I have my issues with Rockstar’s storytelling. At worst it ends up being horribly cruel to the women, with satire that often does the foolish thing of saying “well, both sides of the political debate are wrong” to end up with a big nothing-burger of a statement about contemporary political discourse. But despite its faults, I can’t deny that Rockstar often nails the pacing and character development. The hypothetical Bully 2 could package Jimmy’s return into a story about self-reflection and growing older, with the uniforms coming to represent something he has to outgrow if he doesn’t just want to become Grand Theft Auto V’s Trevor Philips in a few short years.