Would be good if you could add the tag that the game is female mc only. Went in thinking that I can choose my gender like some of your other works.
sure but that still doesn’t make it the end of the world if someone wants gender-inclusive options. the original commenter wasn’t asking for the otome aspect to be changed anyway; they were just asking for a female protagonist to be specified in the tags (“otome” has lost a lot of its meaning lately, so just saying it’s an otome game may not be clear) so your response was pretty unnecessary
Yeah, Marlo's right. Technically they should use Amare, but the name for this genre, though correct, doesn't seem to be well known yet. I've seen MANY amare novels labeled as otome, which has led to or is in conjunction with the confusion over what is and isn't an amare rather than otome.
There's actually only a handful of times I've even seen the label used.
Please do not take someone's genuine confusion over amare vrs otome as an attack against vn/ifs catering exclusively toward women. Amare only very recently (within the last four years) was recognized as a subgenre and there's not been much effort to educate anyone about these differences.
The developer, while expressing confusion, has not expressed any difficulty over adding 'female protagonist' to the tags, which helps clear up confusion and even helped some people find this interesting otome game.
I think as a dev, and I know others feel the same, it can just feel like we're being ragged on from all angles sometimes. The initial comment felt a bit snippy to me, though of course that could just be my interpretation of it and my aforementioned defensiveness!
The OP is familiar with my work, and I suppose in my initial response I assumed that meant they understood that my game pages tend to be pretty representative of the content. If there is a gender chooseable MC, that is mentioned on the page and the game is tagged with a wider range of genres. BUT you know what they say about assumptions, lol. My mistake, truly :)
I understand that there is some people who use the otome tag erroneously, but I also think there are a (not insignificant) group of us that just generally view the tag differently.
My games are made for a primarly female/woman/feminine audience, with male LIs, and I do not think a pronoun option changes that they are spiritually and functionally otome, and I think it's the same for some other devs who use the otome tag with pronoun/gender options. Until amare is a popularised term, it's also just untenable for many of us to avoid the otome tag when, as I said, the games are functionally otome.
Just my two pennies, not trying to debate that this game being tagged otome + female protagonist is the right move :)
I sure know what that feels like! I think we all feel that way sometimes, which is why a little grace and communication goes a long way.
And it sounds very possible that you've an unpleasant history with the OP that i'm not aware of (I'm very sorry for any nasty comments you may have recieved from anyone for any reason ever. There's no excuse for that), but what me and several other people were seeing was a bunch of very angry, accusatory sounding responses by other fans of your work targeting someone who just seemed confused and dissapointed, asking for the only clarification they knew of.
And that did not seem very fair or nice, so I thought it would be good idea to try and increase understanding and facilitate a less hostile conversation between everyone as I believe it to be born out of a perception gap.
So I'm glad we're able to have this conversation and want to thank you for having it. <3
There's room enough on the internet for both amare and otome fans, especially since there's a lot of overlap as you pointed out and should actually be allies. Even if I do respectfully disagree that Amare is women oriented anymore than reading itself is. 'Tis for everyone and I personally know of several men, women, and enbys who adore them.