While I appreciate the defence, it's totally okay for someone to come into my thread and tell me they have an issue with one of my characters or the way I handled something. If you want to be an artist, you need to know how to filter honest criticisms from bad-faith trolling, and Animalistic saying "I don't like her because she decides what wishes she wants to grant and how" is a totally fair thing to say. I want this thread to be a place people can talk about my work; I don't want it to be a hugbox.
(That said, please do not ask me about Berwyn; there is nothing new to add to that discussion.)
Oma deciding which wishes to grant in earnest and which ones to Monkey Paw is the whole basis of her story and character arc, meaning that Animalistic is correct: Oma is deliberately bitchy and difficult for
every single wish the player can make - that's the point - and she only reverses course after you've proven to her that you aren't like all of her other masters, and you have the strength of character to finally give
her something that
she wants. Her story is a moral lesson on hubris, humility, and karma - on treating others how you want to be treated, and whether you, as a character, should be trusted with power over someone else. If you only use Oma to try and fulfill your personal greed, she eventually has the last laugh when she vanishes into the lamp and you've essentially wasted your three wishes on nothing. But if you show Oma empathy first, then you're rewarded with your wishes as you
intend them and not as you
phrase them. Oma is meant to be a story and a lesson as much as she's meant to be yet another waifu and a way to experience your deepest fantasies in a game like this.
Now, that said, there
is an argument to be made about the nature of a game like CoC2, where the focus is you, the player - as noted in the narration describing everything in second person - and how you, the player, want to play the game. Some people wouldn't stand for someone like Oma constantly getting the upper hand despite them being the 'master' in the relationship. Some people just want to be an asshole and, I don't know, beat up Lyric because they know Lyric would smile and thank them for it. The game isn't giving them these options and they feel like they're being slighted or misinformed when the game purports having 'freedom of choice,' particularly since it's implied with the Corruption stat.
However, CoC2 never advertised that it's a game like that. Having the freedom to burn down Hawkethorne or, well, beat up Lyric, was never a thing that was advertised for the game, and there are a handful of reasons for that:
- The general audience of these games are
not people that want to run wild and kill enemies and play as villains. The silent majority of our playerbase enjoys CoC2 for the feel-goods of our stories - this is a
porn game. It's fine to have more fetishistic content like futas or taurs or hyper or whatever, but as soon as you put in something particularly fringe, such as glorified violence, gore, vore, death, etc, you're actively pushing away that audience that's just there for the porn. It's one thing to say "this isn't for me;" it's another to say "I find this revolting."
-- Oma is meant to be one of those feel-goods: yes, she's a difficult woman, but as soon as you prove to her that you're different, she changes immediately and now she's much more friendly and willing to do stuff with you. People like success stories; they like progression; the porn hits harder if you like the character. There is an audience that wants her dead and gone, but this isn't a story for them.
- Like it or not, CoC2 can only exist thanks to Patreon, and we are therefore beholden to their terms of service. They're notoriously anti-furry and we're already skirting the line enough with that alone; introducing something more extreme like beast porn or violence could put people's entire livelihoods in jeopardy.
- It'd be an enormous amount of work to introduce the possibility to 'burn down Hawkethorne' just to appease a vanishingly-small subset of people that want to be villains.
Now, like I said: it's one thing to say you don't like a character. Lord knows people have told me they don't like Lyric because they come off as infantile or Zo because she's furry. Those are valid complaints! A game as big as CoC2, just as there's bound to be something for everyone, not everyone is going to like everything. An
invalid complaint would be to come in here and, I don't know, call me a dog fucker because Zo is furry or something. Saying you don't like Oma is valid, but understand that 1) unless you're subbed to my Patreon and you're reading the whole document, you don't know her full story or arc, and 2) if your request to fix her is to
punish her - remember, Oma is a prisoner to the lamp and a slave to whoever possesses it, and your idea of making her story better is to
punish her further - then perhaps her story was not meant for you from the start.
I know that this is late in development and that I should have suggested this sooner, but do you have any intentions on writing a wish that screws her over in some way.
The more I read about her, the more I do come to hate her.
Edit:I wonder how she would ""Monkey paw"" that one.
She would grant it by teleporting the lamp into the sky, where it would promptly fall back down. By your very wording, nobody would be able to find it in the sky. It just wouldn't be there for long.
