Falling in love with a bully sounds weird but kinda refreshing.
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Bullies, Villians, you name it.
swooon
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This sounds like I can be the petty person I’ve always known I can be so I’d love to jump on this ship. Possibly even let us name the characters so I can relieve those unrealistic high school memories. Question though, will the ability to use romance as a way to get revenge be an option? You know trick them into loving us and then dropping that hammer? Cos I’m not above that pettiness either.
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What if you try to avenge the one who broke your heart by making them fall in love with you and later humiliating them but in the process you fall in love with them again 
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Well problem with that is, again, that I think 11 years old is a bit young to really have your heart broken in a romantic way and I certainly hope the mc wasn’t in a sexual relationship with whoever did so at that age. 
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That is actually the first thing that came into mind when I came up with the idea. At first I even wanted to do an ending where you romance them all and do a weird revenge where you break all their hearts 
I don’t think I will do that now but, who knows? I’m pretty far from the ending.
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It’s possible to fall in love in that age, well not really in a sexual way but they could still have feelings and get heartbroken if that person danced with someone else for example.
Though most people would forget about it after a few years
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And that’s my point an eleven year old not getting over it no matter how “mean” those other kids were is likely indicative of severe underlying psychological problems or a developmental disorder that needs competent counseling and parental care and attention more then an elaborate revenge scheme.
Not that revenge obsessed (young) adults are likely to be completely mentally healthy either but it’s a bit easier to play that for fun and even comedy and a roaring rampage of revenge Count of Monte Christo style then it is with little kids. 
Also most adults (or even older teenagers) can be (legally) presumed to be responsible for whatever they did to the mc to screw them up that way with young kids, peer pressure etc, it becomes that much more complicated too.
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Well, if it’s played for laughs i wouldn’t mind the age at all. An 11 year old would be perfect for a parody revenge story. But if it’s a serious revenge story where MC really did not get over something that happened at 11 years old then MC needs serious professional help…
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It’d probably have to be really silly though to the point where the mc putting on the paper-thin: disguise of just gluing an obviously fake mustache to their face suddenly makes nobody recognize them at all anymore and more of that sort of over-the-top silliness.
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Or want to kill/torture the bullies because they ate the last cookie or because they blamed MC for loosing the class’ pet and that keeps MC up at night/MC has nightmares about it or something equally as silly 
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If the story is based on something tragic like what they did in the movie Carrie, i could see why the MC would want revenge…
But that would neither be “fun” in the Count of Monte Christo sense or the over-the-top comedy sense we were just talking about. For me that would make this game not very fun and Carrie’s religious zealot of a “mother” is as much or more to blame then the awful kids so she was denied access to the kind of parental and professional care that could have helped her.
It would definitely make this story into a tragedy while the author mentioned a desire to go in a more lighthearted direction.
To be honest I wouldn’t be all that interested in a Carrie type of tragedy either, but, like I said before I’m certainly up for a good Count of Monte Christo-esque tale of revenge every now and then.
Hmm I could be interested if it were relatively lighthearted I think … I have seen stuff like this go badly when it’s clear the author/person making it thinks that someone “deserves” to have their life ruined because of what they did at a really young age and I personally have issues with that… I like the idea that some are nice now (puberty turns people into assholes man!), others are still terrible, etc, so we can decide who to avenge ourselves on also based on what type of person they are now. Like maybe the MC sees that one of them might be planning to do something similar to another person…
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“Steal the girl” is a cliché commonly used in narratives. It could go either way. You could even apply the samething to an extra-dimensional, alien monster and the same rules would apply. And honestly, in reference to your concerns about the MC’s mental health… what kind of party pooper are you? Sure it’s a real world issue, but in a book, a game, in any fantasy world and especially one you get to interact with and immerse yourself, you want to be someone bigger than yourself. It’s pretty awful to be forced to play as someone who is defeated by his own demons before you start. Life is full of despair and angony already. Real stories center around characters we can look up too, who triumph over impossible odds, superheroes compared to us average human beings.
Even if you’d like to play as a depressed suicidal man who hears voices, the monomyth structure requires a hero with everything stacked against him, who uses what’s inside him to hurdle opposition and come out victorious.
In a story like the movie the OP mentioned… that’s what the character has to be. Otherwise the story is less the tale of the hero, and more the tale of a person fell victim to their own mind.
In summation, you shouldn’t have to worry about tbe indepth well-being of a protagonist you control. Fiction exists so we don’t have to stress about every real world danger and hardship.
What fun would video games be if your character died once and that was it? Or if he got sick and you got to experience every hour of his suffering? I could go on and on but you see why this is a bad idea?
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Sounds interesting. I hope we get a demo soon.
Very sorry for being rude and I’m gonna be a bit clueless, but what does suicide and realism has to do with the “steal your girl” cliche?
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There is no need to get personal here, sir.
Yes, because the common narrative is still that of the straight male protagonist competing against equally straight and male antagonists.
While, Mandela, Dr. King, Schweitzer, all of our real-life icons and legends in many respects are superheroes compared to us ordinary folks. They also did what they did in-spite of and in some case because of their almost equally huge flaws.
If you insist on being pedantic about it, sir, the Count of Monte Christo is first of all a book that has multiple movie adaptations, some good some decent, some bad. The OP makes no reference to which of those they watched.
I have said all I needed or wanted to say here. I still believe this tale can very easily go wrong in large part because of the tender ages of the characters. Black comedy is a very sensitive subject and very hard to pull off right, particularly when you’re aiming at an international audience.
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I think perhaps the problem some have here is that the cathartic revenge story works best if the revenge-seeker is shown to be absolutely in the right. With an eleven-year old, the inciting incident is maybe something quite petty, in which case the MC seems quite unhinged for not letting go of it when they grew up, or it’s something genuinely serious in which case possibly forgiving the instigators seems hard to swallow.
Edit: not saying it can’t work! I’m seeing possibly a black-comedy Mean Girls thing?
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Oooh, a revenge story! While I do enjoy seeing karma served, although I have to wonder if we have multiple options to exact revenge? Because whether I want my revenge to be disproportionate retribution depends entirely on the severity of the “humiliation event” the MC suffered. As for how I think the story will go:
I agree with @Scribblesome that the “humiliation event” has to be significant enough that the reader will take the MC’s side on the whole revenge shebang, but not hurtful enough that forgiveness is out of the question.
One thing I notice from children is that they can be very cruel. So, considering the location of the “humiliation event” is a school dance, I can imagine MC’s friends pulling a cruel, but elaborate prank that ridiculed his/her romantic feelings to a certain person (like making said person escort the MC to the dance, getting the MC’s hopes up, and revealing the prank).
While MC’s friends think this is nothing but a harmless prank for laughs, the MC may find the experience traumatic enough that they may have developed trust issues that plagued them for years, and so they want revenge on their ex-friends.
Is the RO’s the friends that betrayed the MC back then? Because I want the option to make them fall for you, and then break their hearts to pieces 
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