Honestly I find the entire game silly as fuck. I'm clearly not a normal person when it comes to this kind of stuff, but I literally felt nothing the entire game except for "Who the fuck talks like this?" and "Who the fuck would make decisions like this?". I'm not trying to downplay anyone's emotions about the game, I'm just curious why you have them at all. Like how old are you, have you ever been through actual trauma, how many years worth of relationships have you been in? I'd love to ask that of everyone who felt emotional about this game, I'm quite fascinated. I've been through some serious shit in my life, and one of the girls in my life once started to pull manipulative shit which including talking about cheating, not sure if she ever would have actually done so, but my reaction was to feel hurt for a few days and then I stopped feeling anything at all about her. I had a good think and figured out a plan of action. Then I spent the next few months extricating myself from the relationship very carefully. One of her suicide attempts even involved handing me a knife and then trying to throw herself onto it. Clearly a completely psychotic person, but I managed to get myself out of the situation without her killing herself. And if she had killed herself that wouldn't be on me, I did everything that I could. That is the only realistic reaction I can think of to a situation like that, all the shit in this game just seems so goofy to me. Do people really behave this way? Do people really hate themselves so much that can keep caring while they are being hurt? Is this related to the reasons why humans kill each other constantly?
I said this before, you need quite a bit of suspension of disbelief to enjoy the game.
In many ways this is a classic tragedy and my guess is that most people here lie in wait for some sort of MC awakening, a climax of MC finally standing up to the injustices he is subjected to, this is hinted but never happens, so the reader is kept on edge and we get bad event after bad event.
Some people enjoy this, look at telenovelas, look at romance shojo mangas.
Granted I have to agree with you, it gets tiring after a while and even if the author gives the MC a small win at some point, it is never the victory we want to see: a win against his subservience to Lacey and her lies, a win against his simp attitude.
We get a weak MC, that is never able to express his emotions or act on them and even when he does, everything is erased in minutes after some manipulation and we are back to square one, the emotional growth and payoff is non existant, unless you consider that now he gets excited if other people fuck lacey, this is not the promised emotional payout, it's a fetish fulfillment (this is honestly the only part that I truly dislike as it feels extremely forced).
Let me make you an example: in musicals, you have a nice predefined structure, the protagonist will sing about what they WANT and the villain will sing about themselves and what they ARE.
In this story MC wishes and wants are never fulfilled, he has to compliment Lacey for the slut dress, he has to accept everything she and their friends do to him, all the while demonizing his natural feelings.
Would someone with so much trouble with his emotions be able to do so? Obviously not, we would get at least some lashing out, but this is a way for the author to create an MC without agency so that the storytelling can go on and for fetishes to be fulfilled.
His jealousy about Lacey, which is absolutely warranted, as jealousy is lack of trust about your partner, is dismissed over and over as a demonic sin.
So as the best romance shojo manga, we get thrown in a loop if tragedies, issues and misunderstanding that could have been resolved by saying something are kept going to create artificial situations.
The dialogues after a while feel very unorganic and curated, it is difficullt to find true feelings behind them and MC is able to change his emotions at a moments notice, this why the author need to abuse the "emotional" tag in dialogues, because it is not clear to the reader.
For example Imagine how much more impactful the promotion to IT director arc would have been if MC feelings were directed towards loyalty and affection for Jeanette, if his first thought would be "I am betraying my friend, I owe her and now I get this chance and she doesn't, I feel bad about it because I care for her" insrtead of "white man vs black woman yadda yadda" which completely dehumanize them and makes them a statistic.
Imagine how much more impactful the discussions between Anna and Mia about the messages Mia sent to MC or Mia and Lacey during the suicide would have been if they spoke about MC feelings and emotions instead of dismissing his whole personality as "Male Ego".
They know MC, they know his weaknesses, it could have been very personal and a way to show the connection between individuals, instead we get a generic comment, MC becomes a (debatable) statistic.
Another example, we get told over and over that Lacey has very blurred memories, but then she spends most of the time describing every single sex act perfectly, remembering each dick shape and size (including while MC is about to kill himself), assigning names and behaviours to her partners even better than Mia.
Would someone with a blurred or damaged memory be able to do so? Obviously not, it is just a way for the author to force feelings and maker her disgusting (or exciting if you are a person that enjoys humiliation) to the reader.
We get told that Lacey rejects Jared touching her breasts, while we discover that a minute before he was groping her ass like everything is normal and he was already groping her in the bathub. Would this happen in real life? would that make sense? Obviously not, since Lacey is very familiar with sexual touch (and abuse) and tells us over and over how she despises people coming on to her in the wrong environment.
So either she is enjoying it and she is cheating or ir all becomes nonsensical at best and bad writing at worst.
I wrote extensively about the other various inconsistencies and unresolved arcs, the tennis practical joke, Lacey laughing with Jared, the bathub incident , the Damian incident and the lies about Barty are only a few of them.
That said, you felt that the game is silly, you felt anger at MC and Lacey's actions.
You felt something, which is more than what can be said about many games here (which have a different purpose, I'm not kicking anyone down).