In an effort to stay on topic… this is what I said quite a while ago in a different thread:
Sometimes the premise of the story doesn’t allow for certain actions/plotlines to fall through that the readers may want. In part this is based on how willing the author is to follow through with delivering those, perhaps radically, alternative plot lines.
To address the original point brought up in the opening post, I’d like to share some advice I received from Malin Ryden when I posed this question in relation to this post:
ChubbyBlackCat: Have you gotten negative criticism for personality locking Sidestep?
Malin Ryden:
I have not had a single person complaining about that. The secrecy about their past, yes, some people don’t like that, but since that’s part of the mystery they’ll have to suffer.
How do you avoid this problem? By realizing you are writing a person, which the reader can influence, not a perfect translation of the readers thoughts. Your job as a writer is to write the best possible mc you can, who can have interesting discussions with people without the reader having to pick every sentence. Some people won’t like it if they want te blank protagonist, but they will quickly realize this game is not for them.
One thing I do is to mitigate this behind the scenes. For example, I vary dialogue depending on relationships, hidden stats and the like. The mc might have a similar discussion, but there would be different details if there was a romance involved, or if they were rivals.
I think it is very easy as a writer to worry too much about what the reader thinks. You are NEVER going to be able to write a game where the mc acts exactly they way all the very different readers wants to. It is impossible. So what you need to do is to make the character work in the story, you are not there to accommodate others oc’s, you are there to create a mc which can inspire and birth new oc’s for people.
People read stories because they want to read about new and interesting people. Make sure to write one, and they will be happy.