Dean Smith

"Love is an invisible poison."

Dean Smith is a fictional character featured in the videogame Dry Drowning. He only appears in Chapter 2 and is the older brother of Eugene Smith.

## Psychological Profile:

Due to his shy and insecure personality Dean developed the habit of always keeping a gentle and accomodating attitude to conceal his frailness. Thanks to his good manners people usually have a good opinion of him, both at work and in private.

## Biography:

Ever since young age Dean has consistently shown promising skills in computer science, eventually graduating at the University of Nova Polemos. Cornelius Huber has always been the mentor he respected and looked up to the most, causing Dean to go to great lengths in order to be assigned under his wing after being successfully employed at Hephaestus Tech. He was eventually even chosen as his successor after the huge success gained by his videogame "Be a good citizen".

## Character Overview (spoilers):

Dean's natural propension to be an apparently selfless person of good will makes him quite the unconventional individual in an environment populated by social predators such as Nova Polemos. Unlike other characters like Freya Goldsoul, the toxic environment he grew up in didn't prompt him to develop an aggressive temper in order to fight back. His natural reflex was instead to adopt a submissive attitude aimed at avoiding unpleasant situations and people as much as possible. It's also worth noting that his morals are somewhat flexible as Dean shows little to no moral concern in regards to having manipulated millions of people with his videogame when Mordred confronts him the topic. This is possibly yet another strategy aimed at surviving in the most effortless way, something Dean ultimately values a lot due to his inability to deal with pressure (incidentally he is the only character who suffers a complete breakdown when confronted by Mordred in Living Nightmare mode).

Dean's submissive and elusive nature ultimately made it hard for him to express sincere feelings towards anyone but people he truly trusts, his accomodating manners being just a facade to conceal his actual contempt towards dishonest or heartless people. This also caused him to cling in an almost pathological fashion to the few people he genuinely respected and loved. The best examples of this are Cornelius Huber and Thalia Wells. The former was almost akin to a father, in that Dean depended on him for both mentorship and protection. The latter was instead the target of his repressed sexual pulsions and romantic feelings, feelings that eventually exploded after the removal of the main blocking obstacle. Since said obstacle happened to be none other than the other most important person in Dean's life, it is likely the emotional struggle associated with having falled in love with the fiancée of his mentor must have been massive.

His relationship with his brother is the most complex and contradictory: on the one hand he seems to show genuine affection towards him and strongly regrets how much Eugene treats him as an adversary rather than a relative. On the other one he can't remember having lived any positive experience with him ever since the two started competing for Huber's favor, ten years having passed since. Despite these problems the two had however kept living together, which was unlikely caused by financial problems since both were employed in the most powerful company of Nova Polemos. It can thus be safely concluded that the crisis they experience in Chapter 2 shatters an equilibrium that despite everything had still managed to survive up untill that point, in this sense causing for the first time an irreparable damage to their relationship as brothers (during his own breakdown Dean will even go as far as asking Mordred and Hera to kill Eugene, accusing him of being a maniac that would otherwise kill them all).

## Ultimate fate (spoilers):

Although player choice influences directly whether Dean survives or not the end of Chapter 2, he is doomed to meet a quite terrible fate regardless, ending up either framed for all the crimes committed in that chapter (and subsequently jailed) or killed by a reprogrammed version of Thalia Wells that acts on behalf of Eugene (the vengeful hand behind both of his grim endings). These two scenarios occur respectively as direct consequences of the BlackOut and WayOut endings that conclude Chapter 2.

## Trivia:

* The dolls scattered around Dean's house are a funeral rite of his own dedicated to Nova Polemos' lost pets: every time an animal goes missing, Dean will buy a doll to let its memory live on.
* Dean's pig like mask represents the depraved feelings he harbors for Thalia and is also a reference to the Aubrey Mask from Hotline miami. It also represents an animal that thrives in filth (in this sense Dean's passive acceptance of Nova Polemos' filth).