December 18 Update (Patreon)

Lustmas continues as we see Santa's elves hard at work! With a bonus frame, like a Christmas card, so that you can send this one to your grandparents. I hope everyone has been enjoying Lustmas and looks forward to the Christmas finale next week. ^-^

Meanwhile, I'm going to continue the unplanned season of long text posts by rambling on a subject that's been on my mind. I don't only think about whether some game concepts are unworkable in the context of adult games; it comes up in other sub-genres too as I try to think about narrative on a fundamental level.

Of course, creators can do whatever they want, but I'm not considering that simple answer. There are also questions of whether you can do something well, or in such a way that you actually reach an audience. This leads me to think about certain narrative "problems" and wonder if they're truly solvable. Almost like a chess composition.

In this case, I'm thinking about JRPGs with a certain tone and whether or not it would be possible to do a subversion twist without losing your audience. If you play the subgenre, you probably know what I'm talking about: the main character is idealistic without having put too much thought into their ideals, refuses to give up in the face of adversity, and may reference the power of friendship. I think in this company it's safe to say these stories are often naive and uncomplicated. What I'd like to do is take this character and slowly turn them into the villain: not in a corrupted sense, but doing increasingly terrible things for justice with their friends.

A lot of people might hear that and go "haha" but executing it is the tricky part. I'd want to play the initial tropes straight, which means you have a potential problem of splitting your audience: the people who like the earnest part will hate the twist, and the people who would have liked the twist won't play long enough to see it. I worried about this with TLS, with people bouncing off the prologue, and this hypothetical game would need a much longer prologue than ten minutes.

There are hypothetical solutions, of course:

1) Hint about the twist early on. Unfortunately, JRPGs are usually filled enough with mysterious figures and MacGuffins that I think all but the most heavy-handed hints wouldn't register until later, which would defeat the purpose.

2) Heavily satirize the tropes played straight, potentially via other characters/elements that contradict that arc. I think this is theoretically viable, but would be hard to execute. There's no such thing as perfect balance, so you'd definitely lose some people in both directions.

3) Reduce the problem by having the first scenario be a microcosm of the whole plot. This would limit the confusion to TLS levels, but runs the risk of blunting the slow arc toward villainy.

4) Play this character arc as a subplot within a larger story. This one reduces the impact but it's much stronger conceptually; I actually tried it in an unpublished pre-TLS story.

5) One tricky option I'm surprised I didn't include at first would be to start in medias res, making clear certain negative outcomes but not how the story gets there. While this potentially ruins any surprise, if done properly it might set expectations while still letting the descent play out properly.

Many of these could in theory work, but I don't know if they'd land in a memorable way. I play a decent number of games, but I'm not sure if any have already taken a shot at similar concepts. Another problem, specific to me, might be that this concept would be too similar to work I've already done, since I do like twisting heroic tropes. I think it's a well worth returning to, but only so often.

Ultimately I don't have a real story idea here, much less something I'd pursue; this is just some abstract thinking I engage in while watching particularly earnest JRPG cutscenes. Hopefully it has entertained someone. ^-^