please don’t write another generic dumb horny human protagonist T_T
giving the option to name the characters already gives off huge ‘audience self-insert’ vibes, please have them be interesting instead of character archetype cardboard cutouts
Viewing post in For Skin & Scale comments
I don’t know what you count as well rounded but so far to me it just reads as having the bare minimum to make the story work and instert porn in it, which is not bad, don’t get me wrong, but not “well rounded”.
Like, of course he cares about the children, is not bigoted, wants to see the wider world and is horny, the story hinges on that being the case. The one thing I can think of that I would not have known is that he draws, which so far seems more like additional flavour than substance.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re super early in the story so it wouldn’t be fair to make a judgement about it now, but that goes both ways. There’s way too little available now to go as far as to describe them as well rounded.
I care about the name choice because the only real reason I can see that inclusion making sense is if you’re meant to be able to roleplay as them, but that usually comes with the characters being as ‘blank slate’ as possible to avoid conflicting with the reader’s own interpretation of, basically, ‘their own character’.
That’s where my worries about this come from, especially since a lot of those human archetypes in gay furry 18+ vns are dumb/incompetent as hell to make the rescuer manly furry bf have lots of opportunities to do their thing. Which again, is not necessarily bad, but something I’m very tired of reading again and again and would be disappointed by finding yet another time.
In terms of character development I see it more in terms of how smooth the world building and establishing the lives of the characters in that world.
I have seen some VNs that will try to establish a deep back story for a character, where the more interesting and entertaining aspects of the story takes a back seat, in those cases, people can find themselves rapidly skipping through the text without really reading it. The video game equivalent of that would be taking a game like skyrim, and making the first part of the game reading through all of the lore books found scattered in the game world before you get to start your first quest. That method will make many people in that game a lot more well rounded, but it would also mean that 90% of users will never make it to the first quest before dropping the game.
There are also some games where the main campaign seemingly has no story because all of the world building was done in random books and notes that are easy to overlook.
Usually the best overall are the ones that manage to strike a balance of developing the characters while also moving the main story forward. For me, since I see elements of a balance, the indicators are pointing in the direction of a well rounded character, even if that rounding is not yet complete. Given the length of the first release, if the character ended up well rounded already, then the first build would have been more of a fictional biography textbook and less of a VN.
I dislike exposition as much as the next guy, no disagreements there, but I’m concerned if you think that’s the only way to develop characters.
Hell, I found the writing so far has been fairly exposition heavy in my opinion. The same tendency to be ‘utilitarian’ and very direct in the writing when it comes to character development seemed to happen with worldbuilding too.
The same way the writing made very obvious that the human cared about the children, that he is horny for dragons and that he is unhappy with his place in life was also applied to the worldbuilding. The internal monologues of the mcs mostly tell you everything straight. It’s not like the scene of the dragon mc walking down the street was particularly subtle in demonstrating the town’s bigotry towards dragons, and it wasn’t the first nor last one to be like that.
It’s not bad, mind you, just not for everyone’s taste. That and it’s just something that in my experience very often came with the aforementioned ‘carboard cutout’ characters I also personally dislike, which is why I made these comments: haing read the story so far I worry the mc will turn into the archetypal ‘dumb horny human in a gay furry story’.