parttimestorier wrote: ↑Wed Nov 06, 2019 2:57 pm
My impression is that it's mostly just a loud minority of people who get mad online about their video game love interests not meeting some weird "purity" standard.
There is a certain amount of this, but another factor to consider is that players have an easy time relating to characters who are similar to them, and many people who play romance game are often less experienced (or sometimes completely inexperienced) when it comes to real-life romance. For a person who didn't date at all in high school, their reaction to meeting someone who had 6 different partners in high school might be something like, "Wow, your experience growing up was totally and completely different from mine, I have a hard time relating to that."
One of the easiest ways to get readers on "the same team" with a given character is to make the character similar to them. (For example, many YA books feature characters who are fans of reading YA books -- an easy way to flatter the sensibilities of the readers and give them a character that they can easily relate to.)
There's also a trope of romance stories (not just visual novels) that will introduce old love interests specifically for the purpose of romantically competing with the main character: things seem to be going well between Alice and Bob at the end of act 2, when suddenly an old flame enters the picture to add drama to the situation. So I could understand why some genre-savvy players might be suspicious if a character mentions past relationships (even if they wouldn't be suspicious of that kind of behavior in real life): why would the writer be telling us about this information if it wasn't going to be relevant later on in the plot? Better be on your guard in case one of those exes shows up!
This is sort of connected to a principle that undergirds a lot of fiction, which is that there's sort of an implicit promise that the things you choose to mention about a character will
matter. If a character off-handedly mentions some past trauma, and I spend most of the game with that character, I'm going to assume that their story will, at last in part, involve dealing or at least acknowledging that past trauma or in some way make it relevant to who they are as a character. If a character mentions they have a tragic backstory and then it never comes up for the rest of the game, that sort of feels like a broken promise: why did you bring it up if we weren't going to explore it?
This is sort of connected to a more generalizable piece of advice: readers are really only interested in people's pasts insofar as those pasts give insights as to who they are as a person. For example, if a character says, "I had chocolate cake at the party for my 5th birthday" without saying anything else, that feels like an irrelevant bit of trivia and something that I have no interest in because it reveals nothing about them as a person. However, I
would find it interesting if they told me about how they grew up in a family that wasn't very well-off, and birthdays were the one time of the year that their parents pulled out all the stops and really let them indulge in a fabulous treat for one day out of the year: in that context, a detailed description of the fancy cake that they got for their 5th birthday (juxtaposed with the squalor of the small one-bedroom apartment that it was served in) would actually tell me something interesting about that character's childhood. (And, as an added bonus, it might reveal why they would be especially delighted to receive an extra-nice birthday cake, which is a piece of information that might be relevant to me if I am a dating game protagonist who is trying to woo them.)
Likewise, if I'm told something about a character's romantic history, I don't want it to feel like a piece of trivia. I'm interested in what it says about them as a person. Uninteresting: "I had a girlfriend in high school. We broke up after a year." More interesting: "I had a girlfriend in high school, but it kind of happened by accident. I just wanted to take someone to the dance at the end of my freshman year, so I asked her to go to the dance with me, and afterward she assumed we were a couple, and I just sort of let it happen. Maybe it was due to a combination of being an emotionally inarticulate teenager, and not wanting to break her heart. The irony was, I let things go on so long that when we did break up, I ended up hurting her way more than if I had just told her up front I didn't want us to be a couple. She's forgiven me, but I still feel guilty about the whole thing, and I made a promise to myself that I would never make the same mistake again."
To make trivia more interesting, one of the questions I like asking is, "Why?" Why are you as the author telling me this piece of information about them? (If there doesn't seem to be an apparent reason for the information that you're sharing, that's when my genre savvy radar starts to go off and make me think that maybe you're only giving me this bit of trivia so you can introduce drama later on. You can use the one-word question of "why" to interrogate own writing. Sometimes, a fun "warm up" writing exercise can involve interviewing your characters using the same question:
"I like going on hikes." Why? "My workplace is super loud and hectic, and while I like the energy, sometimes I need to get away from it all. Weekend hikes are the one time out of the week when I feel like I get to be alone with my own thoughts."
"I had six different girlfriends in college." Why? "I guess I was like the romantic equivalent of the person who changes to different major every semester, stuck in a cycle of trying something new, finding myself discontent with it, and then moving onto the next option. For awhile I dated a real party animal, and we'd go out clubbing every weekend, and after awhile I thought, 'This isn't who I am. This isn't who I want to be.' So I'd break up, and figure, 'maybe things will be different if I date a bookworm this time.' I was still in the process of figuring out what kind of person I wanted to be with, partly because I was still in the process of figuring out who I was." Okay, now we have an idea of where the drama in this relationship might come from: has this love interest self-actualized to the point where they know what kind of partner they're comfortable being in a long-term relationship? Or will the main character be yet another short-term fling that they eventually move on from in their continued quest of self-discovery? Those are the kinds of questions that can make a romance arc more interesting than just a simple "will they/won't they" question. And if you
don't want to explore these kinds of questions, maybe you should consider not giving the love interest a backstory that involves them dating a large number partners on a short-term basis.