I’m way too much of a people-pleaser for companions in games

“all of this sneaking around must be so boring for you. I’m sorry. I should have left you back at camp”

“oh no I didn’t protect you well enough! I’m so sorry about that. I shouldn’t have put you at risk at all. I could have done all of this myself anyway”

“I hope this quest is interesting to you. I know it’s not the kind of thing you’d usually do. if you’re not interested I could always leave you back at camp”

“hey can you hold onto this loot for me until I can sell it? oh that voice line makes it sound like it’s too heavy for you - I’m so sorry. I’ll take it back”

“oh no that voiceline makes it sound like you don’t like the sun! I’m really sorry about that - maybe I should have left you back at camp. you know we don’t have to adventure together at all if you don’t like it”

after playing through a lot of FFXIV content I’ve concluded that ideally I want the story to involve my character as peripherally as possible. I don’t want to be a Chosen One who is deeply entangled in relationships with a bunch of characters and involved in morally complicated stuff while things go wrong around us

I want to be Some Girl who shows up and learns about the local worldbuilding and peoples’ problems and then fixes those problems in a way that is unambiguously good. and then people are thankful and tell me I did a good job and tell me about more worldbuilding and then I get to do the next quest

I like to kinda summarize this as “I love bad storytelling” but what I mean is that I like:

• light entertainment that is not emotionally affecting
• which is simple and predictable in terms of its overall story structure, with no twists or turns
• that’s also morally uncomplicated
• also ideally the protagonist should be a Mary Sue who just succeeds all the time and always does the right thing

and I’m pretty sure if you described this to Literally Anyone except me, they would call it bad storytelling. so that’s how I think of it - and not in a resentful way either. to me good storytelling is good because it’s an emotional rollercoaster - which I don’t want. I want storytelling that’s bad at being an emotional rollercoaster, so I’m happy to call this bad storytelling