Oh! Thanks! I am enjoying the one. I will have to wait for the other then.
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I dunno if anyone else feels the same but… romance games? Especially some Heart’s Choice? They often have this very peculiar way of always being too forward and accessible.
I pick a straight man, everyone’s all over the character. I pick gay woman, everyone’s all over the character. First, it gets kinda sad to not ‘fight’ for affection but merely ‘pick’ who of your always-agreeable suitors would get your hand.
Second, when all others characters are into your MC, picking one often forces me to be rude\dismissive of others to not pick their romance route accidentally, or they just can’t take a hint and it becomes a clown fiesta of me trying to romance one character and being forced into ‘friendly’ scenes with ALL OTHER POSSIBLE RO where I have to suffer them just to say ‘no, friends only’ or refuse their advances.
The idea is not bad, but so often execution gets very lacking.
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Because many (most?) romance stories/games are written as wish-fulfillment material, so it makes sense to have your ROs fall head over heels for you. It’s that fantasy of being effortlessly desired pretty much just for existing - without having to work for it.
Personally, when I play these games, I don’t treat them very seriously. It’s just a fun wish-fulfillment ride. I usually try to romance everyone at once for as long as I can, just because I can 
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Eh, sure, but IMO if you do romance game do the romance game.
Write in a roll-in-a-hay character who’s not serious, write the drama queen who won’t romance you until you do grand gestures to win her over, write the heartbroken who’ll have to be slowly doted on and will not romance you if you have a side-hoe. There are so many different and interesting ways to write a romance and all the flavors of people types, yet they are so unexplored.
I like the ‘ice queen with a hidden soft side’ and you can’t believe how hard it is to find actual ice queens, for example.
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It’s not like I disagree. But what you’re asking for goes beyond the realm of simple wish-fulfillment, which is the reason why a lot of people consume romantic media. It requires the player to actually work for the relationship, and possibly fail at securing one if they don’t understand what makes their RO tick. It’s not a bad idea by itself. It’s a great idea! But certain types of media - power fantasy, romance - are built on wish-fulfillment because that’s what a lot of people consuming them are looking for. So it’s no surprise that different takes are somewhat rare, but maybe more will appear overtime?
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I know, it’s just weird to find better ‘romance’ in gamebooks like 'Defeat the Necromancer" vs devs that explicitly are making romance game.
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It’s not weird at all.
When I started writing my current WIP, I put ‘will not be focused on romance’ in bold letters right in the intro post. And I explained my reasoning in a later post, which I’ll just quote because I feel it explains this pretty well:
hidden to not clog the thread
It has to do with something I noticed when editing an early draft of this story, and thinking back on my previous writing.
Basically when writing a character as a “designated RO”, for me at least, it is easier to fall into writing them as a trope or stereotype. They need to look a certain way, behave a certain way, etc etc and in my case, this led to severely stilted writing with reactions that made sense for the character’s “type”, but not in the context of the situation they`re in (re: Ember smirking all the damn time in the early draft).
Therefore, I decided I won’t think of any character as a “RO”, but just a character. And I want to try writing relationships as something based on getting to know each other and surviving stuff together rather than flirting. So, yeah, there’ll be romance. But it wont be in-your-face, hence I wrote its not a focus.
tl;dr: If you label your game as ‘romance’, your readers might develop certain expectations; not labeling as such allows you greater freedom.
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I feel like that logic can be extended to power fantasies as well. The stories I remember for making me feel truly powerful all featured some sort of counterbalance, some moments of failure or clear limitations that reminded me what power actually means, and what it’s like to go without it. But doing that leaves the author at risk of losing some of the less-than-patient readers and being left with reviews like
I’m 42 seconds in and there are still characters who don’t worship the ground I walk on. Also the stat checks are freaking impossible, there should be a way for me to win the wrestling competition despite being a pacifist bookworm with an hourglass figure. Worst game ever, 0/10.
And that’s how you end up with “power fantasy” being a borderline derogatory term, associated with the most immediately gratifying trash out there. It’s kinda unfair to the concept, since most games (IF or otherwise) contain some level of power fantasy. It’s just that the good ones tend to wait a minute or two before shoving the fantasy in your mouth like you’re a horse being fed sugar cubes.
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Power fantasy shouldn’t mean the same as ‘you’ll never suffer or be forced to make an effort’, yeah. Though I struggle to think about any game like that that wasn’t filled with microtransactions, lmao.
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Yeah, power fantasy or not, I’m strongly in the camp of never wanting to have to ‘work’ and jump through hoops to impress a fictional character. I just do not care enough. It’s also not really what ‘romance’ means to me personally. This gamification of character/player relationships is really hard to pull off and it’s interesting to see how new IF writers are finding their own ways to do that. I think the best I’ve seen it done is in RPGs with fun character companion quest lines though, but that’s because adventuring & experiencing a storyline alongside companions is also fun in itself.
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I hate it when the devs/author decides to rename days and months. Especially if the new names are really similar to the original names like morndas vs monday, and/or they keep a 7 day week and a 12 month year anyway. It’s just so unnecessary.
Only once have I ever encountered a setting where I felt the decision to rename days and months actually added anything of worth to the setting, and that was Exalted.
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I don’t mind it if it’s just for flavour, but I agree it’s generally unnecessary and if the author keeps referring to a fictional calendar all the time it can get annoying. I mean, to this day I have to sing the song in my head to remember the order of the months and you expect me to learn a whole ass fictional calendar? tut tut Not gonna happen. 
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I agree. It can be fun worldbuilding if it’s in an actual calendar view, or talked about in a lore section, or in some character’s speech, or otherwise somewhere where it’s obvious what it means (or that the character comes from another culture), but not if the reader has to actually remember it. (I liked the way it was used in one Sandman story. It told what was happening on every day of the week the story was about, mentioning the names of the weekdays. You could decipher them - fairly easily, I’d say - but you also didn’t really need to, because the main information from them was “okay, then next day this”, not what day it actually was.)
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I have used it (not in an IF, because the idea of me coding, let alone successfully branching a story is HILARIOUS) to set up background information for a character. If used appropriately, a strange calendar can be a nice bit of background information to include to inform a character (and the audience) just how far from they know the character or group is; which can then become shorthand for how strange they find everything and how strange everyone around finds them. But you have to be careful and use it with a light hand. No one really wants to have “this place is unique, look they have their own calendar” throw in their face every few pages because the author is trying to make a point that the setting is the same but different. It’s a tool of utility, and should be used judiciously, and I’m not sure most hobbyist writers understand how to tell when it moves from appropriate use to overuse.
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I disagree tbh. If your setting is a complete fantasy without any say, Roman Empires or Christianities, the calendar will be a glaring incongruene if it’s not changed. Nothing like an elf coming out and talking about “August” like that’s a culturally relevant thing.
(Assuming a Gregorian analogue is used though, there should be an explanation of what equals what easily accesible)
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I mean, if there’s a Roman analogue you could just have a Julius and Augustus.
It does also depend on what mythology exists here though. If this fantasy is like D&D where the various Pagan gods are present, that’s one thing but English day names are gonna be a bit odd if Roman and Norse mythology doesn’t exist.
Admittedly, it’s a fool’s errand to try and exclude every word that’s a reference to something that doesn’t exist in fantasy land. You really just need to stick to stuff you can manage that non-pedants would actually notice. That list seems to expand a lot as time goes on but it’s a lot easier to get away with say, having gauze be called gauze than having someone use Jesus’s name as a curse.
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One meta example is that sometimes a creator will get an absurd amount of hate and harassment from awful fans over a bad creative decision and you need to condemn that obviously, nothing warrants that. But it just so happens that it WAS a legitimately bad creative decision, extremely bad in fact, sometimes bad in a way that couldn’t NOT have made people angry even if the response is horrible.
Then the whole issue becomes radio-active. Like, what do you even say about it? Doesn’t feel right to criticize the decision when people responded like this. But like, it doesn’t make it any easier to enjoy the story after it. Everyone’s talking about something that really bothers them and you feel the same way but other people say that it’s bad to criticize it because the criticism is tainted with this. And then some people who DID enjoy it (fine on its own) deflect even good faith criticism as fan entitlement. Like so much as implying the writer made a bad call is entitled now. I can’t say I don’t get where they’re coming from but it’s still scummy and disingenuous. You can condemn terrible behavior without acting like there’s no objection to be had.
Saw it happen with Sasha’s death in AOT. Anyone who harassed the author or the killer’s VA over that is a worthless scumbag but that doesn’t mean I endorse that creative decision. I couldn’t think of a defense for that decision from an artistic standpoint if you held a gun to my head.
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I have seen this happen with quite a few things and my thought on those situations are the same.
Condemn the bad actors (the people harassing I mean) but that should not mean complete shutdown of actual criticism. If it was just one or the other then nothing would be able to be criticized as sadly, death threats and terrible harassment is sent to almost everyone even if it’s not like a decision a creator made. Heck, it can even be a thing that one person just didn’t like and they will send threats or harassment which is the sad reality.
Sorry for rambling, but it’s a thing I notice that happens a lot unfortunately and it really is just a messed up situation.
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In my work, Falrika the Alchemist, I basically renamed the names of the months and days based on their old Japanese names.
For example, January is called mutsuki (睦月), which means “month of harmony (among family and relatives)”, and thus I renamed it “Affectionmonth”. Tuesday is renamed “Fireday” (火曜日, kayoubi).
This is heavily justified, as my IF borrows heavily from anime, visual novels, and overall Japanese culture.
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This is an example of it adding something to the setting, and not just being a distraction like morndas instead of monday. When they’re that close to the real word, imo it also pulls too much attention to the fact that the characters shouldn’t be speaking English lol.
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