Honestly, I don’t think this is a problem with the PC, rather just how often the Mc’s strengths come up. Disregarding stats, the PC in that game does has powers. Powers that make them immune to all psychological supernatural effects. That’s a pretty substantial power. A bit niche at times, say if you’re fighting werewolves or vampires, but can be utilized a lot. Not only that, having super powered blood has so many routes that the story can potentially go down with growing or gaining power, or even the ability to suddenly make your teammates super soldiers, even by supernatural standards, is extremely badass, imo. It’s the buff/debuff caster in a raid boss, essentially.
Now, using that as an example simply because it’s popular and ties into the topic here, every PC has the potential to be a well written character that is part of the team, it’s just a matter of giving them the spotlight.
I 100% base my writing from my D&D background in the sense that, I want the entire cast to feel cool and valid and good at things, and most importantly, to give each of them their moment to shine. As far as I am aware, that succeeds on fixing 50% of the problem with ‘doormat MC’s’. The point of not giving them the ability to stand up for themselves, well… I went over that before in a different post. Disliked Elements, Mechanics, and Tropes - #4048 by ViIsBae
tl;dr - Giving the PC autonomy is a lot more work than having them along for the ride, and I don’t think a lot of people realize or appreciate just how much extra work it is. Because writing a thing, thinking to yourself, “There are about six different ways I can see someone reacting to this.” Then writing six completely different scenarios for that choice, which all might have extra individual branches of their own, with the knowledge that most people will only ever see one of those choices/paths is a big mental barrier to get over. Speaking from experience of writing 50k word updates and having the average word count per playthrough only go up by 8-10k, it can get absolutely exhausting.
So, while some people do this as a hobby and want to create those types of epic divergences, others do this as a hobby and just wanna write stuff that they have ideas about. Personally, I think they’re just two different kinds of IF’s. Granted, I do think that both total word count and average word count per playthrough should be expressed in descriptions of games for this reason, so people have a better idea of what kind of IF they’re purchasing, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Granted, I don’t find PC’s that take abuse being hurdled at them from every angle fun either, so again, I don’t think RO’s treating PC’s like garbage is a good trend either. BUT I think comparing IF’s to one another in situations like this is usually unhelpful as well. And by that I mean saying things like, “This one story did it so much better than this other story!” Because the reality most likely is, they did it differently. I would never compare (I haven’t read it myself only read about it) I:TFO’s PC agency to Wayhaven’s, because they’re just completely separate games. It’s like trying to compare the mechanics of Gears of War and The Last of Us because they both happen to fall under the umbrella of third person shooters. It’s just not really helpful at that point. I only bring this up because I feel like, unfortunately, it’s a trap I see a lot of people fall into when talking about this subject.
I think the best way to talk about stuff like this is as it was said before; isolating the causes and reasons for how author’s fall into this trap and expand outward from there in a focused manner.
Not that anyone has done the opposite in this thread so far, I just thought I’d bring up the cautionary point since it happens to peek it’s head out most of the time with this stuff.
Those are my thoughts on it, though. Very… very long, thoughts…