Yeah, I know they are little bit evil. Everyone knows that the secret ingredient in Joja Cola is a mixture of green slime (provided by Krobus) and kitten tears. Then again there isn't a Joja Bank that holds a mortgage on your farm. I think someone needs to make a mod that does that. Then you have to pay off they mortgage in even ballooning payments. Any other ideas on how to make Joja more evil?
Joja comes in the night. They spirit away your animals. They reap any ripe crops. They rifle through your bins. And then...they charge you $1k. RIP.
I like that. However I think it's a bit extreme. I don't think anyone would want to play the "Soylent JoJa mod" even if it had 20% more Charlton Heston and came in an easy to open compressed archive. An "A" for effort though!
Phoomph, you said, 'evil', not, 'mildly disagreeable'. Finefine. They cut advertising crop circles in your fields at night. You come out to find the Joja logo emblazoned across your cornfield. It's like the crop fairy but less useful.
EDIT: These two go hand in hand! Maybe after the first time they could just charge the $1k so they could protect you from themselves. More money, less work...I like it!
Honestly I figure the easiest way one could have helped make Joja more antagonistic would be to have them be more of this looming threat trying to creep in and choke-hold the entire community. As it stands, you have like their store which just prices things more expensive and them wanting to turn the community center into a warehouse. And while they are antagonizing Pierre's business and there's indication that folks are shopping their for better deals now...it's never really this sense of corporate takehold as it could be. Heck, for a while I felt a bit bad in the sense that after you get rid of Joja you have Shane unemployed and so he literally does nothing but stays at home before going to the bar. Like one thing one could have done could have been something like some of the events at the start are big "JOJA SPONSERED FALL FESTIVAL" where the first year it almost feels like a big advertisement and only through your farmer's actions and contributions are you able to make it so the festival is community owned. Or have various NPCs all struggling with some aspect of Joja. Perhaps Leah is getting an offer to sell some of her art to Joja for use but its like "I'll get good money, but then they will just take the statue and make plastic mold copies of it to mass produce it...which completely negates the pieces point" or Maru and Demetrius getting pressured to join Joja's science team but it requires them to basically go against their own research and lie on behalf of the company in that "oh yeah Joja's totally not causing troubles in the natural world with this project" Or having it be that you have to help Willy with a clean-up project due to Joja pollution thus unlocking prime fishing spots.
See, I like this, because the honest truth is that Joja isn't evil, it's capitalism. It's nothing you don't see from actual large corporations every day, and find yourself making those little compromises too so that you can buy groceries at 2 a.m. or pay 15% less for a knockoff import. That's not evil in itself, it's just a creeping tide, the death of a thousand cuts. The people who work for Joja may be totally innocent, even nice-- Morris might be a delightful fellow when you get him away from his sales quotas and the regional manager looming over his shoulder (who, in turn, is being coerced by his own sales department, who answer to a corporate headquarters... and so on). So an artist like Leah sells them some art for an ad. They offer to slap their name on a local festival in exchange for helping to sponsor it. They have a couple of-- oops-- accidents with their waste. Hey, all part of the cost of doing business, right? But nobody in Joja sits up at night, gloating before a fire, twirling their moustaches and chortling, 'Now I have you at my mercy, me proud beauty!' And Leah, or Lewis, or Demetrius may make that compromise (and feel a disquiet in their bones all the while), or maybe they won't, but either way the company will go on. Joja is just a company out to make a profit. If it was Pierre Mart, and Joja were a local mom & pop, wouldn't the balance be the same?
I'm pretty sure someone is going to write a fanfic AU of Pierre and Joja reversal with Abigail and Caroline complaining about Pierre spending too much time with his company than his family...which ends up being a slightly more amplified version of canon...
And kindly old Mrs. Joja, baking cookies for all the neighborhood children (Which is to say, Jas and Vincent, so it's not that many cookies) when she's not dusting the shelves of her tiny little local green grocers store, while her nice nephew Morris looks after the counter.
Better than my version of Joja, which squandered their employees Christmas bonuses, all because they wanted to build a JojaCannon, which fires terminated employees into the sun, built a boobytrap in which Abigail got injured by...
Y..yes.. JojaMart is not evil! Not at all! Embrace Them! D..Did I do Ok? I said what you told me to.. OH GOD! NO! DON"T! .....................
Joja's Witnesses. They wake you up during the night and drains your stamina. "Have you heard of our lord and saviour, Mr. Joja...?"
I once wrote a little fic where the Joja route wasn't really all that bad. Morris ends up reaping the consequences of short-sighted penny wise and pound foolish business practices, and the Farmer ends up using Joja as his distributor as a name brand for his all organic green business model yuppie treats.
