My hypothesis is that Steve Purcell had the impression that his first sketches had too few elements that suggested a game about pirates. So he made a sketch filled with stereotypical images, starting with a bunch of random pirates who never appear in the game or in the code wheel.
This sketch had a lot less pirate-related elements, although it suggested an exotic environment:
A couple of people within the comments section of Ron’s blog were doubting my (correct) claim that Ron once went on record as stating that he viewed Guybrush and Elaine’s relationship more as that of brother and sister (as I pointed out; that did not necessarily mean that they are literally siblings - it could just as easily have been a metaphorical view of their interpersonal relationship) and that Ron said that they would never have gotten married, had he made a third Monkey Island game back in the 90s.
Thankfully, Ron jumped in to confirm his previous words and expand upon them…
“The way I always thought of the Guybrush, Elaine, LeChuck triangle was that they were kids from the neighborhood playing together. Guybrush was 8 and Elaine and LeChuck were 11. Guybrush was the younger kid following the older kids around trying to be like them. They were not related. None of this is real or ties into the ending of MI2, it’s just the way I thought about the characters. It’s why Guybrush and Elaine would never get married.”
It’s a fascinating insight into the thought process behind how Ron wrote for those characters in the first two Monkey Island games. I can definitely see that metaphorical relationship in those games.
This is the first time that Ron has been explicit on the reason why he didn’t like seeing Guybrush and Elaine married. I didn’t expect to get more details on this topic, and I think that this is quite a rare event.
Old and well-known lines, like a random insult-fighting pirate saying “Pirate lingo! It’s how everybody talked back then. Come on Guybrush, play along” now can be explained in more than one way.
Now, I’m curious to know why he approached the creation of the main characters of a pirate game as if they were kids and not adults.
As I said above the G/E/L triangle was just a framework for thinking about the relationships. It’s not part of the story or had anything to do with the ending of MI2
Basically he always thought of them as having a relationship similar to those of kids, but only later he decided to actually make them kids.
