“Sort of like dating sims or the Persona games’ social links, but with a much more honest portrayal,” Love wrote. “Really, dating sims are inherently about manipulating other people — pick the right dialogue choices based off what you think they expect, learn about their interests so you can give them perfectly tuned gifts, make decisions based off whether you’ll impress them or not — but like to pass it off as being about romance. Well, fuck that. You can still do that in Ladykiller in a Bind; we’re just not going to pretend that it’s anything other than manipulation. It’ll have consequences.”
And this other comment nailed it down pretty well on visual novels in general:
Like automatically the MC of these games is this social manipulator/seducer that takes the obvious path to get the girl/guy of his/her choice.most of them might as well just say "you're choosing this girl's path/you're choosing the arsehole ending" as they're just so blatant in presenting the choice.
I want to write romance VNs/dating sims but I don't want to write the romance interests as trophies to win or have the MC do inherently manipulative things. But in this genre that doesn't seem avoidable. What do you guys think?