Thank you, I know what an antagonist is. I also know that you don't strictly need an antagonist to create conflict, and an antagonist doesn't need to be a character. There are plenty, PLENTY of stories in games here on f95zone that proves that very thing. And, before you say anything, many of them have arguably better stories too. This is not a dig on Power Vacuum, I think it's a fantastic game but the overarching plot is simply not its strongest draw. Which is another reason why a character like the grandfather is so superfluous. The overarching story structure doesn't take itself too seriously anyway, so being anal about having a strict antagonist is misplaced. Sure, for people that are into NTR it makes a lot of sense. For people who are NOT into NTR, all he does is serve as a rotten spot on the apple.
So in so many words, that's a false dichotomy. We don't need either this grandfather or some hottie like Erik to be the antagonist. We strictly don't need one at all, and if we are to have one there are plenty of other ways to do so, *cirumstances* can be an antagonistic driving force. You can have antagonists that are turned into deuteragonists. Or a million different ways to achieve the same thing.
But honestly, that's all moot because rewriting the entire structure of the story is a bigger ask than what I'm advocating for. I'm essentially just asking about never having to lay eyes upon that hideous face, or at least as little as humanly possible, and certainly NEVER see him near any of the girls. I could find that meeting the grandfather once early on, while NOT groping one of the girls, would be at least close to necessary. That could be acceptable to me. But after that, in the non-NTR version, his existence on screen simply cannot be justified. Every single impact he has on the story could easily be presented without showing him at all. Make him an invisible influence, something stories do literally all the time.
It's not *just* that he's a boner killer, although he is that to the extreme, it's that he quite literally leaves a foul taste in my mouth that no amount of good things happening after it can get out. His detriment on the entire experience of playing the game is so great that even after experiencing one of truly amazing sex scenes in this game, I find myself not thinking about how good the sex scene was, but how much I truly loathe that he's part of the same story, and how much that spoils it for me.
Rewriting scripts and code isn't necessarily the massive amount of work you make it out to be, and yes, I do expect an advertised NTR-free route to actually be NTR-free. The very blatant threats of NTR is still way too close to NTR in what's supposed to be a non-NTR route.
