Don’t be too sure. I’m 6’3 1/2" (193cm-ish) 270 pounds (a bunch of kg), my arms are scarred from a rollover accident as a cop, I have a bad back, a bad knee, hair past my shoulders (okay that might be sort of hot, but ehh) I have a scar by my right eye, a partial monobrow, and my facial features just don’t seem to get any attention.
Plus, if you base it on my online dating record, I write a well thought out, intelligent message, the person looks at my profile, deletes the message without reading it, and that’s the end of it.
I haven’t had a date in over a year.
But hey, I guess I am pretty inside though
One day my friend, one day. I will find that person some day.
Yeah, but we still lost and I’m quite sad a work as unique as this that ticks this many boxes for me is quite rare. The only other one really was the Myrmidon (XoR too, but that is very much not a happy story and tickles my angst and conflict boxes much more then my romantic ones). I also don’t think it is feasible for an author with a busy day-job to work on two projects at the same time without making one feel like an afterthought and something as awesome as The Beast Within deserves to be more than the poorly developed afterthought.
Just on these forums Rena has had to drop Icarus Sun to focus her new (and imho more awesome project) and Parrotwatcher has also shelved his second project while he presumably very slowly finishes up Totem Force.
This is all secondary to how friggin’s rare gay locked games are even on this site (there are no released ones yet, while there already are a couple of straight-locked HG’s and more where the gay options do feel like afterthoughts, which can sometimes happen even in mainline Cog’s) as there have been only a few gay-locked wip’s to date and, as expected half of them were lesbian locked, which was another point in TBW’s favour that it would have been both a gay and lesbian story in one).
Maybe the sibling and epic sibling interactions are going to be its saving grace it but I’m still far less psyched about On the Hunt then I would have been for TBW of course I’m mainly comparing it to Supernatural where everybody is super straight and most ro’s are flings anyway and the only choice other then a fling would be a jerkass Angel. I also mentioned the very boring costuming and I honestly think that paints a flattering and sanitized for TV picture of what traveling monster hunters who sleep mostly in dingy motels or their car would look like.
In any case I’ve already said I think the costuming on Supernatural is utterly boring jeans, work boots and flannel shirts for the most part and that still paints a flattering picture as in reality, given their lifestyles I think looking like outright filthy hobo’s (or Woody from Zombie Exodus, at best) would be more realistic given their professions, limited space to store a wardrobe and even more limited opportunities to visit laundromats or dry-cleaners, combined with limited access to running water and personal grooming supplies too.
But hey buddy, it’s a fictional game so of course the MC can be hot. And maybe the monsters too?
But if we’re going to compare the games with reality then I can say that living in a medieval time ain’t that fancy. Even if you’re a royalty a full-body bath was uncommon.
Do we have the option to customize our warderobe or are you going full author-power and decide it for us?
If it was low fantasy, but it isn’t. In high-fantasy settings that have it magic most often provides handy substitutes for many of the industrial and even information age amenities that we take for granted. Also the actual middle ages were different, depending on where you were, some people in some places mostly kept to Roman grooming and bathing standards for a very long time into the supposed “dark ages” often in-spite of what the church said. The upper classes in the Arab world and China during what was the dark-ages for us in Western Europe for the most part were also nearly as clean as most modern people. It is just that access to that level of grooming tended to be more limited to upper-class people then it is today.
Just having a church or religion that like the Zoroastrian, Jewish and many Muslim sects emphasizes (ritual) cleanliness instead would do it, at least for the upper classes and those who can afford it and butterfly the “dung ages” stereotypes away.
Depended on the royalty, some particularly in more southern climes did so anyway despite the Church, particularly it seems if they retained a Moorish slave-physicians.
In any case fantasy worlds are usually quite a bit better on the hygiene, even the low-fantasy ones as they are not burdened by misguided Catholic and early Protestant doctrines on bathing and healthcare. The no regular full-body baths and grooming is literally one of the easiest things to butterfly away in a fantasy world or alternate history as it wasn’t for a lack of resources that upper class people at least didn’t take them but mostly out of idiotic, religious superstition.
Probably so long as it is cheap, practical and rather limited. Which I guess mostly comes down to a choice of signature colour, not style.
Without magic or lots of money to clean and mend it going monster hunting in something expensive and nice likely isn’t a good idea. And the Supernatural boys are mostly strapped for cash.
In any case I don’t see On the Hunt as a romance game anyway, the real star of that one if they are well-written would be the sibling and our mc’s relation and interactions with them. Which is also why it is such a pity as there are several other games that have some of the Supernatural vibe going for them but there are no fun, lighthearted gay games, let alone gay royal romps out or in WIP here yet.
I think you may be assuming too much based off the supernatural vibe OtH gives off and not accounting for author ability and vision.
And thinking an author who is going to make an orientation locked game is going to mess up or make the homosexual relationship options in this one feel tacked on is a disservice to the author.
True, I dislike Supernatural, or at least its writers and executives for their repeated practice of queer baiting where they have their writers give the (lead) characters some or even many scenes with ambiguously queer content while never ever following trough and making open statements that the scenes are not ambiguous at all and the characters really are super-straight.
But expecting me to just get immediately over the tropes and expectations Supernatural sets in a game that is so clearly inspired by it that’s going to require more and better empirical evidence then what I saw in the rather limited “trailer” TSSL linked. Especially since Supernatural is bad enough with the queer baiting and flamewars over it that it gives rise to such crap as this. For the “straight” answers to that just trawl Reddit yourself.
I never said anything about “messing it up”, but unlike TBW OTH does not seem to be (primarily) a romance game, which means the romance options will be more limited and that it becomes correspondingly less likely that there will be one between them that is satisfying for everyone. Again, going by Supernatural most of the romances seem to be flings and the only prospect for a long term male one (if the writers actually decide to ever follow through would seem to be the jerkass “angel” who wouldn’t be my cup of tea for an ro). While I liked the first couple of seasons of Supernatural I got tired of the constant queer-baiting and stopped watching it after a couple of seasons to tell the truth.
In any case, like I said before, I think the real star of OTH is and should be the mc’s sibling and our mc’s interactions with them, which does mean the ro’s will have to take second stage to that. If there’s a gay male ro I like in that game then great, but I don’t treat it as a romance game and I expect, particularly if it has a limited main cast that my mc would be more likely then not to remain single.
I have full confidence that what gay romance there is going to be will be well-written but if there are only one or two gay male ro’s to begin with that does rather limit the possibility there might be one I really like.
Don’t get me wrong if the author can avoid the worst pitfalls of Supernatural I’m still excited, just less excited then I would have been for the alternative.
My excitement for this is now comparable to how excited I was for this WIP, where there was explicitly not going to be any romance but there were promising relationships. I particularly liked and was looking forward to the one between the mc and their brother in the flashbacks and hopefully those of the mc and his new “brother in spirit”, Eli in the present. Alternatively had it gone forward there would also have been the mysterious number 16.
I mean, did you really have a choice? Doing only one would have caused people to riot. It’s your fault for having such a creative imagination and being such a good writer. Can’t wait though
Unsurprisingly, I actually ended up dreaming about this poll thread last night I don’t remember too much about it, except someone was actually baking real cookies and sending them to people as bribes, and later on the Beatles (!) all still alive and together, showed up on the thread and played Strawberry Fields
Yeah, I mean, I feel this way too. I do think we got the best compromise solution out of a tight-running poll, however—we were at a point where just changing the closing time by a few minutes could easily have flipped the results. I think if the author’s excited by both and alternating attention, let’s give it a chance to see how it works
I mean, I’ll be honest, On the Hunt would’ve been my fourth choice—I’m not that into monster-hunting in general, and the premise sounded close enough to Supernatural that I wasn’t really sure what would make it stand out as different. But at the very least I expect we’ll get a subversion of the queerbaiting… we’ll see how it goes If it does get a little more romance in there, that would definitely not hurt, and the blurb does describe it as “action romance”
Medieval Europeans, it turns out, were quite fond of bathing, including public baths. A cursory search turns up this page (see section #4), and, with even more extensive info, this page (warning: medieval depictions of nudity… because baths…).
Bathing became less common for a while around the renaissance.
And the female characters tend to get killed off suspiciously often too…so a few things to unpack and avoid while working on it, but hey I actually trust @DarthDovahkin to make something super queer out of it, even if the premise is not that intersting to me (I guess when it comes to urban fantasy I just tend to get my fix at quite different places than supernatural)
Even if it avoids the queer-baiting I just hope the romance interests are not a choice between a couple of flings and/or a jerkass “angel”. But then again I’m not expecting much in the romance department from this title, so as long as it avoids the passive homophobia and queer-baiting of its inspiration that’d be a huge win.
And other “pagan customs”, so unless you have the church clamping down, which as TSSL said they did more near the end of the middle ages, expect people to continue as they always have, particularly if they’ve been brought up with regular bathing, public or otherwise. In addition powerful enough royalty can always get away with some amount of “deviant practices” as compared to the commoners however.
Fantasy and even alternate history worlds need not adhere to those particular religious doctrines however and if you’re going for not making homosexuality taboo you might as well throw in ritual cleanliness, which tended to promote bathing regularly, rather than dissuading it.
Well Chimera is still last for me, but yeah I did like United more then OTH from the blurbs and like most people around here it seems I’m a sucker for well-written and inclusive superhero (or villain) stories.
I only saw your post in the morning, it was the middle of the night in Romania when you made your appeal to me. I’m sorry.
I think The Beast Within sounds fun, I like comedy fantasy and something that hasn’t been done in Cog before, so had I seen your post in time, I would have voted for it.
You make me blush with your kind words, Quaintrelle. All I can do is accept your praise humbly and hope you keep enjoying my work. As a writer, knowing someone holds me in such regards brings me joy. Thank you.
@DarthDovahkin Good luck on your projects! I’ll be keeping an eye on your games, they seem interesting!
Don’t apologize for anything, dollface. Let alone for being asleep. Why are you so adorable?
Well, the poll did close a day earlier than expected, through no fault of the author’s. I pleasantly remembered how chill and forward-thinking you are, and thought the uniquely fresh story deserved a bit of a nudge and the underrepresented gems here deserved to have something to call their own for once. Happy ending since a compromise was formed, but thank you for trying.
Oh, same for me, I came to vote but it looks like it’s already closed I guess I’m way too late. When did it end? Too bad, each option did sound wonderful, specially The Best Within, I would have loved to be able to vote
@Quaintrelle I’m sorry I wasn’t fast enough, lately I’m either a lurker or way too absent from the CoG forum And you’re way kind with me, I swear. It’s so nice to know you think as such of me, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy; you’re such a peach sigh I wish I could have helped you with the poll, really
Can’t wait though
I don’t remember too much about it, except someone was actually baking real cookies and sending them to people as bribes, and later on the Beatles (!) all still alive and together, showed up on the thread and played Strawberry Fields 
If it does get a little more romance in there, that would definitely not hurt, and the blurb does describe it as “action romance” 
All I can do is accept your praise humbly and hope you keep enjoying my work. As a writer, knowing someone holds me in such regards brings me joy. Thank you.
I guess I’m way too late. When did it end? Too bad, each option did sound wonderful, specially The Best Within, I would have loved to be able to vote 