I´m not judging the fans of this game, but truth is, as other previous and controversial comment says, that LikesBlondes is toying with topics like NTR, men being cuckolded by lesbians, male impotence and male dominated by women. The dev is not entering into that kind of themes to the full so far, but that´s the "smell" of this game the last updates.
I'll give you the male impotence thing, but the author pulled that from the inspirational material (aka VTM), he didn't invent it himself. If I were in his position with the freedom to pull the things I liked from the inspirational material while leaving those I didn't behind, I'd have either left it behind or enabled the MC to pick up some blood dolls earlier in the game so it could be much more quickly resolved. So I can empathize with your disappointment on this one.
I'm not really seeing the NTR or lesbian cuckolding however. And it would be odd for someone who has existed as long as Sharon to have no prior relationships. Not wishing to believe the worst of an Ex is not the same thing as NTR. Furthermore Sharon is only in a dominant position because she's been a vampire much longer than the MC and was given responsibility for the MC's education; she's not domineering at all. In the most recent updates she's even expressed a bit of submissiveness towards the MC.
First of all, the MC is obliged by the plot to romance Sharon. He can mess up things with her, but he can't decide not to see Sharon as a romantic interest. He can't start treating her just like a mentor and nothing more, or leave her and go to follow his own path with another girl.
This is a common criticism of many visual novels. They're railroads with insufficient choices. This has much more to do with the author wanting to reduce branching and thus the amount of work needed to write the story than female domination.
There are other female characters, but they are just secondary characters.
I grant you that Sharon is the most significant female character in the game and anyone who very strongly dislikes either the lack of choice regarding her relationship with the MC or the tenor of the relationship itself will probably not like the game much either.
But he can´t make the girl fall in love with him either. Sharon treats him like a pet dog.
Sharon treated the MC like a fledgling vampire for much of the game. Yes she was a bit patronizing, but given that she was for all practical purposes his patroness, that patronizing attitude isn't surprising. He was an ignorant newb, and he was spouting what sounded like nonsense to her. So of course she wasn't going to take some of his seemingly more outlandish statements seriously in the beginning. And he didn't exactly do a good job of explaining what he was seeing in his visions either. He just assumed that Sharon would believe him and acted surprised when she didn't. He missed a great opportunity to convince Sharon when he had that vision from the past of Sharon and Astrid in bed together. I can just imagine the expression on Sharon's face had he described that past event in detail.
Since he's useful as a helper, she gives him some petting from time to time,
It's more than that. I think it's pretty clear she's falling for him. I'm sure he'd have bedded Sharon by now, if Astrid hadn't crashed the party. That's why the MC had arranged for the blood doll to show up. Instead we got a scene with Carmen, which I still enjoyed.
and the rest of the time humiliates him with her indifference and her mocking towards his romantic advances.
I wouldn't call it humiliation. She just didn't take the seemingly ridiculous statements the newb vampire was making seriously, and it took awhile for her to recognize that the MC wasn't a typical newb. And what you call mocking I call flirting. She isn't being mean about it, she's teasing him affectionately.
And the MC accepts that because... as other people says in a previous comment, he´s a pussy.
The MC gets very few choices in the game, too few in my mind, and I don't like it when the MC acts like a dunderhead either, but I also sympathize with the desire to avoid branch proliferation.
Likesblondes didn't make the MC a strong and charismatic character, even being a vampire. His dialogues are not really funny or witty, for example. And the worst, he's even mostly an eunuch if he don't drink blood, and he can't even drink blood every time he needs it...
I actually agree with you here, but I also don't consider it the end of the world. The MC's personality is kind of blah, and there are times where something he says or does causes me to do a face palm. Those are the times when I wish there were more choices in the game. Nevertheless, there are enough other things about the game I like that I'm willing to roll with it.
At first is OK: the poor MC has started a new "life", knows nothing, and is clumsy when try to get Sharon's heart, but at the en of the day, he gets some wins... but them, Astrid appears, and it's obvious the MC in this game is right now just the third wheel into a quarrel of two old lesbians.
I disagree. It's Astrid who is the third wheel, the discarded and still scheming ex who is attempting to get between Sharon and the MC.
The conversation of Astrid during the last update is specially humiliatingly for the MC (it means, the player). "You think that you the center of Sharon's world but you are not, that's me" "The couple of times she has opened her legs for you means nothing compared with the decades we spent together" "Hahaha, she didn't even opened her legs for you, right?" Morally, the MC is being humiliated and cuckolded by lesbians. Because what Astrid is saying, is true.
Astrid is a scheming and manipulative bitch. Just because she says something doesn't make it true. Sharon discarded her and she's bitter about it. So of course she's going to say hurtful things, and she's observant enough to put the worst spin possible on the things she observes in a bid to drive a wedge between the MC and Sharon.
The MC is not the center of the world of Sharon, Astrid is.
I don't think the evidence supports this statement.
They loved each other (or probably, Shanon was Astrid's submissive bitch) for decades, then for some reason they had a fight,
We only have Astrid's word on them being lovers for decades. I'm skeptical about that as I strongly suspect Astrid is exaggerating here.
Sharon felt deceived or betrayed and, instead forgetting Astrid (the healthy thing to do after a bad break up) she started to feed a bitterness about her.
Astrid is the one who is bitter, although she's pretty good at hiding it most of the time. Nevertheless Astrid's bitterness is evident from the MC reading her emotions in the morgue, from her alliance with the archon to enslave Sharon and make the MC her toy, and her willingness to break the Masquerade by sending some hunters after Sharon and the MC.
And that means she already has intense feelings about her. And now Astrid is plotting to get back Sharon. It´s supposed that the lifespan of a vampire is eternity. They were lovers for decades, enemies for some decades more, and probably in a few decades more they will be lovers again, since Sharon seems to have a "weak spot" for Asley, as the bald guy (the other pet dog of Sharon) says.
This is what Astrid wants the MC to think, but it strikes me as a combination of exaggeration and wishful thinking on Astrid's part. The MC would be a fool to believe her.
Being forced to romance Sharon from a "beta" position, as a mere subordinated begging for some attention from her, and with an antagonist that is a manipulative bitch and has so much power over her,
It's the classic, Boy sees Girl, Boy chases Girl, Girl acts hard to get to make things more of a challenge, Boy catches (and beds) Girl. In this case it's just that the Girl is his mentor, and it's taking longer than usual for him to bed her due to his little impotency issue. I'm not really seeing Astrid as having "so much power over" Sharon.
means that the dev is flirting with forcing the player to enter into the same field of feelings of NTR, cuck, male domination and humiliation. And we can expect that the main drama in the future will be Astrid having more and more power over Sharon, and gaining her closer and closer. I don't think the dev is going to enter full in NTR and cuck, but right now, is already caressing it with the point of the finger.
And I don´t like that. Like the other user says, I don't play a game to feel that my romantic interest is thinking in his old lesbian lover more than in me. I don´t judge, again, if others like that kind of feelings when they are playing an erotic game, but I´m not into that fetish, and I don´t like the path this game is following since the appearance of Astrid. I could think in supporting the dev, but obviously, not like that. I like games in which, if the player adopts stupid decisions, there is a bad ending. But I don't like that the dev doesn't gives real options to the player and puts him, as the MC, into a humiliating position for starters. I play games to get good feelings, not humiliation and cuck, even if in a soft form.
I'm not seeing the humiliation or the cuck, just women with past histories, a newb vampire MC who in the first half of the game needs to prove himself, a perhaps unwise amount of screen time spent on the MC's impotence issue, and a game that could use more choices because there are times when the MC behaves like a blockhead.
