Snow’s folklore history is also steeped in horrid abuse, physical and sexual, by her seven dwarfs. Even Snow White, Fabletown’s bureaucratic representative, is victimized by Crane, who stalks Snow with lecherous intent. No one is free from a history of suffering in The Wolf Among Us. She too succumbs to the Crooked Man’s promise for answers that the Fabletown government cannot provide, but she does so out of desperate circumstances. Likewise, her husband, who enters trance-like violent rages, is nearly an allegory for an abusive husband, one she loves but also fears. Beauty, who appears financially secure and in a loving relationship, secretly works a job to satisfy an imposing and crushing debt. Look deeper still and even those relatively well-off women of Fables are nonetheless sufferers in their own right. Faith is a victim twofold, first of her murderer and second of structures that left this battered and beaten woman (literally after her encounter with the Woodsman), to go unprotected and unnoticed. The episode’s titular character is a not-so-veiled allusion to the lack of faith in the systems designed to protect Fabletown citizens. It is the meeting and subsequent death of Faith, a Fabletown prostitute, that kicks off the hard-boiled detective story in the first place.
There are many victims in The Wolf Among Us, the vast majority of them women, and it is their suffering, largely at the hands of men, that drives the narrative forward. The game does, however, send a clear message about focusing on the victim above all else. Issues of culpability and guilt abound, and the game offers no easy answers to the persistent dilemma. Victimhood is a recurring theme throughout the game, consistently used to undermine Bigby’s efforts to solve a murder case far more complex than he first imagined. This dynamic, between the sufferers (in this case the Fabletown citizens themselves) and the institutions of power, runs through the entire five-episode arc of The Wolf Among Us. When your government abandoned you, left you poor and helpless, sniveling on the street corners, I was there to look out for you.” He wants those he most exploited to respect him as a savior, a hero of the people. Speaking in his own defense at his murder trial during one The Wolf Among Us’s final scenes, the Crooked Man, the kingpin of a Fabletown mob of sorts, questions the perspectives of the jurors/townsfolk: “You all act like I’m some kind of tyrant. Warning: This article contains spoilers for all episodes of The Wolf Among Us.
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