The Phantom Men-ness
I missed this post from @balioc the first time around, found it interesting.
What silver-and-ivory said re: interesting but flawed post, and also
“ Hell, you can hold everything in its normal null state, and get the Default Human With No Characteristics At All. Who is a dude. In particular, it’s the supernally bland dude who serves as the player character in dating sims. The idea is that you can project yourself onto him because he’s such a total nullity. Leaving aside the question of whether that’s a good idea, narratively speaking…you couldn’t even begin to do that with a girl, right? “Dating sims directed at women are totally a thing; to my knowledge many of them have no faces or even no physical appearance; at the extreme some games like HuniePop let you choose your character’s gender (and a lot of non-dating-sim games for that matter). This isn’t required though; the same thing is done in fiction and TV, see: Bella from Twilight.
I think separating games which go out of their way to not describe or show the player’s stand-in from ones which DO present a character who is intended to be a generic player stand-in would be useful here.
That said, I don’t agree with balioc, because there’s two very different types of supernally bland dudes who star in dating sims: the Cool Guy Who You Want To Be, and the Nice But Completely Useless Dweeb. Otome game protagonists all tend to be on the completely useless side in my experience, but there’s a lot more variation in their personalities and appearances beyond “the field they are Very Cool at” or “the dweeby thing they like” respectively.
(Discounting subversions like, say, Shiki Tohno. Who appears to be a sad-but-nice dweeb until you realize he’s a magical serial killer.)
It’s probably bad form to insert myself into a critical discussion of my work, so I’ll constrain myself to the very narrow issues in this thread, but…
The telling point, I think, is that you can set up your protagonist as a Cool Guy or as a Useless Dweeb without doing a single damn thing to change his behavior, dialogue, or appearance. You stick your medium-height dude with short dark hair in the middle of the situation, you have all the pretty girls react to him, and suddenly you know what kind of story is being told here – what the game is presenting as the essence of the Dude Fantasy.
Yeah, I wouldn’t use Tohno as an example here. Or Shirou Emiya, for that matter. They’ve both got a lot of “residual” protagonist blandness, but the story is in fact clearly at least trying to focus on them and their personalities and their choices.
Dating sims for women are indeed a thing, of course. In my limited experience, they either give the protagonist real characterization or just hide her entirely a la Doom Guy.
And I feel the need to point out that we’ve had a couple years’ worth of very active cultural discourse revolving around Bella Swan’s personal attributes. Maybe Meyer was trying to make her a Bland Default Everywoman, but if so, she failed hard.