Fair enough. But do you act this way every day? Look at those girls, their mimics - they are alive! On the other hand there is the MC that is completely static. There is no way of reading his body language cause this guy seems .. dead. That's why I called him "dummie". From a player perspective I would like to push that dummie into some movement, you know? And not just sit like him frozen and rewind some text from time to time. It's not a kinetic novel, is it?
Some interesting points coming up in this discussion also by
fried,
Kionashi and
Miðgarðsormr
I think there's a couple of factors that play into this, and some come down to specifics for a scene.
First of all, there's the MC's that's being kept out of the image at all times and not moving about a lot, that adds to the sense of his disembodiment.
The reason for keeping his face out of frame is a principle choice, but wrt to him not moving about all that much: I've experimented with that, but I found that him moving about a lot is quite distracting as the girls go through their emotes while have their conversation, because it looks like he's squirming, sitting up in alarm, settling back as if reassured or bored etc. The body language adds an unintentional non-verbal component to that that doesn't match his voice in those conversations.
That's why in most of the scene's, he's sitting quite still and his voice comes purely from the dialog.
Then there's a definite problem with a more active
("gropy") MC during couch scenes.
Those wouldn't have worked with Macy
, as he's yet to have the big "moment" with Macy, which meant they'd have to have been moved into the next chapter entirely and we couldn't have them talking about events and bonding.
In the scenes on the couch with just Denise there is more interaction,
and he's stroking her hair as she's satisfying her curiosity about him on the couch, and in most of the other scenes you'll see him stroking her belly and such. But as has been pointed out, the MC is letting Denise set the pace here, and the main reason there's not an option there for him to push for more is a little meta because I didn't want to have Denise refuse on account of her ideas about precedence between her and Macy.
None of that really addresses what you raise, but it does explain why it's done that way.
