Look, I'm going to be short and, unfortunately, somewhat curt in my reply here since I'm currently suffering from burnout that, frankly, isn't particularly compatible with this kind of discussion. It takes effort for me to engage in this kind of thing at the time of writing, hence the late reply.
I’m sorry to hear about that, and I hope you get better soon.
You imply that I'm "reading" the setting and characters. No, I'm not. I created, wrote, and had them live rent-free in my head for years. I'm not interpreting them. My view of how they act and think is the absolute truth by default. You can accuse them of being poorly written since that is a matter of personal opinion. But to claim, or even imply, that my realization of them is wrong is absurd.
I quite literally said in my post that I
didn’t think you were wrong for writing any of the characters in the way you did, and so I don’t know why you’re accusing me of this here.
That being said, I believe you too are, in a way, “reading” the characters. Perhaps no one knows them better than you do, but there are people I’ve known for decades for whom, if asked how they would act in a given situation, I couldn’t answer you with 100% certainty; it’s always possible for someone you thought you knew inside and out to surprise you. You can put yourself in another’s shoes—and you can do it very well—but you can never truly
be someone else. Therefore, any time you ask the question, “What would person X do in this spot?” the only answer you can get is what
you think person X would do, not the “absolute truth” of what person X really would do. As an example of this, actors routinely disagree with writers or directors about how their characters should act. Who holds the “absolute truth” in this scenario? As another example, it’s entirely possible that, in say ten years’ time, you yourself will change your mind (as creatives often do) about how some characters should have acted in
Long Live the Princess; in another ten years, you may change your mind again. Which version of the author holds the “absolute truth”?
What the author writes is canon, that much is true, but I think it’s false to say that canon is automatically the correct interpretation of a character or setting. To pick on an easy target, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were the writers of the
Game of Thrones TV series, and yet there are still moments where characters go “out of character” and do things they really shouldn’t, based on their previous characterization. I’m not saying this applies to you, but authors are not immune from getting things wrong about their own stories.
You would have written these characters and part of this story differently. Okay. That's fine by me. It doesn't change how I wrote them and how I decided to leave their stories behind as I moved on to other projects. I'm happy with the current state of Long live the Princess.
So, you are unfortunately correct in that this isn't a discussion that I want to get into. I see no value in it. You are more than welcome to interpret and critique this game and its contents to your heart's content. Heck, if you want to call them the worst-written and most poorly realized characters in adult video gaming, then be my guest. But to say that I don't fully understand my own characters? I suspect you didn't quite think that argument through.
Look, all I wanted was some insight into your creative vision. Like I said, I’m not campaigning for you to include a harem ending, and I didn’t make a list of “arguments” for why you should or not. I wasn’t even criticizing your writing.
All I brought up was a list of things I picked up on which informed my own interpretation of the game, which I was wondering if you would care to discuss; my reasoning being that, if I came out of the game thinking a harem could be possible, while you were adamant it couldn’t (which is why you didn’t include one, despite having polyamory endings), then surely there were grounds for discussion. If you think the characters couldn’t have acted any other way, why is that? If I was wrong about the setting, how come? Is it something you world-built, but which didn’t end up in the final game? Again, this isn’t to say you did anything “wrong”; if anything, you did things so
right that I’m interested in learning more about this world and these characters, and discussing different interpretations thereof.
