I’m considering writing a story (a novel, specifically) that’s a satire about Otome/Dating games. Inspired by a book I’ve been reading that’s been pointing out flaws in stuff that happens in those games. (It’s called “Accomplishments of the Duke’s Daughter”. It’s a good novel.)
A Girl wakes up in the world of a Fantasy Otome game that she HATES. But she’s a (male!) side character and therefore free of the game’s main “plot”. (The glimpses of the world it was set in sounded amazing, and she hadn’t been allowed to see ANY OF IT.)
She loves adventure games more than anything else but had originally been tricked by a friend into playing the game. (She’s got very little interest in romance. At all.) She had been told that it was a cool fantasy adventure game, with guilds and dungeons and monsters.
The anger she felt when she played and discovered that she never actually got to tackle any of those challenges was REAL.
She played through every story, but not because she’d grown to like it. She played them all out of SPITE so she could thoroughly nitpick and lambast it as revenge against the friend who was making her play it. And now she’s in the game, itself.
So she’s decided that she’s gonna do all the cool, fun things she was never able to do before.
And, since she’s a guy now (and a pretty broke one at that), there is NO PRESSURE on her to do the stuff she has no interest in. No one is telling her to do more “feminine” work. Or treating her like she’s too frail for adventure. Or trying to make her find romance to be a “proper” woman.
No, she’s a guy and allowed to be messy and pick up weapons and travel around at night by herself.
And she is there for it.
Honestly, finding all kinds of stuff to dismantle and make fun of for these games is fun. If anyone else has thoughts on stuff they love/hate/know are not how things would actually work in an Otome game, send them my way!!