The areas I'm concerned about are the world and the overall tone of the game.
Your world isn't shallow. You've done a lot to develop a history, power structure, and a couple competing factions. However, all that depth and the overall seriousness of it leaves some aggressively glaring plot holes. That was fine when the game was mostly a comedy/porn game, but if you're going for a more serious tone, that's no longer the case. The main questions that stumped me when I was playing were:
As a writer, I take plot holes very seriously. I don't believe there are any plot holes, just things that have yet to be explained. And I will happily answer your questions.
1. Why are elf slaves necessary in a world with an android work force? Since Kali's college class is programming construction droids, they don't seem ludicrously rare or new. As such, how have slaves not been replaced by bots already? The best explanation I could come up with is momentum, but shouldn't the easy availability of manual labor have caused either slaves or androids to become dominant or isolated to certain sectors of the economy? Maybe that's happened off screen but...
Androids are very expensive, especially in comparison to the price of a slave. When converted to USD, cheap slaves cost around $4,200 each. Androids on the other hand will cost closer to $70,000 each. They're very complex and delicate, but are not suited for actual work. For example, if someone wants to build a car factory, they don't build androids to build a car, they build car building robots (I'm sure you know what they look like already). The human form isn't the most efficient form for any of the work we do. So those jobs would be replaced with the right type of robot, or just a cheap expendable slave.
2. Are there people who desire abolition? Outside of Nia of course. We've seen some pretty horrific racism in a lot of different scenes throughout the game, but I think Vanessa, the hipster/rebel, is the only non-elf abolitionist we've ever met. There's an implication there that abolition is not something desired by the majority of society simply because of who Vanessa is. I guess this isn't a plot hole, but damn if it doesn't make for a dark setting. Racial slavery and no groups who find that morally reprehensible?
There are definitely abolitionists, as you probably saw in Vanessa's latest events. But their voices are actively suppressed and mocked. Syl'anar doesn't just have laws that allow for slavery, Syl'anar has a slavery culture. Anyone who speaks against it will most likely be shamed. So that also lowers the amount of abolitionists in Syl'anar. IIRC it was close to 10% of the country is an abolitionist. The second biggest ideology are the technocrats, who want to replace the government with an ultra efficient AI. The abolitionist's only goals are to make slavery illegal, if that were to happen, the movement would dissolve into other things.
3. Is the high elf queen an idiot? The high elf queen's "plan" probably irritated me more than anything else in the game. She apparently has invisible spies capable of infiltrating nearly anything and she can't get blueprints for a gun on her own? Is no fairy capable of watching a person use the internet and learning? Worse yet, wouldn't she know how pointless a gun would be at this point in history? Even if the fairies couldn't use the internet, shouldn't they have some idea what a jet is? What exactly are the fairies telling the elf queen? That entire sequence felt like the idiot ball was being passed around.
I guess what I'm saying overall is that just because you've got a world with a history, doesn't mean that history makes sense.
There have been some very recent real world conflicts in which a relatively small group of poor people defeated the world's biggest and most advanced military in history. So just having guns, rocket launchers, vehicles, etc, are a big advantage, especially over bows and spears.
The fairies can be seen by high tech military security cameras, she and the fairies know where to avoid. Most of their spying is on the citizens so information is limited.
I believe they do know what a jet is? I can't recall a point in the story where she didn't know what a jet was.
As for tone, that should be pretty straight forward. Regardless of the characters or story, the early parts of the game were bright and happy. The problems were small, the solutions were simple and everything stayed happy throughout the scenes. Over time, the problems grew more complex and less concrete. I was completely okay with that as well. I liked Maria's soul searching over whether camming was really healthy for her and what she wanted from her life. Kali had similar issues with a similar change in direction. I felt like the player character acted as something of a rock for the girls through those turbulent times; a constant as they changed their world around it.
But some of the current scenes? They're dark. Not funny haha 40k grim dark, but dark dark. Android and Maria are experiencing the kind of things people prefer to pretend don't exist: existential horror of a type humans don't get to experience and dead serious, no joke, slavery. How different is that from where the game started? I guess I'd liken it to walking into a kids movie only to have it interrupted by a chainsaw massacre halfway through. It doesn't matter whether the kid's movie or the horror movie were actually good, it's the sudden tone switch that would throw people off.
It's very possible that I'm the exception to the rule on this one. Doki Doki Literature Club was wildly popular and I'm pretty sure this very thing I'm complaining about is a large part of that reason. In fact, I feel like there's a lot of recent anime that do the same thing, dropping a horrific murder into the stereotypical shonen opening. Maybe people out there like a sudden tone switch in their stories to keep things surprising and dramatic. Then again, don't all those examples follow the tone shift? While the shift in Doki Doki is surprising, it never goes back to VN after the horror is revealed. The shonens stop shonening after the sudden horrific murder, don't they? Feel free to ignore me on this one if you feel I'm off-base.
I think comparing the shift in focus in HH to doki doki is a bit of a stretch. When you meet a person, you typically don't hear about their deepest insecurities at the beginning. You typically see the person they want you to see, not their truest self. Once you get to know them, you learn more about them, and it happens to be that HH's cast is full of broken people. What happens in Harem Hotel is progression and development. Lin was introduced as a slave, had slave related insecurities, slave related background, etc etc. Her theme is slavery, and that's never replaced.
And it was always my intention to draw real world issues into HH's story. It was always my intention to make this a fairly serious story, but that doesn't mean wacky things can't happen from time to time as they do in real life. I think you simply got a wrong first impression and didn't pick up on the subtler themes. When you meet Kali for example, she tells you she's trying to escape from reality, this wasn't a joke or a passing comment, that was real, and you later learn why she doesn't want to think about reality.
Honestly, I think Android is over-reacting a decent bit, though I can sympathize with where she's coming from. Imagine a child abducted by aliens. She grows up with them, but knows they're different. As she gets older, she realizes just how much so, and worse yet how inferior they are to her. I can sympathize with the desire to know an equal in that setting, to meet someone just like you. However, shouldn't it be a important how hard the people around her are trying to understand and care for her? I feel like even in that scenario, that should make a dramatic difference. To me, Android's breakdown feels a decent amount like teenage angst to me, though that doesn't quite cover all of it. Given her age, teenage angst isn't even entirely unreasonable.
Yes, it is important to know the people around you care and want to help, and that will make a dramatic difference. It's actually what snapped her out of it in her latest content, and she will grow closer to the people around her. Ashley and Kali helping Android during the last event was me setting this up.
Android is a very intelligent but very unwise character, she has to learn things in the same way humans do, but at a very accelerated pace. She has the same sort of "soul" as we do, but without the same limits.
I think the direction I'd want to see her story go is her attempting to create immortality for those close to her. Rather than killing herself to make others like her, why not try to make those close to her like her instead? I also think that having split herself to make others isn't likely to be as rewarding as she imagines it. Imagine meeting yourself after all. There'd be no surprise; you could call all of the other you's shots. Maybe Android is capable of creating a little more differentiation though, so I'm off base.
There is unfortunately no immortality pill the characters can take. If that were possible, that would more than likely be a huge theme in the plot.
Android also isn't creating clones of herself. Her partitions will learn from their environment in the same way Android does, so depending on time/place/exposure they would develop unique personalities, just like Android has.
As for Maria... god her story is dark. I'm trying to imagine what the time she spent after she was abducted and forced through training was like and it seems quite possibly the most horrific thing imaginable. What if Ellen hadn't come through and managed to purchase her? She'd have been bought by who the hell knows who based off of what, solely a picture of her, maybe a list of skills? She'd have spent every moment of her captivity wondering if she was going to be sold as an honest to god sex slave.
This shit happens in real life and it's the darkest thing I can imagine. I don't want to imagine it. I don't want to imagine that humans are so depraved that they would want something like that. Worse yet, you've created a world in which not only is this something that happens, it's been NORMALIZED. There's an honest to god website in your world, not on the dark web or something, but a GOVERNMENT SANCTIONED WEBSITE in which girls are sold as sex slaves. You have created Rapebook. What the fuck man.
I think typing this out really helped me get to the crux of my issue with the story currently. It's not that the story got dark; it's the fridge horror that it was this dark all along. You've pointed out that the world this story is taking place in is not only not our world, but just possibly one of the most fucked up worlds imaginable. The world in which I was amassing a harem of cute girls and getting to know and love them, had something like Rapebook sitting in the background. That was going on; all the characters knew about it; all of the characters didn't think twice about it.
Hell, it was even quietly there from moment one, but I never thought about it because it was "just elves" or out of sight, out of mind. It was only when it was rubbed in my face that I even considered the ramifications of everything. Even as I'm absolutely horrified by all this, I can't help but be impressed by how you presented it. I can only imagine that the MC and all the rest of the girls got the exact same rude awakening that we did... though they have less of an excuse for not realizing it. After all, they can visit Rapebook anytime they want.
Exactly! But I would like to quickly clarify that this story doesn't take place in our world, but a twisted mirror to it.
Things happen, or have happened in history, where most people were born into a world where bad things are considered normal, you don't think twice about it. "It's just them". But it's not them, it's us. And there are many parallells in our world that make perfect sense for the horror dystopia in HH, it might not even be too hard to see this world becoming somewhat of a reality, and that should be the scariest part to imagine.
Kali is actually not a native to Syl'anar at all, only recently moved, but her father essentially funds slavery, yet has the money to give all slaves a happy free life if he chose to. This isn't something that's very obvious unless you think about it, or unless you read it later in the story.
Anyway, keep in mind that it doesn't really matter in the slightest what I think of things. My critiques are meant to be constructive and if I've come off as too harsh, I apologize. The important thing in all of this is that you're finding your work to be fun and/or fulfilling. I can definitely sympathize with watching a movie and considering how they decided to present the story. After all, the same story can be told a million different ways without changing the actual subject matter. I'm glad you have a plan and I truly do like the way you've developed your characters. It's just your world man... it's so fucking dark. Maria's story has skewed how I'll ever be able to look at the rest of the game. It all seems dirty and corrupted. I'm not sure if that was your plan, but damn if it didn't succeed.
It was absolutely my plan. The world appears and acts normal on the surface, but deeper down, it isn't at all. And it isn't my goal to show you these dark things to make you feel dark, the goal is to make the light brighter when it comes. To give you a reason and desire for justice so when it comes, it tastes sweeter.
