Jake wrote:But I don't think it's really fair to claim that for any piece which doesn't hinge upon the gender of the protagonist it's an arbitrary assignment
Darn, I had to look into the dictionary to see what "arbitrary" means ^_^. Blast my English.
Well, the point I tried to make is that it's often not crucial to the GxB game that it has female
thoughts, but much rather that it has a female
feel.
So basically, the "heart" of your story - the main idea (something philosophical), the point, will often be gender-neural, and it's up to the designer to decide whether to wrap it up into a package appealing to females, or males.
But of course...
This is something different from say creating a story with specifically one gender's typical thoughts in mind - for boys this would be a pirate adventure for instance - and then replacing the boys with girls. In this normal pirate's adventure, the point of the story would typically appeal to the boy's dreamy side (being a pirate and conquering the world), but by actually replacing the cast with girls, it can appeal in addition to that to their sexuality as well (let's not be hypocritical, anime girls of all ages are hot). So you have the adventure, but also the pretty girls, all in one.
And it ties directly to this thought:
DaFool wrote:Sure, maybe you can replace female protagonist with a male one and the story will be the same, but I also want to be able to add additional pleasures to the story... ..so that in addition to the edge-of-your-seats battle with cyborgs while solving the mystery of the foundation of civilization, one can also get a peak up her skirt... ...and that makes a far better story in my opinion.... the hormones of the viewers kick in and by golly if it ain't the best action anime I've seen in recent years, etc, etc!...
- in our case the pirate story with girls.
It looks like a win-win, but maybe take this into consideration as well: While a pirate's adventure with girls is twice as nice to look at, the "realism" will suffer, since IRL boys will already have understood that girls aren't really behaving like that, and aren't really as crazy about pirate's adventures as the boys. So this combination of appealing to a boy's mind and his sexuality might be great to
watch and consume - however, when it comes to
role-playing in the yard afterwards, no one is going to want to be Captain Elena Longhair and no one is going to want to wear skirts. So this concept of added value by having sexy cast is good for passive enjoyment, but not good for active imagination. This would target otaku boys, not adventurer boys.