And no, it hasn't always been political. The first few updates were far more simple. If anything, if anyone plays the game from the beginning now, they will notice the increasing change in tone through the events, which I always jokingly thought of Runey's increasing evolution as a writer.
Any media other than perhaps the most abstract is at least
somewhat political. In Harem Hotel's case, from the beginning it has featured themes of slavery, and abuse of slaves. I'll grant that those themes have become more pronounced and developed over the course of the game so far, but they were there from the start.
Very early on, Lin compares grandpa to other worse masters she's had, and tells MC she's lucky she wasn't raped by one of her other masters. She talks about the genocide of her people and culture.
That's already pretty intensely political.
I just explained in detail the problem right above your post, and its beyond "I dislike her character"
Btw, I gave a perfectly reasonable comeback, which didn't involve talking about stuff taht we found about from Nia or Sylvia. Just saying "I knew all of this, because I actually talk to Linm on a daily basis to know her" is enough.
Here's the entire part of the conversation that involves elven biology:
Harem Hotel said:
nala "His reports, while not completely accurate, were still ahead of his time. He studied elves in great depth!"
nala "Elves have an accelerated growth spurt at the early stages of life, slowing dramatically at roughly fifty cycles around the sun... and strangely, while all elves appear to outlive humans by at least 6 life times, each subspecies has a different biological clock entirely, with the 'common elf' to appear to live the longest."
nala "Now we know that common elves and desert elves live about the same length, both very long. While dark elves live shorter lives, and drow even shorter still."
kali "How is this history? This sounds more like biology..."
vanessa "It's in the book!"
kali "And...?"
vanessa "It's the oldest biological study on elves! Just listen..."
nala "You want history? Here's history..."
So, a grand total of eight lines, including some back-and-forth and some lines to transition into the lore dump, and then to another part of the lore dump. All told, by word count it makes up about 5% of the infodump.
Moreover, despite you saying that you already knew everything Nala was telling you, there's new information there. Desert elf lifespan is completely new information. The fact that elves have an accelerated growth spurt early on is new information, and in fact wasn't something that was even part of the planned lore for Harem Hotel until pretty recently.
Plus, Kali does push back on this part of the infodump, even if she doesn't do it in precisely the way you would prefer. If those eight lines are mainly what's bothering you, I don't feel like your dislike for the event is really warranted.
Now, if she bitches out and call sus liars it would've made the scene less one-sided, but that would make her look worse, and we can't have that, can we?
I'm still not sure why you're apparently still holding to the belief that Runey is presenting Vanessa as some perfect exemplar for good behavior. At the start of the event she literally yells at Kali in the middle of the lecture hall before getting quieted by Kim and then shut up by Kali. She makes repeated incorrect assumptions. She interjects tangential stuff into the conversation at bad times (the stuff about landlords). She lectures Kali about her relationship to MC without knowing almost anything about it. She thinks she's being profound when she's just being trite (talking about how "we're trading elves whether we like it or not" because the currency is called the Syl).
Insinuating that Runey "can't have" the scene be less one-sided demonstrates a misreading of the scene, in my opinion. Vanessa already makes herself look at least somewhat bad, multiple times throughout the scene. Contrast that to Nala, who holds the same underlying beliefs, but presents them more calmly, and is more informed. Vanessa's assumptions and belligerence are already shown to be a character flaw. MC doesn't need to actually argue back for the scene to be multi-sided, because other characters, the scene itself, and information the players have already serve to counter a number of Vanessa's points.
