This is actually a common misconception, incest was largely frowned upon even in medieval times.
Fire Emblem fans when they won’t play the games instead of learning about them via horny reddit memes.
Anyway I can’t believe this thread isn’t locked yet but if it’s gonna stay up anyway, then: the actual reason this is a bad idea is because FE romhacks are just a weird space to explore topics like this. You’ve got the silly looking map sprites and the kinda cartoonish combat animations and the cute mini portraits and all these bright colours. It’s the same reason why a lot of the edgier pokemon romhacks get joked about all the time, they’re just kind of absurd in context.
Exploring themes like sexual taboo is not a moral failing and can be done within the realm of fiction for sure, but it’s an awkward fit for a GBA romhack. Moreover, the reasons you give for why you’re interested in exploring it are, bluntly, bad reasons, and don’t justify making such a leap. Its inclusion would, very likely, make your script worse. There are just several substantially better ways to do the emotional beats you want to do.
The vast majority of the people in this thread taking the admirable pro-incest stance are doing so with a really weird “yes, king, don’t let them cancel you!” vibe. Guys, Game of Thrones was an absolute cultural cornerstone for like a decade. People thought that one Lannister guy was like peak fiction, and he was so incestbrained he tried to kill a child over it.
Nobody relevant is actually going to crucify you for writing stories where these things happen; the actual issue is that most people on this forum are not George R R Martin. If you can’t see the reasons why you should try not to include touchy and taboo topics in your gameboy nintendo game romhack, then I’d wager you’re probably not quite ready to handle those topics in a more suitable medium, either.
That’s not meant to be a dig, mind you - when I was an aspiring writer, I also had a moment where I decided I wanted to tackle some weirder, more serious themes in my writing, and I quickly found out that senseless inclusion of these topics is almost always a bad thing. See, for example, how by the end of the thread you’d decided to omit the plot point - the goals you’d stated were simply better served with a lighter touch. Unless you have very good reason to, it’s very rarely correct to apply a freight train of a topic to your script.
Also some quick shout outs
yes you do lmfao, going “you should do the incest thing” by pointing at examples of games where they have really terrible incest inclusions that make their scripts demonstrably worse, or are written so terribly that incest is accidentally implied, is not the silver bullet you seem to think it is.
JasonGodwin7 jumpscare 
again, this absolutely does happen. There have been multiple hacks with these kinds of “dancer sold into sexual slavery” type characters in them that have raised some serious eyebrows, usually because it’s an extremely heavy topic to include and is frequently done so way too nonchalantly. Obviously, these topics can be, and have been, tackled competently and tactfully; that doesn’t mean they’re worth wading into unless you seriously know what you’re doing.
it’s not, but this is a very intentionally obtuse way of approaching this and you know it. Nobody is going to a romhack for a lesson in morality, and the general fearmongering of “people these days will hate you if you include a bad guy bc on twitter I saw the dumbest people ever getting into an argument on the website where the dumbest people ever go to argue!” is turbo-overblown, but like… Your writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you write something morally reprehensible, but do so in a way that makes it seem like you really don’t think that is the case, you are as within your rights to write that as your readers are to think you’re a slimeball for doing so, and so it’s pretty fair to advise that you handle those kinds of topics with an extra degree of tact.
Like, framing this shit as a “be true to yourself” thing is stupid, bc anyone who’s ever done serious writing knows that including every random whim that comes to mind will make for a terrible story, and a big part of the writing process is rigorously testing your ideas to make sure they’re sound. A writer isn’t compromising the purity of their artistic vision if they decide the incest plotline will be distracting to most viewers, they’re just writing a better story.
yes it would lol, people still find that shit weird as fuck with or without offspring. Please, FE gamers, draw less of your worldview from porn. I already commented on how fucking weird the other part of this comment is.
ok I don’t have anything to reply to with perma he’s just based and correct, love you perma 
but also his work is a good example of what I mean, but in reverse; Deity Device deals with some pretty heavy themes of spousal abuse and the like, which could easily come across as tacky or over the top, but is instead monstrously effective at establishing the villains and leads to a lot of really chilling scenes. Permafrost is also, probably, somewhere in the top 3 writers on this whole site. I would not trust most other writers, including some I already like, to tackle those same themes even half as deftly.
Basically;
is still true. Don’t fuck your sister, folks.
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well to be fair someone86 is pretty cordial about the whole thing. Think they’re genuinely asking an opinion about this instead of essentially rallying support for an already pre made decision/stance. Regardless of whose side people are on. A neutral thread to discuss stuff such as this deserves to be open imo
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the thought has certainly crossed my mind and I’m not a huge fan of this thread existing, but the conversation has by-and-large been a lot more self-aware than similar threads in the past so we’re tentatively letting it play out in the hopes that we can get some of the why your edgy plot ideas will make your hack bad written out in longform for once
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I never said “you should do the incest thing”. I would appreciate it if you didn’t put words into my mouth. My issue here is constantly restricting writers to adhere to a certain arbitrary standard of keeping Fire Emblem Romhacks as pure as possible, and each and every time someone shows a desire to move against the flow, there comes the holier-than-thou attitude of “do not put edgy stuff in hacks. You wouldn’t be able to handle it with care, so don’t even try.”
Like this here. Do you not realize how much it looks like pandering and showing favoritism to someone due to the fact that they did things the way you liked, or are just part of your circle? I have not played Deity Device yet, and do not know Permafrost personally or have ever read any of their writing, so what I am supposed to take at face value here, according to you, is to trust in your praises of them, and go along with it just because you brought them up.
This legit has me just… flabbergasted.
*"I, and most of the prominent member of this site, have decided that Fire Emblem Romhack stories should be suited for all ages, and only be predominantly light-hearted/very curated in order to not feature anything that could make players uncomfortable. *
Since we don’t play Fire Emblem or Pokémon Romhacks in order to enjoy both simpler go-getter stories as well as some darker/“edgier” ones, surely every other romhack creator and player feels the same way as we do. And hey, if you do want to see hacks featuring heavier topics, leave it to the writers in our circle, since only they can do it right."
Except us, you know, the people of the website known for spreading and publishing Fire Emblem Romhacks. You know, the very same one you would like to format your story to? 
Nor should we allow them to become someone like him, since we of the policing squad are here ready to stop them in their tracks. And since we mentioned him, yes, Game of Thrones did end up becoming a cultural milestone, but from what I’ve gathered, it also has a very bad and unsatisfying ending.
This reminds me of the attitude here where I lived during the 2000s and 2010s, where the consenus between adults was “cartoons and videogames are just for children”.
Honestly, you might as well close the thread now, because you just came in to basically say "We’re allowing this thread to stay opened becuase we want to see how much those who disagree with us end up embarassing themselves.
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I don’t understand where you’re coming from.
The horror genre is full of bad things happening to good people. And bad things happening to bad people. Were they all depicted tactfully? Or rather, with sufficient tact to satisfy every viewer, even the most sensitive? No, because some people don’t like horror. Some say “Horror isn’t for me” and that’s okay. Some people put themselves through horror not for them anyway, and then complain about the gore in the gore movies and the incest in the incest games. What’s next, complaining about the ero in eroges? Age ratings aren’t there because you’re expected to magically become okay with certain topics upon hitting certain age milestones. They’re there because part of growing up is understanding what Twitter doesn’t: Real is real and fictional is fictional. Real people deserve rights and fictional characters don’t.
Remember when loonies on twitter got mad over Berserk, Redo of Healer, and Goblin Slayer? Redo of Healer wasn’t even good. Artists shouldn’t concern themselves with how concern trolls react to fiction.
If the writer’s artistic vision includes incest, compromising on that artistic vision would be compromising on his artistic vision. If he decides “Actually I’d like it more without it” he’s free to change that artistic vision. But if he changes it for fear of an audience’s reaction, that’s compromising his artistic vision and that’s tragic and inauthentic. Just like I’d be compromising on my theoretical artistic vision for a grim and gritty serious war story if I thought “Actually the audience would probably like this game more if the hero was a bland overpowered half-god half-dragon self-insert wish fulfillment kind of guy with an overpowered magic sword, and one of the girls was a comedy relief buxom clumsy maid, and I deviated from my historical inspirations by ensuring the heroes lived happily ever after instead of dying at the end”.
Fiction isn’t a matter of life and death. The creator of this thread isn’t in charge of a billion dollar company with countless people’s jobs and families depending on him to make the best decisions possible for pleasing as much of the theoretical target audience as possible. This isn’t a kickstarter his reputation relies on. The creator of this thread could make the worst Fire Emblem game known to man and then learn from that mistake and make his next game better. He could even make his next Fire Emblem game bad on purpose as a joke and nobody could stop him. No matter how bad it might end up, it can’t be worse than real games out there being sold for money on Steam and other sites. Anyone complaining about what a fangame developer makes for fun in their own time… would probably be shocked at what gets sold for money these days.
Media Literacy isn’t “If you include something objectionable in your game it must be handled correctly or else”. It’s… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFVRjNG1sSk&t=1s
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I see a bunch of people trying to prove a bunch of nonsense here. Some appealing to pandering and favoritism and “do the stuff the way that I like or perish” (I have to clarify that this is an overstatement).
I do dislike incest, is the main reason why I can’t never enjoy Fates as a game, even if it has amazing gameplay. But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be explore those narrative points in a FE hack.
Obviously it needs the correct context and also don’t overstay it’s welcome once presented. It can be done in multiple ways that it doesn’t feel forced. Taboo topics are always dangerous to put inside any media because most of the people with instantly assume that the author approves that kind of stuff even if it is presented in a way that says the contrary.
Now with that being said, just let me in a funny note, just to break the tension.
The funny
Sex.
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I mean, aren’t there literal age-marks in this site in other to filter content in here? You theoretically can put “edgy stuff” in hacks - it literally is allowed (within reason) in the FEU forums and community, but consider what happens when its delivery is awful or heavily botched.
Things such as bloody sprites (which featured on a hack very long time ago) have been deemed somewhat jarry, and some hacks that tackled trigger warning-able themes either suffer of awful delivery, or have been branded poorly due to outsider reception.
Some of them have been driven away from FEU as a cause of this. There is a place for gritty realism and the ‘horrors’ of the medieval ages, but often slavery, abuse and other sensible subjects are taken in a rather petty way - as someone said, used as shock value rather than as a cohesive part of the plot.
Instead, you’ll just see Dancer on your doorstep with a screenshot with the header of “Why.”, and then a lynchpin will happen. And you know what happens with those lynchpins.
You shouldn’t be tailoring your story to the opinion of others - but you should be braced for them. There are boundaries and limits, and people will call out hacks if the game isn’t of their taste (which lately seems like it’s not a cool thing to do anymore).
Hear me out - Advance Wars: Days of Ruin.
Now that I have said my obligatory ‘Hear me out’, you could argue that potentially the way to pave this issue of “gameplay does not have the same tone as the story” is to endarken the tones. Make the palettes darker, add some sort of “dirty” aspect to your characters, to the UI. Maybe even go all in and make less cartoonish animations while keeping the same GBA-style. Such atmosphere can arguably be achieved.
Then again I’ve heard the Pokemon hacks (Rejuv or smth) are causing mass hysteria so, glad to see they inspired themselves in Fire Emblem’s Peak Fiction.
Isn’t the main difference that the people that are selling things made them to sell? There is a gap between what you make for money and what you make for ‘passion’.
In my honest opinion though - darker themes and edgy ones should be tried and tested further. Can people avoid them? Yeah. But through trial and error we might get someone who brings a solid take on this subject or makes it a hack, or adds an actual “Oomph” for the sake of consequence (which is something that I feel that lacks in many plots and stories, and the ones that apply it are the ones prone to failing miserably).
If issues such as clashing atmospheres or similar come up (such as the game not looking like it should be by its narrative), then the game itself should be changed to adapt to the plot to better sell such story.
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So I think we’ve lost the plot a bit here. OP’s question was about a worry that writing about a controversial topic would have people respond negatively to them. And the reality is that, given that they are a newer writer and have no thematic goals with the controversial topic outside of “spice”, people would have likely responded to the story negatively. Hence the reasons why OP decided against including it.
A lot of people in this thread really value the idea of a “pure artistic vision”, a story beholden to no concerns of backlash or quality made for the sole purpose of expressing oneself. Which is fine, of course, there’s a certain charm in seeing unrestrained expression. FEU content policy is extremely lax in order to facilitate writers exploring as many themes as possible without damaging the personal lives of its owners and operators. People are well within their right to write about 99% of all topics that exist on this site, be they newer writers or experienced ones.
But OP’s goal was very explicitly a desire for a positive response to their writing, and if you want a positive response to your writing, you’re going to have to make changes to your original plans and ideas. There’s a reason first drafts aren’t the final product, after all. Stating the difficulties with exploring darker themes within a FE story format is not some arbitrary standard meant to restrict writers, it’s just a reality that some things are more difficult to write. An “okay” story about a fun fantasy adventure will have a more positive reaction than an “okay” story about more controversial and emotionally charged topics.
It’s possible to use darker themes well in FE, Deity Device is a beloved story in the community despite exploring darker themes of domestic abuse and sexual violence. But given how easy it is to handle these topics poorly, I think it’s best to recommend newer writers to stay away from those darker themes. Especially when there’s no greater thematic goal in mind. Hell, I still consider myself a newer writer, so there’s a lot of darker topics I stay away from. If your goal as a writer is to have people like and enjoy your writing, you will be “restricted” by how you want people to respond to your work.
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My man man, the point was destined to be lost by people that are too entitled to their opinion.
Sadge.
hijacks Thread
You should!
leaves
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Definitely. Keep hearing good things about it.
Well since you keep hearing recommendation of playing it, I’ll recommend it to you too 
.
Anyway, I read some user saying that “if you need to ask people to know wheter to put incest or not in your hack, then maybe you shouldn’t do it”. And this is a wrong line of thinking. Hear me out:
It is always scary to put a taboo in any artistic creation, whatever the taboo is PRECISELY because it is a taboo. We have been taught to never speak about it, much less debate or defend it. The prohibition to speak, debate or defend something is what eventually turns that theme into a taboo. In this sense, it’s perfectly justified for the Someone86 to ask about it, as it isn’t something you would normally ask about or even think about at all. I believe this is a brave approach to take, saying it out to everyone instead of saying nothing and just putting it into his game. And thankfully enough, most people decided to debate about it respectfully.
Anyway @Someone86 , I’d recommend playing both Darius the Conqueror (hackrom) and FE4, all the 3 have a certain approach to these thematic and you could inspire yourself with them, specially with Darius the Conqueror as it inspired heavily in Ancient Greek history and, as such, has a more “realistic” approach to how crude a war in the middle ages could be and everything related to lineage and that stuff.
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Related to that, my opinion is that Chapter 10’s depiction of abuse has an awful delivery to it, and through playing it I kinda have taken a slight disdain to some of its story, with some conversations that come up souring up somewhat the narrative. I would not recommend Darius the Conqueror as a good base to introduce a hackmaker into how to write darker themes.
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You are entitled to your own opinion, of course. It’s fine to disagree. And if it’s as bad as you say, at least it will serve as a bad example. We can learn from bad examples too
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It’s a very petty depiction of it - to the point where it paints more of a “Is there no man that is not an abuser (or potential abuser)” in this game?"
I’m sure you know of both Ch.9 and Ch.10 and the massive shock value that the aforementioned scene has - but in all honesty, it’s a very petty depiction of assault, with how the “double down” is made which honestly is just… bad.
Add that up with the very next convo on Ch. 11 about the mermaid city and the image I’m given is that there hardly is any “good” man in the game.
And yes, we can learn from bad examples - in fact my main takeaway from my last reply above (one more above) was for people to fuck around and find out - and in this case, that fucking around led to a bad delivery.
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Well, not really. After all, they couldn’t exactly make a hyper graphical description of sexual assault or parental abuse, that may be a little too much for some people. I believe it is made as petty as you say precisely to not make it too hardcore.
And in any case, men are never depicted as evil in this game. There are some men that are evil, yes, but it’s never depicted as “every man is bad”, if that’s what you mean. All these men hold positions of power (very history accurate, as the entirety of the game), which makes their evilness even more notorious, making it look like there are no good men there, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t (the protagonists, for example). In any case, most characters in the game, men and women, are grey. Look at Pericles, for example. Or Ulysses and Garrick, or Boudica.
I also agree with that premise, by the way, there is no better master than fucking around and finding out.
My take away with it being petty is that Ch 9 introducing the soldiers abusing the whole town (razing, pillaging) with Darius stopping that. It’s introduction of “The soldiers have assaulted several women.” was a small tip off, but that’s not my core issue with the scene and its showcase.
It is about Ch 10’s ending cutscene where it is mentioned by one of the victims how the soldiers that had been mandated to leave simply abused that one victim right after Darius had left her and before they had to go away - that was what gave me my reason to gripe with it.
This is the “double down” I am refering to and why I consider this showcase ‘petty’, gratuitous, even.
Do also consider how this is pretty much commonplace for the soldiers under Sulla’s command to perform (due to lack of reluctance), which is another thing to ponder on. At times, it feels that almost every man is either perverted, an undercover slaver or racist.
Then again that’s also the state of Twitter.
Well it is based on an age very similar to that of Alexander the Great (which I suspect is the main inspiration for Darius himself, among others). At that time, women were openly considered little more than a property, so it makes sense for Sulla’s soldiers to be this way (specially with such a general, who openly lets them be as much of an ass as he is). And this not only happened in times past’s wars, but in more modern wars as well. I believe the sexual assault in chapters 9 and 10 were more like a way to humble Darius and teach him the consecuences of his naivety. In any case, if you want to keep debating (I’d be glad too) about the game you should DM me. It was fine to mention the game itself, but debating about the game for more than 2 or 3 posts could totally be considered derailing the topic.
Sir, a second longpost has hit the thread
And it’s somehow even longer than the first one. 
So I woke up and I guess some of y’all are a little cross with me. I didn’t plan to post again in this thread, but something about getting called a prominent member of a kind of implied elitist exclusionary cabal of superhackers is just so… exciting. It’s like a spy flick, it’s so cool. This reply probably isn’t gonna help make any of those people less cross, but I’m like bedbound level sick today anyway so why not spend my afternoon debating the artistic value of anime incest?
Gonna reply to some smaller things before delving into the two posts I’m interested in
This is basically what I mean, though. I explain it further below, too, but the basic principle is just that an experienced writer will already have the skills to handle a topic like that, and knows they can include it without drawing (meaningful) ire, and so won’t ask the question at all. To a degree, if you’re asking the question, it kind of already means its inclusion is optional, so if it’s not important enough to be a shoe-in, and you’re not confident enough to execute it, then you should be thinking about ways to get things across without the spooky taboo that’s spooking you. If it is vitally important to you, then the question should be “how do I?” not “should I?”
Just quoting this here to say, broadly, that spensir is basically 100% right, and I’m gonna be echoing some of his points in here just as much as he was echoing some of mine from the first post. There are just flatly things that are harder to write, and have more negative consequence for screwing up, than others - an experienced writer telling you as such isn’t because they’re a stupid prude, it’s almost always bc they’ve walked that road before and know where it leads, and are just bothering to let you know before you decide if you still wanna take that walk.
Yeah, exactly. By retrofitting the AW aesthetic into something grimy and lived in and melancholic and weary, the game was able to prime audiences to expect that kind of tone to carry over into the writing. Video games are a multimedia thing, your visuals need to be in line with the rest of your game. When people bring up the jugdral games as a comparison point, they kinda forget how much darker those games are visually than their GBA siblings.
I’m also gonna repeat this bc I don’t really mention it in the main post - people on this forum are extra wary about these things just because, historically, we’ve seen a lot of tasteless shit get posted. Without naming names, some people in this thread advocating for the “”“artistic freedom”“” angle are themselves people who’ve used their artistic freedom destructively… and are also still allowed to contribute to the forums, share their work, talk in threads like these, etc. Because, again, nobody is actually going to crucify you over any of this shit - if you fall afoul of the content policy, your stuff might be removed, but as Spens mentioned, that content policy is intentionally lax, and it takes a lot of work to actually get the hammer to your account.
One last thing before I get into it:
One of the hard parts of giving writing advice is that it all ultimately boils down to “do it good.” There’s a lot of perceived elitism from some people in here, that I’m saying “only the good writers deserve to have access to all the most fun toys,” but I’m really not. Writing is incredibly hard, and incredibly personal, and gets consumed by people who will feel incredibly personal about it.
It takes a delicate touch to even handle some of the easy, basic stuff - a few misplaced words or an awkward sentence or a flubbed character arc can totally collapse an entire scene in on itself. Things only become more fragile when you bring in topics that immediately put people on guard, or that they might have a strong (or even extreme) emotional reaction to.
When I say “only good writers should handle this,” it’s not bc I don’t want the plebian masses to touch my holy incest plot point, it’s bc I spend a significant amount of time teaching people who are amateur writers how to write better, and part of that is fostering that sense for when a topic is worth including and when it’s better to take a lighter approach.
Is that all understood? Bc if you don’t understand where I’m coming from with this, even after the novel that will ensue from this point on, then our viewpoints are probably irreconcilable.
Okay now that all that’s done, Johnny and Jason’s comments are the ones I’m really here for.
wow, hey man, um, I would appreciate it if you didn’t put words in my mouth or something 
Anyway I’m not part of the evil FEU cabal keeping you from writing what you want to write, dude. You warped my post to be about “only the cool FEU elites can do this thing,” but Permafrost had 0 interaction with FEU before his hack drop, I met him by playing it, and he’s primarily a forum user so we never talk. He’s not part of some super exclusive club, he just writes well.
The reason I use him as an example is because, as somebody who used to be an aspiring writer, aspiring writers have an extremely high tendency to overestimate their own ability to tackle something exceedingly heavy without stepping on any toes. I wanted to show that these things can be done, but that one of the only hacks I’ve seen it done truly well in is one that’s near-infamous for the quality of its writing. I already said you’re well within your right to write such things anyway, but if you share them with other people, you shouldn’t be shocked when toes are stepped on.
However, when I see somebody asking for advice like this, they’re usually not asking if they, specifically and personally, should do this thing; they’re trying to gauge reader opinion, bc it matters to them, and bc it matters to them, I’ll advise in the vein of reader opinion. And, on average, I can assume that the average romhacker is likely writing for their first, maybe second, time ever. It’s not unreasonable to advise somebody that early into the learning process to start with something less volatile and harder to mishandle. That’s why I said, more or less, that if you need to ask the question, the answer is no - an experienced enough writer to handle it will already know that the reason to include it is because it’s necessary to the story or is something they very deeply wish to speak about.
This is obviously mere opinion, but it’s opinion backed by a lifetime of actually working as a semi-professional, now actually professional, writer. I’m not trying to stifle you, I’m trying to share my growing pains so other people might skip past a few of them. Telling somebody “no, you should not do this” does not necessarily mean “nobody should do this,” or “you should never do this,” and viewing such comments as a personal attack is, if anything, just another indication that you should probably practice a degree or two more trepidation.
Uhh I guess I really don’t lmao. Calling it pandering and favouritism to use a positive example is… you just seem really upset about this, man. I wanted a counterpoint to bounce off of to explain that darker themes can be portrayed well with a deft hand. You don’t have to take shit I say at face value, I just wrote a forum post bc this thread’s been haunting the front page for days - his game is free, if you’re curious, go play it. Form your own opinion, maybe you agree, maybe you don’t, I’m not arguing from a place of objectivity lmao. Also, what was that earlier about putting words in mouths?
No, I am referring to us when I say that. People write dark shit on this forum. People praise hacks for including dark shit on this forum. I am in both of these camps - Lady of Masks, for anyone who’s discussed it with me on the discord, is a deeply political script about war crimes with an evil protagonist and a content warning tag for suicidal ideation. When this stuff gets removed from the forums, it’s because it’s being done incredibly tastelessly, not because it’s “edgy.”
Idk how this point always gets misunderstood even when I spell it out so directly. FE romhacks are a bad fit because a.) FE, especially in the GBA era, is literally a franchise made for children and a lot of them use this forum, and b.) far, far more importantly, the aesthetic language of the GBA fire emblems is a poor fit. If you want to do a major asset overhaul, or are exceedingly confident in your ability to manage that tonal dissonance, then sure, absolutely go right ahead. In fact, I encourage you to do so if that is the case.
However, for most people working in this space, they aren’t going to be in either of those two camps, and the GBA format is incredibly restrictive for how you can write (due primarily to screen space) and the GBA aesthetics will clash with the tone of your big heavy moments. It is not insurmountable, but it is just one more reason to reconsider if you want to do all the additional legwork required to retrofit an ill-fitting medium for your ideas.
Writing is a skill. Just as somebody might advise a new artist not cut their teeth on a big public mural, or a new musician not multi-task learning their chords and busking at the subway station, I am advising new writers start with topics they can approach with relative confidence and whose mismanagement isn’t going to offend anybody’s sensibilities, not because those sensibilities need protecting, but because it will be intensely, intensely embarrassing in five years time to have worked out that particular lesson in a public setting.
If you’re extremely confident, or don’t mind an icy reception, then sure, absolutely go for it - again, I downright encourage you to include things that are extremely important to you to include - but this thread isn’t that. It’s a guy asking if he even should, and providing reasons that aren’t sound from a plotting perspective. So… no, this guy shouldn’t, and he correctly landed on that conclusion before I even showed up. But even beyond that, I already mentioned that new writers who are juuust starting to really hit their stride are, by and large, overconfident. I saw it in basically all my writing friends growing up, myself included, and we all grew out of it with work we made in private and now wince about when we remember it. So, if you have that confidence, it is worth double checking for a moment if that confidence is earned, and considering if you’re actually invested in handling a racy topic… or if you’re just into the thrill of trying.
anyway JasonGodwin7 time
Nah, this is the rare “objectively wrong opinion.” Any serious amount of time spent writing will dispel you of this notion VERY quickly, unless your work is VERY half-assed.
As you state, you will find that what your artistic vision is changes fucking constantly. All the time. Half the writing process is about cutting through all the noise of what you think the project is going to be starting out, and what it actually is once you’re knee deep in the mud. You will have ideas that you staked your entire script on that you just kinda realize don’t really matter. You’ll have major new ideas spring up that you’d never even considered, that suddenly become core to the thesis of the entire work. Your artistic vision is malleable, and flexible, and adaptable.
Now, you acknowledge that already, but then you draw a line in the sand, arbitrarily; that considering how a reader might feel about a topic’s inclusion is, somehow, an invalid reason to re-evaluate your work. You throw in a completely absurd example as though it’s relevant, annihilating any shades or degrees one might approach this topic with by pretending it’s all or nothing - “I either have an edgy blood death murder blood story, or baby’s fun time hero adventure!”
It would entirely reasonable to think about your story, and go “I don’t think I’m going to compromise on my main character’s personality even if some people might find it off-putting, and I’m pretty committed to keeping fan-servicey sexuality out of my script… buuuut even if I find it kinda cool, I think readers would just be left with a bad taste in their mouth if I had a full downer ending, so maybe I should tone that back a bit, keep it sad but maybe focus in on a different kind of sadness.”
Once again, I have to say it; if you aren’t capable of conceptualizing how a reader might experience your story, you should not be including really volatile subject, not bc you’re gonna explode instantly if you do it, but because you’re gonna write a bad story. In this case, a bad story where you haven’t even considered if that story might actually hurt somebody. Sorry, elementary school gamers, but the sticks and stones mantra is kind of cope.
This is the core reason why I say this stuff is almost never actually necessary. I’ve, in the past, written stories with indulgently-awful rape plotlines, because I thought it was the best way to sell the horror of a character’s past. In those same scripts, I’ve later realized that it’s a terrible idea, overshoots the mark by a wide margin, and distracts from the core point trying to be made - and also, is a pretty heavy topic to be bringing into the script when it’s not even doing the script any good.
The major difference is, I kept that story mostly to myself. I wrote it for me, while I was still learning, and nobody who was a survivor of SA had to read it. I haven’t always been so lucky; For all the talk of how based and awesome it is to be a totally liberated writer who’ll include anything that strikes their fancy in their work, it actually feels really fucking bad when somebody reads your story and tells you it hurt them, because presumably you do not want to hurt people with your “true artistic vision”, and it’s worth understanding that when you include this stuff in your work, you run that risk. Not that you’ll offend an evil bogeyman online, but that you’ll offend somebody you care about and respect, to such a degree that it leaves them hurting. If you’ve never experienced that, then you know, good for you; my advice will help you keep it that way.
But good writing is, JasonGodwin7. Good writing understands that the work will exist as a part of a reader’s broader world - the reader exists in the real world, has real world experiences, can and will infer some connections between your work and that real world whether you like it or not, and as such, in the interest of being good writing, it understands how to get its point across deftly and consistently.
Also, not to be mean, but I’m gonna be mean; sharing a source and having it be a kinda-clickbait-titled internet outrage piece about fandom drama on twitter is kind of telling on yourself in this discussion. Like, surely you talk to real people in your real life about writing opinions, and aren’t getting your takes from twitter… right JasonGodwin7? You wouldn’t actually believe booktok is representative of the cultural zeitgeist, would you, JasonGodwin7?
(also I fucking knew all of this was just a proxy war for that fucking coffin game)
Rewinding a bit;
Oh I love horror, let’s fucking go.
I’ve been writing horror, and reading horror, for the past year or two now - like, actively with a writer’s eye, not in the more casual sense I did before - and you know what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately? Silent Hill 2.
Silent Hill 2 is an absurdly heavy game, dealing with some incredibly raw and vulnerable kinds of human weakness and fallibility that are absolutely, knife-twistingly perfect in their execution. That the game is willing to delve into those ideas with such single-minded devotion, tuning everything in the entire game towards bolstering those ideas, is part of what makes it one of the best games of all time. It is astonishingly good, a gold standard for how to use dark themes and taboo subjects to paint an incredibly vivid and, importantly, meaningful picture of a man suffering from intense guilt and grief.
But recently, there’s been word of a new team, Bloober, being handed the Silent Hill name. If you’ve played any of the Bloober Team games, you might know they have an extreme and bizarre fixation on having the monster in their games be a personification of a character’s guilt, or trauma, or some other degree of mental health woe… and then having the only way to beat that monster be suicide. Which has connotations.
Their games kind of suck already, yeah? But even beyond that existing level of sucking, the fact that they so frequently end on this note - that the only way to defeat your inner demons is to just die so they stop hurting other people - is disgusting, and not in a “wow that’s such good horror” way, but in a way that reflects terribly on the people writing these games and makes it very difficult to appreciate what few things their games do well.
Because, you see, SH2 tackles its themes well. It has writers who are prepared to reckon with these concepts, and do so in ways that resonate with the reader on a level beyond “woah, that’s so freaky!”
When talking about writing, if all my advice was aimed towards writing some B or C tier shlock, then sure - go include incest for some shock value, or some SA for a nice dose of edgy grit. Whatever, who cares, clearly not you. But if the goal is to write something good, then yeah - even in horror, thoughtlessly including shocking things because they’re shocking is literally still bad.
Being in horror doesn’t mean you have to try less, it just means - and here comes the important bit where I loop it back around - that your audience is primed to engage with the game on these kinds of levels. It’s a genre that deals in metaphor and symbolism and allegory a lot, and that deals with very touchy and sensitive themes a lot, so a larger portion of the audience is going to be willing to engage with that stuff.
A Fire Emblem romhack is spinning off from a game where the most complex character in it is a sad anime boy with an evil demon in his brain that makes him do evil things. The average romhack really isn’t dramatically more complex - hell, often they manage to be less so, somehow - and so your audience is not going to be predisposed to this kind of content.
That doesn’t mean you can’t do it; it means it’s way, way harder to get people in the mindset for it. When it’s already harder to include touchy subjects in the first place, doing so at the same time as acclimating your audience to a story that does so within a space that historically does not is going to be especially difficult.
This is “where I’m coming from.” Your hack doesn’t need to be a fire emblem hack - it doesn’t even need to be publicly released. When you’re choosing to tell a story within this medium, delivered to this audience, you need to understand that, returning to the initial line you quoted, your work does not exist in a vacuum.
A warhammer 40k fanfiction will get away with some way bloodier action scenes than a FE romhack will, because people who are fans of FE are not already naturally predisposed to be into big bloody action scenes. A steam game called “Nyan Nyan Cat-bath: Naked Girl Bath Time IV” is probably going to get away with having naked girl bath time in ways that would feel absolutely ridiculous in an FE romhack, and its audience will likely only be expecting that bath time in one of the two games.
Anyway last thing
Berserk? The legendary beloved manga that is constantly referenced and cited as an inspiration in dozens if not hundreds of works in the years since its release, that has praise heaped upon it whenever it comes up? Is the point you’re trying to make that Berserk is somehow victim of a hate mob, despite its monumental popularity and cultural influence, because of twitter users?
Did you know the artist had once stated that he regretted a lot of early Berserk’s callous edge and random shock value, because he felt it detracted heavily from the work compared to the more thoughtful techniques he learned over the course of his career? Do you remember when I specifically had a sentence talking about how going on twitter, a site designed to feed you the worst possible opinions to mine outrage clicks out of you, to find what the average person thinks about media is a fucking stupid idea? You wouldn’t do that, right, Jason?
Okay JasonGodwin7 hour over. I’m gonna be explicitly mean again, and say that both these comments show a kind of aggressive incuriosity, a really juvenile “I’m 16 and just realized that if I tip over the garbage can, some poor sucker has to pick it up later” mindset to writing where the only thing that matters is doing whatever you want. You know, getting your raw ideas on paper, fuck anyone who says “you don’t seem to understand this concept” or “bro I think this whole bit is bad” or “have you even edited this yet?”
Seeing somebody come in and say, you know, entirely reasonable things about how nobody can stop you, and nobody’s gonna get * literally hurt*, but you are gonna end up writing something kinda bad and might offend some sensibilities you actually care not to offend, is I guess really upsetting to that mindset. Like, I want to reiterate again that my own project is the fucked up fascism warcrime simulator, early drafts had the protagonist daydreaming about dying on a pile of corpses - I am not a stranger to edgy writing, or the allure it has.
That’s specifically why I’ll sit here and write 20 billion word longposts about it; I’ve written and scrapped my terrible romance-drama with an over the top SA+murder backstory; I’ve written my (unfortunately never released) black comedy VN about suicide; I’m actively writing my war story about the dangers of fascistic ideology and the ways extremist rhetoric fosters intensely broken and dangerous people in times of strife.
I like when writers tackle these ideas - genuinely, I really really do - but when I was in their shoes, I made a ton of missteps along the way, and I’m very glad that the worst of those missteps were confined to the eyes of myself, or maybe my old editor, and not potentially hundreds or thousands of players.
So, I advise new writers to pump the brakes - if you’re looking to have well received work, and want to release that work publicly, then maybe learn to tread water before heading out into the big spooky ocean. And if you really don’t care, and want to throw caution to the wind, nobody can stop you, but… at least bring a floatie or something, just in case.
Basically the moral of the story is that the only thing worse than incest is using twitter.
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