Being doted on like that like you’re made of glass is a large part of that feeling. They treat you as a fragile little newborn as though one of the first things you can do in the story isn’t incinerating a group of people with ease.
Let me reframe it, I think. You’re supposed to be ridiculously overpowered (in the larger context of the world) but it never shows it because you’re constantly pitted against people with parity or who enormously overshadow you. You get like one time you punch some schmuck’s head off right after that beginning trial and that’s all you get. You never feel particularly powerful because you so rarely get the opportunity to actually see it. I think that’s probably where a lot of the trouble is coming from.
Well if they’re meant to be frustrating, then it’s only logical people would feel frustrated and then express it in the forum, no?
I don’t disagree about people being fucking weird about everything in that thread, just that this sounds like a reasonable expectation to me. The vibes of that thread are rancid at the best of times, but I am fairly confident where most of the people in there normally hang out and the horrific nature of it is an expected result of that.
I saw it more as being about all of them being potential ROs and thus ‘don’t want my love hurt’ than about you being fragile. The tone of Soulstone is VERY overdramatic romance focused after all IMO.
It’s rarely MC-like to go around bullying the weak, even if you’re evil you’d mostly end up looking like you have nothing better to do with your life so obviously you mostly end up punching peers and above, everyone else without suicidal impulse wouldn’t fight you to begin with. That’s just the world being internally consistent IMO.
There’s a difference between being frustrated by a defeat in-story as an in-universe motivation to progress and find new stuff and taking that frustration out on the fact that the author doesn’t let you break the setting over your knee in chapter 1.
SSW is very much “you’re a worthless useless peice of shit” theme. The game (not other characters, the GAME) tells you this, while at the same time somehow making everything bad that has ever happened your fault, at the end when part of your Self gets eaten by the parasitical stone, which the game tells you is the only way you won’t be a worthless useless piece of shit.
I think (over)protectiveness reads very differently to different people, and whether people find it nice, neutral, or absolutely aggravating, has a lot to do with their own tastes and experiences in life.
One reader’s ‘they treat me like I’m useless/worthless’ is another reader’s ‘I’m actually being taken care of / protected for once’.
And that goes for a lot of the other stuff I see people bring up a lot about specific games or ROs.
Art, including stories and games, are very subjective experiences, and it’s important to remember that just because it reads in a specific very negative way to you, doesn’t mean that that is the One True Reading of the work.
I really don’t like it when games force you to choose a weakness. Why can’t you be an intelligent, social person who also is athletic? (I mean, it’s almost always a hit to your physical stats, intelligence stats or charisma stats). This is fine for people that want to RP a weakness, but don’t force it on me. I don’t need to be overpowered, but for the love of everything, can I please be a well-rounded protagonist? Especially if I’m royal, we are supposed to be the best at everything, ffs don’t make us nerf a stat and be an incompetent royal because we cannot be a well-rounded character.
Yes this is also a hatred of min/maxing the more I think about it, but both things are true. The forced weakness railroads you into min/maxing. It’s just not for me, I can never fully make the choices I want to as a character, because I have to be one-note and always answering my max stat if I don’t want a massive fail, instead of being a complex human, capable of many reactions.
That’s a good point. I recently played a WIP (College Tennis: Origin Story) that heavily used stats in a really unique way. Since the MC is a tennis player, you pick your tennis “style” which gives you a couple strengths and suggested lesser strengths and usual weakness for that style. You aren’t locked into any of those choices.
You have chances to raise any stat. In addition, choices during games while sometimes playing to MC’s strengths, also give you the opportunity to try different skills or combinations. Sometimes your best skills aren’t on there at all or are paired with a weaker skill. It really felt like I had to think about what to do rather than always choose my best skills. I really liked how they incorporated skills in the game.
Also a really good game that I hope sees publication. I didn’t expect to like a sports game that much, but I did!
I actually do like that particular mechanic. If I’m not able to choose the height of my MC, which is still the case for most COG and HG series and standalones, I like to at least be able to make my MC physically weak. And I do really like MCs and protagonists who, while having clear strengths, also have at least one weakness. When it comes to fiction one of the most boring things for me are generally the good at everything-kind of protagonists, so I think it’s good that many HGs and COGs have MC with clear weaknesses.
What I do dislike, however, is when HGs and COGs increases and/or decreases non-personality stats of your MC without you having a real input in that increase or decrease, but just because the HG or COG in question decided that a particular action should increase or decrease that stat. I much prefer a kind of xp system where the players/readers decides what kind of stat to increase and what kind of build to make instead of having a particular build forced upon them. One of the things that I really like about IF like this is that it allows you to choose what kind of character you want to play and (usually) make the protagonist that you’d like, including ones you don’t see too often in non–interactive fiction and when COGs and HGs takes away quite a bit to all of the opportunity to do so, I find it generally quite frustrating(there might be some exceptions to me for the HGs and COGs where you’re supposed to play a specific already known fictional character, such as Robin Hood or Oedipus,).
Especially since all athletic people I knew at school were all three (or at least got decent enough grades, it’s not like we ran IQ tests). Maybe less good at the free time department though.
A element, if it can considered that, that I dislike is when a WIP or IF is obviously meant to be a novel, but the author forces it to be a IF just to get a wider audience. I don’t wanna list any names, but oof, sometimes it’s just obvious.
As someone who has felt this feeling and voiced this concern, I’m going to say this is a touchy topic with some history here.
It’s more constructive to talk about specific elements that make you feel this way when reading such works versus making assumptions about the author’s intent.
Yeah, that’s usually a minimum requirement here in the states. If your grades get too low, they kick you off. The idea being that the time you spend on sports may be costing you academically. Lots of sports also require strategy too, so you need some smarts.
On the subject, all the older high school focused media that focuses on clique based rivalry has always baffled me personally. My high school wasn’t like that at all. I was a choir kid, and like half the members were on the sports teams too. They would consult to prevent scheduling conflicts. There were jocks in the anime club.
I assume this is a cultural evolution thing since I know a lot of people older than me had this sort of social stratification to a greater extent. And academic culture obviously varies from country to country (from what I’ve heard, being in multiple clubs is really hard in Japanese schools since they’re all more involved).
That always baffles me when I hear it - sports teams have no connection to schools here (they’re just junior teams for the adult teams), I doubt they would even have right to know your grades if you don’t want to tell.
We do have those here for younger kids, they’re called Little League. They don’t ask to see any of that stuff. There’re also community centers like the YMCA. Sports for teens (and maybe middle school, not sure) are mostly school run though, and colleges scout them for their sports teams, and the big sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NHL etc.) can recruit from either, I think, depending on the sport.
A lot of people really don’t like this system since it means schools spend way too much time and money on their sports teams. You ever hear about things like pep rallies or spirit week? They’re sports related (rallies can include other clubs too though). They want as many students to care as possible. We did not (we liked the rallies because they cut classes short though, sometimes they can be kinda fun). We had to get up at 6:00 AM to be bussed to school by 8-ish to start the day because the powers that be wanted the sports teams to have earlier practice times.
I think overall, opinions on how well or poorly an academic setting is depicted in fiction depends on personal experience. Schools can vary wildly depending on their location and goals.
I’d say this depends on the school. At some schools, some of the students on the sports teams do very poorly academically, but the teachers are encouraged to ensure they’re not failing so that they’re still allowed to play. Or they’re put into specific classes that are intended to be low effort and an easy A to keep them academically eligible. Mainly for American Football, but yeah, I saw both while I was in high school.
My entire school hated pep rallies. Like, a bunch of people climbed the fence on the football field and got chased by security to try to get out of one.
I’m fairly young (high school for me was [well, would’ve been if I hadn’t dropped out] the mid 2010s) and my school totally had cliques. I was part of the goth/queers and old friends were the nerds, was acquaintances with a few popular kids, there were unambiguous jocks (mostly track and some football guys), and so on. Very much existed for my time which wasn’t all that long ago. Wondering if part of that is due to being in the South (if not really a small town like one would assume), since like we’re usually behind on trends I think.
Been reading some official published CoG stories, forgot how much I don’t like how it feels like every story requires at least three different subplots going on. It’s overwhelming. And it’s not like a legit video game where those subplots/side quests can be done in conjunction with everything else, gotten to at your own pace. Due to the limited number of times you get to choose between them (often choosing between them and also RO development, which makes it even less desirable), you can never get more than like one or maybe two to completion, and that’ll come at the cost of either character interactions or sometimes main story stuff.
Additionally I forgot how incredibly stat heavy most of them are. I’m so used to either HG or WIPs where stats are largely for flavor and don’t lock you out of things. One story I had tried had like four or five different back to back stat checks I couldn’t pass due to my build in the first or second chapter, well before I had time to even get my character in the place I wanted. Not helping matters is how it’s often extremely unintuitive which stats are being checked, like is this a Charisma check or a Lying check or a Open personality check or a Bold personality check? No idea but there’s three different choices on this one page that all could be literally any of these.
Basically I’m just remembering why I prefer HG/WIPs/itch.
Yeah, that’s got to be the most upsetting mechanic in these, for me at least. The constant stat checks that not only bomb your stats if failed, but can also permanently lock you out of content…
The most ridiculous example I can recall is the IF that would literally kill ROs if you failed a single stat check. It’s been a few years since I tried to read that one so I don’t remember the name anymore, but I remember ROs constantly dying because of stat checks. I didn’t finish it, it just felt unplayable without code-digging or mods. That was definitely the most infuriating, un-fun mechanic I’ve seen in these.
Even when it’s really mostly inconsequential it’s still annoying how like it’s always rubbed in your face how much of a failure you are for not passing. Like, sorry I built for fighting and you’ve thrown a dozen various charisma checks at me, the stat I always dump just like real life, don’t need to mock how much I failed at talking with someone and emphasize how I fumbled and stumbled through the conversation while everyone looked on in pity, I get it and expected it.
I actually think stats are too unimportant sometimes for lesser things and then suddenly important for big choices. Like wish stat checks could be solved auto by stats or manually. And then you get a boost accordingly. Along with that I hate when we must designate a dump stat. I’m perfect thank you very much.
I do think sometimes mechanics like that can be arbitrary because there’s pressure to include any kind of stat check.