Taleria
Posts: 46
7/12/2014
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I'm sorry, but I have to complain. It's the glut of romantic storylines. It's on opportunity cards, storylets, even in Lodgings. I mean, I get that romance is emotional and dramatic and yada yada, but I feel like it's sort of forced on me by virtue of the writing. The heiress and the mud man, the struggling artist/model, the honey addicts, the Affectionate/Quiet devils, tattooed spy, revolutionary firebrand...Like, can't people have relationships that aren't romantic? I think the thing that really triggered this gripe is the Nemesis storylet I just played, where it asked me who I'm avenging. I saw two options for romance. There were two for family as well, but neither option was the one I wanted, which was avenging a parent. *sighs* Oh, I also wanted an option to avenge a best friend, but I chose "Brother" as the closest option to what I wanted.
I guess I just don't like having it assumed that I want to flirt with everyone I meet. The only solution is to not play those storylines, but that's not feasible for a first character, IMO.
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Taleria No Loitering requests, please. Menace help is accepted, but no more than two requests per person. Not interested in cats. Other invitations are fine.
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serguma
Posts: 65
7/12/2014
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In the deepest matters of the Bazaar always look to love.
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/serguma
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Snowskeeper
Posts: 575
7/13/2014
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As Serguma has already indicated, love is extremely important to the Bazaar for reasons you will doubtless discover on your own, should you continue to play. That's part of the reason romantic storylets are common.
If you like, you can pretend your character is manipulating the individual in question. Or you can just decide they're non-canon relationships as far as you're concerned.
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S.F., a midnight midnighter and invisible eminence. Impossible to locate them, personally, but there are dead drops and agents.
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Dorian Foster
Posts: 24
8/4/2014
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theodor_gylden wrote:
Dorian Foster wrote:
I'm less focused on the romantic storylets, myself. However, what is frustrating is when your character has a spouse--yet the cards keep showing up. And showing up. And...
Well, there was the House of Chimes. There were a pair of great storylines in there, but er... without going into specifics, part of it made me feel like I was paying for access to a certain form of rentable room.
edited by dorianfoster on 7/16/2014
I would like to chime in and say that I shouldn't like romantic options to be taken out for all married PCs -- polyamory, free love, and open marriage are all things I like to play, that are made impossible in most narrative games. But being able to go 'no, sorry, I'm monogamous' and not be hassled about it again would be a fine compromise.
It would be. No one's advocating removing the free love options, by the way.
I'm merely tired of them. Repeating, 'not interested, not interested, not interested' gets monotonous! I feel like plastering a sign to my chest and parading around with a little flag. And then I feel sort of creeped out, because they obviously are stalking me, just for a view of my beauteous stockings, while leaving behind writing composed of sorrow-spider webbings and telling me about our forever-futures as revealed by the readings of sacred mushroom spore tea.
Ahem.
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Loon
Posts: 379
7/13/2014
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Also, you can leave out many of these storylets without great much damage to your game. Though I would play through the story of the secular missionary and through that of the revolutionary firebrand, if I were you...
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My main character Krawald can be found at http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Krawald and welcomes all social actions bar photographers.
My alt Loogan Cuthoat can be found at http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Loogan~Cuthoat and welcomes all social actions bar cats and photographers.
My alt Ally Mooney can be found at http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Ally~Mooney and welcomes all social actions including patronage, though they are a bit confused by cats in boxes.
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Golden Caramel Freedom Fries
Posts: 24
7/15/2014
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As mentioned, there are various memorable npcs that aren't pursued/involved in romantic storylines. I do want to mention, however, that with the Sardonic Music-Hall Singer there is an option for such a fling, and if you find amatonormative language off-putting you probably won't like how it's presented. A game can be thematically emphatic on romance, yes, without leaning on that bias. Unfortunately, such is the nature of relying heavily on euphemism to portray a certain class of liaison. (Recurringly, a tendency to refer to 'education' of some sort, but I digress.) Amatonormative phrases are commonplace, and, in talking around the subject, the writing stumbles into that.
Characterization of the player character... yeah, it's a text game. One that likes to inject flavor and nuance and tends not to get into technical detail when it comes to description. What I find difficult to justify/avoid is the means of obtaining goods, even through item conversion. Can't believe how often straitlaced so-and-so resorts to swiping this or that, but hey, the tutorial was about breaking out of jail. And, as it turns out, the story of the game is about love: dodging it, losing it, being horrified by what happens because of or to achieve it.
And that aspect only heightens during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose (nicely timed to coincide with Valentine's). There was even an in-character survey question on love this year, where the platonic answer gets dismissed by the npc doing the asking. To be fair, that was during the Feast. But yeah.
Interestingly enough, the paucity of (late-game) spousal options stands out all the more due to the focus on romance. What, seduction happening left and right, but commitment essentially boils down to either-or? The recent allowance for player-to-player marriage definitely opens that up, and yet I find that the increase in social actions leaves me hoping for more, something categorically platonic or even inimical...like two-person K&C. One could argue that the current range of social interaction does permit such relationships, but the same could be said for romance. (Nursing someone else's wounds, for one thing. Or dinner. Is that eating in or eating out?) Romantic partners even have special 'seen with' status. No such labels for potential best friends and nemeses. And definitely no marriage-level bonuses. So yeah, it's lopsided.
Social actions aside, since they're all really optional - the only unavoidable, or almost unavoidable, romancing that happens can be dispelled as flavor text, I think. As far as I know, it's possible to pretend that one never succumbed to the charms of the Secular Missionary or the Revolutionary Firebrand. You can tell them both off at the end too. And steal their stuff.
Just as rampant thieving can be taken with a grain of salt, so too the rampant flirting? I have a character who usually tries to avoid both, and not always to great success. There's enough content for me to traverse, although I do wish for more. Not that I've hit the content boundary yet. (Gotta pace it out!)
Like I said, I hope that the scope broadens for what's possible. And there are way more petpanions than spouses, though that might be because of the effort put into writing courtship and whatnot. I hear player weddings are hell of a grind too, laden with juicy text, though I don't begrudge them the wedding planning and would not expect to seeing anything similar implemented, even if an equivalent scenario could be contrived. (Jump through these hoops to earn the honor of...? Lack of recognition is sadly reflective of general society. Marriage has a cachet that other relationships don't, even if the romantic element is relatively modern.) So far I've done without trying that part of the game. Maybe an alt of mine will eventually get there. But if he does, it'll probably be to elope.
It's actually my main character who steers clear of seduction when I don't decide to flat out ignore some of the text. My other characters were off-shoots from the decision to characterize my main that way - a decision I made before I really got to know what Fallen London was like. Yes, trying to avoid romance means cordoning off whole sections of the game, but isn't hitting every card and doing everything the game has to offer basically constructing a character who is crazily multi-talented and over-involved? Speaking of which, definitely take a look at this approach if you haven't already. Personally, I try to spread some of the storylets between my characters. And initially, I used them for exploring the options on storylets that could only be played once per. Now, my main character is still slowly, incrementally exploring different areas, while someone else is amassing items and echoes and hoarding not spending, and the still-technically-a-bachelor-but-who-knows-how-things-are-going-at-this-point is eating up all my spare time constructing messages back and forth. Sorry, that was irrelevant. But it is useful to have supporting alts to try out the stuff that the first character hasn't.
To summarize, I do agree with the general gist. The flavorful writing and the direction in which it leans. The choice of euphemism, with the underlying assumptions. A lot of it is up for interpretation, but there's still the nudging and the overall sense of romance in the air.
I hope you enjoy the game despite all that. I did, and also the repetition of storylet-grinding has helped with ignoring any overtones purely through a "seen it a million times, clickety click click, now where's my stuff" response. As for new content? With the exception of the Exceptional Rose business (which was back in February/March anyway) it doesn't look like romance will feature heavily, at least not on the surface.
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Golden | Caramel | Freedom Fries
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Rackenhammer
Posts: 354
7/12/2014
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It's not exactly easy to represent all possible ways in which a character can feel, especially in a game that has to rely on detailed text to be compelling. It's not easy to write one character well, let alone all manner of possible characters. You only get full freedom of character determination if you're actually writing the words yourself.
To a certain extent, it requires a bit of cognitive dissonance, a bit of explaining away, to have full control over a character in any RPG, just from the limitations of the medium. If it's any comfort to you, there are non-romantic relationships that form the center of many stories here. The Four Friends (The Regretful Soldier, Repentant Forger, Wry Functionary, and Sardonic Music-Hall Singer) are probably the best known.
And like Owen said, the plethora of romantic possibilities ties back to the main theme of the world/game, though admittedly it does come as a bit of a surprise when you first realize just how central love is to the whole business.
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"DO NOT TRUST HAPPY ENDINGS. DO NOT FEAR SAD ENDINGS... NEITHER ARE ENDINGS."
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Mathieu Psmith: The Bard of Lost Children, loving husband, and a fixture of the artistic set. Can never resist making a show of things...
Irene Psmith: Adopted Daughter of Mathieu. Specializes in Information, Acquisitions, and the Acquisition of Information.
Vaughan Montblanc: Once a frontiersman of Western Canada, he now practices medicine in London. His discretion may be absolutely trusted.
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