Don't Tell Me How I Feel
Mar. 26th, 2025 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elyusionObviously this is all just my opinion, before I start.
If you're going to make a romantic visual novel and you want to give the player character a developed backstory or preexisting friend group with set dynamics and everything and stuff, you might as well draw them a face too. It's irritating when a game only asks for a name (and maybe pronouns), so I think "oh, this game is going to be real self-inserty," and then the self-insert isn't anything close to a blank slate.
And what's more annoying than that is when these self-insert-wannabe games say that I'm blushing or my heart is skipping a beat or whatever when it isn't. I'm not doing that. I wouldn't do that in this situation. If you want me to do that, you should just write something that makes me do it, not command me to do so. If you want strong control of how the MC acts and reacts without irking me, give them a look and default name. Then I can cheer them on from the sidelines and maybe even start to see what they see myself, instead of feeling like I'm being forced to fall in love.
Examples: I am not much like Ceres from Virche Evermore*, but I enjoyed watching her love stories and took a liking to all the guys myself via how she moves in the world and how they treat her. Unexpected, since I wasn't expecting to like them all. And maybe this isn't a fair comparison because it isn't a VN, but the Angeliques from Angelique don't talk much in their games. The love interests talk to her, and often her reaction isn't shown, neither with dialogue nor a portrait. It doesn't need to be shown because she is me, and I know how I reacted to what I just read/heard in real life. The game doesn't need to say that my heart skipped multiple beats and I'm red as a tomato, because it gives me little moments to reveal and lets them speak for themselves.
*Unrelated to this entry, but related to the last one: this game is a good example of what I was talking about in my last entry, because I saw a LOT of people say the game is too depressing for too long, while I didn't think it was quite depressing enough.
If you're going to make a romantic visual novel and you want to give the player character a developed backstory or preexisting friend group with set dynamics and everything and stuff, you might as well draw them a face too. It's irritating when a game only asks for a name (and maybe pronouns), so I think "oh, this game is going to be real self-inserty," and then the self-insert isn't anything close to a blank slate.
And what's more annoying than that is when these self-insert-wannabe games say that I'm blushing or my heart is skipping a beat or whatever when it isn't. I'm not doing that. I wouldn't do that in this situation. If you want me to do that, you should just write something that makes me do it, not command me to do so. If you want strong control of how the MC acts and reacts without irking me, give them a look and default name. Then I can cheer them on from the sidelines and maybe even start to see what they see myself, instead of feeling like I'm being forced to fall in love.
Examples: I am not much like Ceres from Virche Evermore*, but I enjoyed watching her love stories and took a liking to all the guys myself via how she moves in the world and how they treat her. Unexpected, since I wasn't expecting to like them all. And maybe this isn't a fair comparison because it isn't a VN, but the Angeliques from Angelique don't talk much in their games. The love interests talk to her, and often her reaction isn't shown, neither with dialogue nor a portrait. It doesn't need to be shown because she is me, and I know how I reacted to what I just read/heard in real life. The game doesn't need to say that my heart skipped multiple beats and I'm red as a tomato, because it gives me little moments to reveal and lets them speak for themselves.
*Unrelated to this entry, but related to the last one: this game is a good example of what I was talking about in my last entry, because I saw a LOT of people say the game is too depressing for too long, while I didn't think it was quite depressing enough.
