- Jun 24, 2018
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He did care, the story just fell into the same trap a lot of stories that try to deal with morality fall into. The game assumes you're also a human for obvious reasons and thus understand his perspective of being pro-human. It's being anti-human, or in other words a misanthrope, that usually needs to be explained because it's the unnatural perspective for most.
The actual idea that's being played with is that monster girls preying on humans are no more evil than a wolf preying on a wounded deer calf. Nature is just nature, but from the perspective of an empathetic sapient species, it can only be defined as cruel. And oh boy, is it worse than many think. There are species that eat their own kids. Sea otters will hold theirs ransom to force mothers to give up their food, and they also rape baby seals. If the seals resist, they drown them first, then continue raping them.
What throws a wrench in this is that despite acting on their instincts, monsters in this game are mostly sapient too. That's why it's hard to feel sorry for them, but what Luka is doing is saying that acting on their instincts isn't inherently evil and that it would be to their benefit if they worked alongside humans to prevent needing to, then punish those that continue to hurt people justly the way we do with humans. Kinda of the vampire problem, with it being unrealistic for modern vampires to need to kill or really even harm humans, they could very easily coexist in the modern world if all they need is blood.
It's just really badly written, especially when it comes to kinks like vore which indicate an especially cruel monster (or angel) because it shouldn't be necessary for them. Luka definitely shouldn't be letting these monsters go. In a more realistic setting (which this isn't trying to be), Luka's realization that monsters are no different than humans would inherently also mean that they can choose to be just as heartlessly cruel and thus need to be stopped and punished.
Kind of long winded, but IMO the point is that Luka does care about humans. His whole thing is stopping the monsters after all. He just doesn't want to kill them, even if he should in some cases. From the perspective of other monsters though, his reluctance to see monsters as lesser beings and outright murder them says a lot of good things about him.
This contrasts with the traditional RPG "red is dead" where you kill enemies presented to you without question without stopping to consider you murdered people just because they were in the way. Maybe they were wronged, maybe the bandits were just starving civilians abandoned by their lords who are trying to survive (like many bandits historically were), and yes, they were criminals, but maybe not you-have-the-objective-right-to-apathetically-execute-them criminals.
But we don't think about that normally for good reason. Monster Girl Quest isn't a game meant to be taken all that seriously, obviously, but as-written Luka definitely does care about humans, even if it isn't always portrayed well in the attempt to 'humanize' monsters, literally and figuratively.
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